professional reflection

I have created this category to write about my own experience as a ‘teacher educator’. I am hoping that this will allow me to start to define the term ‘teacher educator’.

Self-conscious narrative 1

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Wood, Eric & Geddis, Arthur.N. 1998. Self-conscious narrative and teacher education: representing practice in professional course work. Published in Teaching and Teacher Education 15 (1999) p107-119.

What the literature said in 1997 about teacher education.

This article was written in 1998 (around the time that I undertook teacher training). I think that it’s a forerunner for ‘congruent teaching’ called in this paper ‘self-conscious narrative’. ‘Self-conscious narrative’ supports trainee teachers with their developing pedagogical thinking.

The paper refers to teacher education research conducted by Houston, Bennett & Carre and Sikula. Schon is also referenced on ‘technical rationality’.

Schon’s writing argues that quantitive (scientific) research isn’t always suitable for teacher education as the research base tends to be studying the “expertise displayed by competent professionals” (p108). Qualitative research being the preferred type of research for teacher educators (which does necessarily fit in with the research profile of the university and the REF).

Wood and Geddis use the paper to investigate how teacher educators in university prepare trainee teachers for life in the profession. Which they see as “a complex, content specific enterprise inadequately explained by applied science conceptions of practice”. Teacher educators need to make explicit the implicit (p108) messages imbedded in the teacher educator’s practice – so explaining the form of the content?

explicating – to make clear the meaning of

teacher educators are different to the other academics within a university as their pedagogical practice is intertwined with their professional practise – as they teach about teaching (different to the business lecturer who teaches about business). A boring, dull physics lecturer is not modelling the content – however a boring, dull education lecturer will have an implicit impact on his/her students if the content is about education. How can you teach about active learning techniques in an  hour lecture to 200 students, without sending out a mixed message about the content?

is your lecture worth staying awake for?

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/higher/another-boring-lecture-544213.html

There needs to be “coherence between the explicit and implicit messages of its instruction” (108). Do we need to talk to the trainee teachers about the dangers of this at the start of the academic year? have things moved on from 1998? are we in fear of them moving backwards as the university goes for cost cutting measures that will pull up the class size? will schools be able to develop pedagogical thinking if a trainee teacher only learns by doing the job and never has time to question the explicit and implicit philosophy of the purpose of education?

What’s teacher education all about?

 


Is sdsdavies a teacher educator?

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I’m a teacher educator – or am I?

I work within the school of education (SOE), in a post 1992 university and my job title is: senior lecturer in Secondary Teacher Education. So I guess this makes me an educator of (trainee) teachers. I hold the following qualifications:

BA (hons) Knitwear Design

PGCE Secondary (Design and Technology) Education

Part way through an MA in Teaching and Learning

I worked for 10 years in a comprehensive secondary school teaching Design and Technology (plus some Child Development, ICT and Art & Design). I was promoted to Advanced Skills Teacher status, which recognised my work in the classroom and meant that my teaching role included suporting other teachers within my school and across the county. I was employed at my university for my professional skills rather than my academic/research skills.

Three years into the post and I now need to develop my research skills (something encouraged by the SOE). But how do I develop my research skills within a SOE that holds a developing (low) research profile? I feel unconfident about doing research, an opinion shared by Burton and Bartlett (2005) who want teachers to see that research is something they do every day and not “something that other (usually very learned or expertly trainned) do” (p14). I’m also not feeling very supported – although the SOE are encouraging research they aren’t able to offer the support mechanisms e.g. role models and collaborative research avenues that are sited as best practice (Griffiths, Thompson @ UCET 2010).

So I’m adopting my research role model from the UCET conference and I’m going to emulate their research on myself. Ellis and McNicolls (UCET 2010) are investigating the work of teacher educators in order to conceptualize teacher education as academic work.

I also wish to find out ‘what is a teacher educator?’ So I’m going to describe my own work – via this blog to give me a starting point for investigation.

I shall keep a work diary during wk 17, 21, 25 and 30 – so that I can analyse what work I do

and I will blog at least once a week – discussing the work that I do and posting artifacts that I am involved with.