On entering the teaching profession in the 21st Century: Mature student teachers’ experience of initial teacher education
Paper presented at the Scottish Educational Research Association Conference, RoyalGeorgeHotelPerth, 24-26 November 2005
Draft only. Do not quote without permission.
Cate Watson
With
Donna Gerrard, Russell MacWilliam and others.
School of Education
University of Aberdeen
MacRobertBuilding
King’s College
Aberdeen AB24 5UA
01224 274873
On entering the teaching profession in the 21st Century: Mature student teachers experience of initial teacher education
Abstract
Recent changes in Scottish education have sought to redefine the nature of ‘professionalism’ in teaching. ‘McCrone’ (SEED 2001) has altered the landscape for those already in the profession and for those now entering it. The Review of Initial Teacher Education (SEED 2005) extends this process. As part of this dialogue it is important to examine the experiences of students as they enter the profession. This paper aims to explore with a group of mature Professional Graduate Diploma in Education (Secondary) (PGDE(S)) students their experiences of ITE. In particular, it discusses the implications of recent policy for mature students, the school as a site for the development of teaching identities, the students’ perceptions of the relationship between school and university, and their feelings of preparedness for teaching as they enter the induction year.
Introduction
Initial Teacher Education is up for grabs. What emerges from the review has the potential to transform the teaching profession, extending the changes already brought about by McCrone and the introduction of the Standard for Initial Teacher Education. Whereas the Standard builds on an established competence model of teaching, the induction year marks a major shift in policy intended to end the ‘scandal of teacher induction through short term supply’ (McNally 2002:149). However, if the induction year marks a new departure from established practice, the notion of ‘partnership’ between teacher education institutions (TEIs) and schools in the preparation of new teachers is a more enduring feature, making the school experience placement one of the ‘few certainties’ in ITE (McNally et al 1997:485). This notion of partnership can perhaps be a rather tenuous one with many unresolved issues surrounding expectations among the different stakeholders of the respective roles of schools and TEIs (Brisard et al 2004) exacerbated perhaps by a lack of contractual obligation in the partnership in Scotland (Christie et al 2004). Indeed the ‘partnership’ can be constructed as predicated, albeit tacitly, on a continuing tension between theory and practice in education - a division which the student is then expected to bridge (or perhaps, more uncomfortably, straddle).
The school experience, is however, widely regarded as the sharp end of the business - the point at which the student starts to develop their sense of themselves as a teacher. Despite the occasional forays of university tutors into the school and their continued hold via the ‘crit’, this is where the student is bound to feel the real world of teaching begins. Regardless of nomenclature and attempts to alter perceptions of the course the preparation of students for the teaching profession continues to be referred to as a ‘training’ rather than ‘education’ by students, tutors and teachers alike. Indeed, the McCrone report refers to the probationary period as a ‘one year training contract’, significantly perhaps undertaken in a partnership principally between schools and LEAs in which TEIs have played less of a leading role (McNally 2002). This perhaps underscores a perception of teacher development as apprenticeship, the purpose of which is the acquisition of skills, and points to a continuing ambiguity in the understanding of the role and relationship of theory and practice in teaching – as well as the nature of professionalism - which necessarily impacts on the development of professional identities.
What might be regarded as the re-branding of teaching in Scotland has been accompanied by ambitious recruitment targets for teachers as part of which mature, or second career, entrants are being encouraged to apply. The government website ( includes ‘vignettes’ of such entrants including a full-time mother, a successful broadcaster and a retired footballer. However, research by George and Maguire (1998) in England suggests that once accepted onto a course, mature students, particularly mothers of young children, find that there is little support or acknowledgement of the extra responsibilities that being mature often brings. And being mature is not always seen as a positive thing by schools. In research by Quintrell and Maguire (2000:26) many of the mature trainees reported feeling that schools regarded them as ‘more difficult to train, more reluctant to assimilate new ideas and techniques, and they also felt that their questioning of policies and practices in schools was resented.’ Mature students also reported finding it difficult to integrate into student life and as a final insult had more difficulty securing teaching posts.
Method
This paper offers a primarily thematic analysis of group interviews held over the course of a year with a group of PGDE(S) students. It focuses on the content of the interviews and the concerns and issues as expressed by the students. In so doing it takes a naturalistic approach looking at the ‘what’ rather than the ‘how’ of the telling (Gubrium and Holstein 1997).
