Partnerships in Pedagogy: Developing pedagogical partnerships involving trainee teachers, school based tutors and teacher educators using enquiry based learning.

Draft paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, University of Warwick, 6-9 September 2006

David Spendlove, Geoff Wake, Andy Howes,

Alan Jervis, Graham Hardy

University of Manchester

Note: This paper is in draft format and should not be quoted or reproduced without the authors consent.

Partnerships in Pedagogy: Developing pedagogical partnerships involving trainee teachers, school based tutors and teacher educators using enquiry based learning.

Abstract

Trainee teachers are assisted in developing their pedagogic beliefs and practices by reflecting on:

  1. their observations of experienced teachers;
  2. their own emerging practice;
  3. the guidance of their school-based mentor, other experienced teachers and university tutor;
  4. activities undertaken in schools and university.

However, more immediate demands in classrooms, such as behaviour management, often result in reflections on pedagogy coming second to pragmatics. It is the intention that this project will bring the issue of pedagogy more to the forefront of trainees’ concerns and therefore development by engaging them in working with their mentors whilst on placement in schools.

At the core of the professional preparation of Secondary school teachers following the one-year full time course to PGCE is the support of their developing pedagogic beliefs and expertise. This is achieved by a complex network of experiences in partnership schools and university. At present trainees’ development in these areas, especially whilst in school, is less well supported than other aspects of their professional preparation.

This project will develop materials that will enable school-based mentors to work together with trainees, using an enquiry based learning (EBL) approach, to investigate and develop pedagogic beliefs and practices. A strong research / evaluation strand will ensure that findings from this project will be captured and made available to other areas of the university where training for professional practice is carried out.

This paper explores and considers the development of pedagogical partnerships between mentors, trainee teachers and initial teacher training educators using enquiry based learning methods.

Introduction

Current models of initial teacher training (ITT)in England and Wales (DfE, 1992)include substantial elements of school-based experience. The most popular route, the Post Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE), requires that trainees spend approximately two-thirds (120 days) of their one-year preparation on placement in no less than two different schools with the remaining one-third spent on studies in a Higher Education Institution (HEI).

HEI's have, since the introduction of this model in the 1990s,developed collaborative partnerships with local schools and colleges involving university tutors in working with experienced classroom teachers who operate as‘mentors’ with a significantly enhanced responsibility for the daily training and assessment of trainee teachers during their placements. The balance in the partnership, whilst in school, clearly focuses trainees very much on the day-to-day pragmatics of working in school classrooms, whilst the HEI element provides the theoretical base of the trainees’ experience to underpin their school based activities. The HEI element is as a consequence under pressure to ensure that elements of the programme based in the HEInot only provide suitable initial preparation for operation in classroom settings, such as developing knowledge of curriculum standards, assessment processes, classroom and behaviour management and so on, but also needs to ensure that links between theory and classroom practice are clearly visible as trainees are very much inclined to focus only on those issues they perceive to have immediate application and value in the classroom.

Hodkinson & Hodkinson (1999) indicate that the predominant focus of the school experience for trainee teachers concerns the pragmatics of ‘teaching and implementation of national policies rather than those aspects of pedagogy, reflection and critical analysis traditionally encouraged by the HEIs’. Such tensions, for teacher educators, in reconciling this dilemma, have been labelled by Atkinson (2000) as a condition of ‘‘critical schizophrenia’’, brought about by on the one hand delivering government policies whilst on the other hand engendering a culture of critical reflection with trainees. A trainee predisposition exists which is orientated to both ‘survival’ in schools, by coming to terms with the rules, routines and roles that govern schools, and to production of documentary evidence of his or her ability to teach.

This is matchedand reinforced by mentors who operatein a state of ‘conflicting loyalty’ having to attempt to reconcile the pedagogic demands highlighted by partnership HEIs and a preoccupation with induction to the ‘rituals of schooling’ and the aiding of trainees in meeting the competence based ‘standards’(TTA, 2002). Many mentors have sympathies which lie with trainees based upon their own experiences as a trainee and often adopt a protective role whilst trying to fast track trainees to the realities of ‘schooling’ as opposed to translating pedagogic knowledge into practice. Edwards & Protheroe (2003) suggest that the focus on pupil performance in national tests “is focusing attention on the performance of student teachers as deliverers of a curriculum … at the expense of a focus on responsive and interactive pedagogy” adding that “teacher mentors find it difficult to talk about the knowledge that underpins their practice in abstract terms”. Analysis by the same authors of post-observation feedback conversations illustrated that 79% of the discussion focused simply on ‘descriptions of observed events’. In their (ibid) view,a pedagogic act consists of “an informed interpretation of a classroom event followed by the selection of responses which will assist pupils to participate meaningfully in the opportunities for learning available to them.” Jones & Straker (2006) quote a number of sources to support this contention by illustrating that‘frequent reference is made to the difficulties mentors face in articulating their pedagogical knowledge and how it is translated into practice’. The urgency and requirement that mentors can reconcile, appreciate and contribute to the pedagogical demands that their role requires is however neatly conceptualised byCorrigan and Peace(1996, p. 25): ‘most mentors have been identified as effectivepractitioners and good role models, but until they can make their practice and therationale underpinning that practice accessible, they are unlikely to succeed asmentors’.

