Session Information
10 SES 08 C, Research on Programmes and Pedagogical Approaches in Teacher Education
Paper Session
Contribution
International comparisons of educational achievement (e.g. OECD, 2005) prompt both widespread concern for school improvement and a desire to learn from the ‘world's best performing systems'. The influential McKinsey report (2007) unsurprisingly highlighted the importance of teacher quality, emphasising both the need to recruit the best possible applicants and to develop them effectively - a process that is now recognised as extending well beyond initial training
Recognising the importance of continued professional learning, the Developing Expertise of Beginning Teachers project was established as a longitudinal study, tracking teachers through their initial training year and early years of professional practice. The project drew on methods and analytical categories derived from Brown & McIntyre's (1993) study of expert teachers' ‘craft knowledge'. Semi-structured interviews following an observed lesson provided rich insights into the pre-active and interactive decision-making of the beginning teachers, analysed in terms of their aims and the conditions they took into account in determining how to achieve them (Burn et al., 2003).
Although the main analytical categories were derived from a study of experienced teachers' thinking (as revealed in relation to specific lessons), our interest in the beginning teachers 'aims' partially overlapped with the concept of 'concerns', first mapped by Fuller and Bown (1975). While the latter is obviously broader, encompassing all the preoccupations of beginning teachers, our early findings were entirely consistent with more recent research into the development over time of beginning teachers' concerns. This work, clearly summarised by Watzke (2007), has revealed the inadequacy of models, such as that first formulated by Fuller and Bown (1975), that postulate discrete stages of development: moving from 'self' related concerns, to focus first on 'tasks' and only eventually on their 'impact' on pupils' learning. Just as Watzke's work has demonstrated the importance of impact concerns at all stages of development, so our own analysis of the beginning teachers' aims - even at very early stages of their training - showed a strong focus on pupil learning and achievement (Burn et al. 2003).
This more complex, nuanced picture was based on post-lesson interviews conducted with the teachers during their initial training year. This paper extends our analysis to include similar interview data from the teachers' early years in professional practice, asking how the nature of their pedagogical goals changes from the beginning of the postgraduate training year to the end of their second year in teaching.
Just as the interview schedule was adapted from Brown and McIntyre's (1993) original study, so our analytical framework (Burn et al., 2003) drew on their model of the interrelated and generalizable concepts that experienced teachers use in evaluating their teaching: the 'actions' that they take either to maintain certain 'normal desirable states of pupil activity' (NDS) or to promote particular kinds of 'progress' (all influenced in turn by the conditions impinging on teaching - most obviously the pupils themselves).
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Barber, M. & Mourshed, M. (2007) How the world’s best performing school systems come out on top, London: McKinsey & Company. Brown, S. & McIntyre, D. (1993) Making Sense of Teaching, Buckingham: Open University Press. Burn, K., Hagger, H., Mutton, T. & Everton T. (2003) ‘The complex development of student teachers’ thinking’, Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 9 (4) 309-331. Fuller, F.F. & Bown, O.H. (1975) Becoming a Teacher, in: K. Ryan (Ed.) Teacher Education: the Seventy-fourth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press). Clark, C.M., & Yinger, R.J. (1979) Three Studies of Teaching Planning (East Lansing, MI Institute for Research on Teaching, Michigan State University). Malmberg, L. & Hagger, H. (2009) Changes in student teachers' agency beliefs during a teacher education year, and relationships with observed classroom quality, and day-to-day experiences. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 79, 677-694. Mutton, T., Hagger, H. & Burn, K. (2011) Learning to Plan, Planning to Learn; the Developing Expertise of Beginning Teachers. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice 17 (4). OECD (2005) Teachers Matter: Attracting, Developing and Retaining Effective Teachers, Paris: OECD publications. Watzke, J.L. (2007) Longitudinal Research on beginning teacher development: Complexity as a challenge to concerns-based stage theory, Teaching and Teacher Education, 23 (1) 106-122.
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