All the participants responded to an email sent out at the start of the course asking for volunteers to take part in my research into teacher identities. (I tutor an optional course on the PGDE(S) that did not involve the students taking part in this research). A number of students expressed interest, but in the end a group of four came along to the first meeting and then met, in all, six times throughout the year immediately before and after the school experience placements. The intention was to gather students’ narratives of practice and to see how these developed and changed over the course of the ITE year and beyond. By chance, the group were all mature students with – or about to have – children. Two of the four were living away from home for the duration of the course (one a single parent of four children), another travelled a considerable distance each day, and the fourth was a single parent of two children.
Meetings lasted for an hour and were held on campus. The sessions were tape recorded and transcribed. Excerpts presented here are in a cleaned up form (ers and ums removed) and with punctuation added to aid understanding. Pauses are represented by full stops. Short deleted portions of the transcript have been denoted as (…). For each session a few guiding questions were drawn up by me (CW) but essentially, meetings provided a forum for participants to discuss their own experiences of the course and to voice issues that they felt to be important.
As the year went on the work developed something of a participatory feel (Heron, 1996), hence the decision to write a piece focusing on the experiences of the group as they went through the course. Some of the group preferred to remain anonymous, and to further protect the anonymity of others no quotations/contributions here have been individually attributed. Regrettably, one of the participants felt forced to withdraw from the course at around the half way stage. Her contributions have, however, been included here.
Being the ‘slightly more mature’ student
At the outset, the group commented on the fact that all who had responded were ‘slightly more mature’ with children. Parenthood emerged as a significant factor in being – indeed becoming - a mature student. For two of the group, narratives of their route into teaching centred on involvement in their own children’s education. As one of the group remarked,
I’ve sort of been talking myself into it for a while because I’ve been helping out at the school for four years, and I’m spending more and more and more time in school - I mean it’s almost a full time job so (…) I walked into school one day and they said ‘you here again’ and I said ‘yeah, should get myself a job really’ and they said ‘yes you should really’ so I thought ‘right that’s it’.
Skills as a parent were seen to impact positively within the classroom, particularly in relation to managing pupils’ behaviour (‘having more nouse’) and setting boundaries,
Part of being a mum is not to let it explode and things and you kinda compromise and they don’t know sometimes that you’re guiding them to do something else and it’s a – it’s a skill that I think I’ve got and will manage to use in the classroom.
So in some respects being a parent was seen as a positive factor but in others the lack of recognition of the wider commitments of the mature student as parent became a barrier,
There’s so little support given for people with [children](…) I know they’re trying to be fair to everybody but if they’re needing more teachers why don’t they try and support people who are further on in life and have other commitments a wee bit more (…) and they don’t give you much notice, I mean they don’t actually tell you a huge amount about the course before you come down. They don’t say, where - if you’re likely to get a placement here or there. How do you plan your whole year? How do you plan a year when you’ve got kids and things when you don’t actually know what’s happening?
Indeed for the student who withdrew from the course, the issue of childcare was the decisive factor. In an email she wrote:
My [second school experience] placement was changed
to __ Academy the Friday before it started. I did the 3 hours
travelling a day for 3 weeks, but I'm a single parent and locking the
door on the two boys every morning at 7.15am became just too torturous
for me, so I decided to leave the placement.
This issue has particular relevance for teachers as they enter the induction year. Ability to take up the guaranteed post was seen as wholly dependent on the accessibility of the placement. This created some anxiety since stories of people who had been placed at a distance circulated widely. It was argued that mature students with family – who had already sacrificed a lot to undertake the course both in terms of quality of family life and financially – would be reluctant to subject the family to further upheaval. But taking the supply route into teaching was viewed as disadvantageous in terms of achieving the Standard for Full Registration, with consequences for future career development.
Constructing a professional/teaching identity
One of the most important tasks for any beginning teacher is the development of a ‘teaching self’. Nias (1988) asked her research participants if they ‘felt like teachers’ in order to gain insight into what she referred to as an ‘occupational identity’. This elicited responses in terms of ‘feeling natural’ and ‘being me’. In this sense developing a teaching self is concerned with answering the question ‘who am I in this situation?’ rather than ‘what do I know in this situation?’ (Connelly and Clandinin 1999:3).
One aspect of developing professional identity emerged at the beginning of the first interview when introductions were being made. The group identified themselves in terms of their subject - ‘I’m history’, ‘I’m chemistry’, ‘we’re both maths’. The early strong identification of the secondary teacher with their subject perhaps distinguishes secondary from primary teachers and almost certainly contributes to the focus in secondary on the subject taught rather than holistically on the pupil.