Because of the predominance of this disposition, important issues such as developing an understanding of Schulman’s pedagogic content knowledge (PCK) become under-represented if not neglected. We take here PCK in the sense that is a:

blending of content and pedagogy into an understanding of how particular topics, problems, or issues are organised, represented, and adapted to the diverse interests and abilities of learners, and presented for instruction (Schulman, 1987, p8).

This paper, therefore, describes attempts to redress the balance in the partnership by refocusing trainees and mentors on PCK in their day-to-day reflections on the trainees’ development by involving both in an enquiry based learning (EBL) activity in which both mentor and trainee reflect upon ‘teaching’ with a focus on PCK.

Enquiry Based Learning

Enquiry based learning (EBL) describes a variety of approaches to learner-centred learning in which the facilitator orientates a learning opportunity whilst the learner(s) take responsibility for organising lines of enquiry. Barnett, O’Connell & Higham (1999) list multiple examples of EBL approaches in the Arts and the Humanities from universities all over the world. Examples from mechanical engineering, social work, optometry, architecture, informatics, law, business, management and economics show the breadth of applicability of the EBL approach (Boud & Feletti, 1991).

Through theEBL process, the learner will identify their learning needs, draw on and restructure existing knowledge, identify crucial gaps in knowledge and understanding and remedy them, synthesising the material into a whole and evaluating the end product for fitness for purpose. Learners work as individuals or part of a group and are engaged as collaborates in learning, for which they have responsibility and ownership (University of Manchester, 2006). Barrows & Tamblyn (1980) define EBL as “the learning which results from the process of working towards the understanding of, or resolution of, a problem”. The EBL paradigm covers a spectrum of approaches including problem-based learning (in which a scenario is devised and explored), small scale (action research) investigations and a research-based approach to projects and processes (ibid). Kahn & O’Rourke (2004) define the characteristics of EBL approaches as typically:

  • open-ended engagement
  • students direct lines of enquiry and methods employed
  • tasks stimulate curiosity in students, encouraging them to explore actively
  • students take responsibility for analysing and presenting evidence appropriately.

EBL is already extensively employed in higher education in a very wide range of contexts, particularly in the education of doctors and other health professionals. It was developed in 1969 and first used at McMasterUniversity in the education of doctors (Rideout & Carpio, 2001). These authors suggest that the roots of the PBL/EBL approach can be traced to Dewey and Bruner and that it is grounded in cognitive psychology and its reliance on group work points to further theoretical underpinnings in the work of Vygotsky on social constructivism.

The strengths and affordances discussed above suggested that an EBL approach might offer an interesting and challenging way to encourage trainees and mentors to start to discuss pedagogy in their work and in their feedback sessions.

Theoretical framework.

The construct of “community of practice” is appropriate and helpful in attempting to make initial sense of the progress of trainees as they make their first steps towards becoming proficient classroom practitioners ( McLaughlin, 2003). They spend much of their time with a ‘master craftsman’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991 ), their mentor,who acts in much the way as Lave and Wenger describe apprentices working with master tailors.There is however, an additional complexity as it is staff of the HEI who have the crucial role of ultimately validating the successful initiation of the trainee into the profession and who, on a day-to-day basis,are not active members of this partnership.

To allow us to fully explore the complexity of this model of professional preparation it is useful to turn to Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT). The concept of an Activity System, in which actions are seen as mediated by the community and its division of labour, its cultural artefacts, instruments, rules and norms allows us to understand how the activity of trainee and mentor working together focus the trainee on more pressing day-to-day matters than developing a generalised understanding of pedagogy that may inform his or her long term professional development. Engestrom & Cole (1997) sum up the corpus of work in activity theory due to Vygotsky, Luria, Leont’ev and their followers in the notion of Cultural Historical Activity Theory, in which a principle unit of analysis is the culturally-mediated and historically-evolved Activity System, represented in the schematic diagram (see Figure 1 below). This allows us to come to some understanding of the complex activity of a collective, in this case that of a trainee teacher working with a mentor in the setting of a subject department in a school, and how this develops culturally and historically.