School experience placements however provided the key site for the construction of identity and this was an issue that emerged often in the discussions. Although this is a task for all beginning teachers, the processes were perceived to be subtly different for mature students. One of the group remarked that she suspected she had ‘greater expectations’ of herself than the younger students did, as though being older and having children she should be able to take on the teacher role more easily. On the other hand, younger students were held to have the edge when it came to current knowledge of the school system.
The process of identity construction takes place within a complex social environment in which the apparent coherence and order of the school is achieved through the ‘doing’ of identity of all the participants (Widdecombe 1998). As an outsider, understanding these complex processes, finding an acceptable place within the system, while at the same time finding out who you are as a teacher – and conforming to the demands of the university – can be a stressful ordeal in which simple survival is a significant achievement. Luck was seen as an important element in this,
…and I think as well, listening to people coming back, their experiences are very different (…) a lot of it’s luck of the draw and I feel quite sorry for those who turned up in school and not being liked by their PT or not being wanted by the school because they’ve been pressurised into having a student – because that so influences how well you get on during your placement and how well you do on the course –it’s really a bit unfair but there seems not a lot you can do about that really.
Finding out who you are, or might become, as a teacher under these circumstances is a tricky business. This was an issue particularly after the first placement.
You’re maybe doing, working alongside four different teachers - you’re taking some of their classes but the classes are theirs and they’ve built up relationships with pupils and they’ve all got very distinctive styles of teaching - and somehow you’ve got to fit into that. I know they keep saying ‘well, you’ve got to make it your own’ but it’s quite difficult to do that especially when the person hasn’t quite given you over a class completely so you’re constantly adjusting to each different teacher’s classes…
For one of the group the requirement to be an actor or to put on an act was a theme she referred to a number of times following the first placement.
..on my PT’s report I was being too much myself and I needed to be more of an actor – do what they did(…)
But,
I don’t see how I’ll be able to control the kids’ behaviour if I’m being false, so I have to be myself(…)
..to be honest I don’t know quite what they want because I’m not a performer(…)
During the second placement, a greater sense of ‘being myself’ seemed to emerge,
We’d done quite a lot of watching on that first placement and I was teaching the same way that the teachers taught the class, so I mean I was basically doing copycat of what the class teacher was doing but second placement – really hadn’t seen them teach that much because I mean I was teaching from halfway through the first week and teaching full timetables from beginning of the second week - didn’t really have much observation time (…)this time I just went in and did it and was more me..
However, the notion of ‘self’ in the teaching situation is complex. As one person remarked, ‘teachers are never themselves’, so ‘being me’ in the teaching situation is perhaps about finding ‘a self’ that is congruent with a sense of ‘me’. Tacit acceptance of this difference in role was expressed,
I find there’s a bit of a tension between the kind of person that I am just normally and how I need to be in a classroom because I think, realistically you have to accept that…there’s a certain role expected of you, you’re there to teach and the kids are there to learn and you can’t just go in and be just like this – you can’t do that. And it’s trying to – and this is I guess what only happens over time - is trying to find out how to be yourself and yet have this way of - not controlling - but getting authority - mutual [A: managing] managing, yeah
The ability to do this could be undermined by the feeling of ‘not being given over the class completely’. In this case, the class teacher could construct the student’s identity for the class as someone lacking authority as when one student objected:
I had one class, the class teacher used to have conversations with the kids when I was trying to teach, when I was trying to get them to be quiet. I’m like, ‘will you please just be quiet Mr Whoeveritwas!’
While this may be a particularly unsubtle way to undermine the student’s authority, it is clear that students can’t start the process of developing a teaching self while the class teacher is present since their very presence signals the fact that this is not a ‘real’ teacher,
It’s difficult I mean, the relationships thing…I felt in the final week that I was finally getting there with some of the classes and they were seeing me as a teacher instead of someone who sat at the back of the room. Because this is the other thing you’re not out the front with their teacher you’re sitting at the back of the room observing, or sitting amongst them observing - which is fine but then they get to see you as someone who’s not really …you’re not the figure of authority in the classroom and then suddenly you’re out the front and they just don’t see it..they do student bait when the other teacher leaves the room they’ll have a go any time just to see what you’re going to do - if you’re going to do anything…