Figure 1: Schema of activity system

Pertinent to our analysis is the interaction of trainee and mentor with the other part of the partnership, the HEI. Engestrom and the CHAT community point to how activity systems develop, constantly reacting to both internal and external contradictions, with outside influences being appropriated by the activity system, leading to internal tensions and contradictions. In the particular development under consideration here, that is, an enquiry-based learning intervention, we need to consider a ‘tertiary contradiction’ when a culturally more advanced object and motive is introduced which producesa requirement to consider theory in relation to, or as a development from, practice. This ‘tertiary contradiction’ may give rise to internal ‘primary’ inner contradictions within each constituent component of the central activity and ‘secondary contradictions’ between the constituents of the central activity (see Figure 2 below).

Figure 2: Contradictions and tensions arising between different constituents of an activity system due to an externally introduced tertiary contradiction.

In later analysis of our findings of our action-orientated research of a pilot of an enquiry-based learning intervention intended to refocus mentors and trainees on issues of pedagogy we use CHAT to draw attention to factors that mitigate against the success of the intervention.

Data sources and evidence

The project worked with non-purposive sample of two trainees in each of three subject areas: Mathematics, Science and Design & Technology. During the first two terms a number of mentoring meetings were audio recorded and transcribed allowing base-line analysis of trainee – mentor discourse.These conversations were coded and categorised and refined using NVIVO 7 qualitative data analysis software (Version 7.0, QSR International ) .

As we suspected, based upon previous anecdotal evidence, there was little exploration of pedagogical issues with emerging themes focussing upon: behaviour management, hints and tips and pragmatic suggestions for ‘keeping them [pupils] occupied’. In the final term we asked trainee and mentor to work together on an enquiry-based learning task in an attempt to move the mentor-trainee discussions away from ‘lower level’ concerns of organizing and coping, toward ‘higher level’ analysis and reflectivity on their practice. It proceeded in the sense ofan iterative process with successive layers of knowledge added through each cycle of the process. Critically, the process was driven by the enquiry (Jackson, 2003) rather than the often distracting day-to-day problems normally experienced by trainee teachers. The task required the trainee and mentor to spend a preparatory meeting selecting two of the professional ‘Standards’whichwould provide a useful focus on pedagogy and then develop performance criteria such that a classroom observer would be able to recognisecompetences displayed bythe teacher in relation to the chosen‘Standards’. Following this mentor and trainee were each asked to carry out an observation of a lesson of each other using a schedule they had devised for the purpose with a focus on pedagogy. Finally, a further meeting allowed mentor and trainee to reflect together on the pedagogy employed in teaching their subject. Each of the meetings of mentor and trainee wereagain audiorecorded, transcribed,analysed and coded using NVIVO 7.

In order to illustrate our findings, two case studies are reported briefly here.

Case study1

Although,on reflection, the intervention project appeared to have been more successful than that of Case study 2, our analysis of trainee – mentor discourse leads us to conclude:

  • This discussion was dominated by the mentor, raising issues to do with timing, pace, ownership:

Mentor: So that the first suggestion is that we need to make a start at bingo. So the words that they have been using in the last couple of lessons we put them up on the board and you ask them to choose 6 of them or 9 and tell them to arrange them.. 9.. 3 by 3 or 2 lots of 3 or whatever so they get a little square on the book and they chose any of the words then you read the definitions out and if they think they’ve got the word you defined then they cross it out.

Trainee: Right I get you

Mentor: And then we’ve got a line and if they get a line they get sweets. Cause you know which word you’ve read out as you read the definition out you put a little tick. They bring their book forward and when they‘ve got a line they go for full house

Trainee: Ok

Mentor: But they’ve got to listen very carefully to the definition and see if they got that word there. So that’s a quick start to see if they understood some of these words transpiration, flaccid, stomata, photosynthesis, flower, oxygen, enzymes and temperature

Trainee: Enzymes? How this came up?

Mentor: That’s what controls photosynthesis. Isn’t it?

Trainee: Ok

Mentor: So you think of the definitions you have to have some definitions. I think probably more important than that is to have all the words here so you don’t have to tick them off lets say you can define flaccid and then obviously to put it down so you know what is that and then you can go this is green. So each one you define you can put down.

Trainee: Ok

Mentor: They like sweets and I am able to tell how motivated they get cause they all gonna say can we go for a full house? They will ask that

  • The trainee appeared to have an understanding of pedagogy and the EBL task:

Trainee: My understanding of the pedagogy ‘Jane’ is that pedagogy is a teaching mentality isn’t it? And the teaching style and different teaching styles and the way which you systematically go about getting your learning objectives over to the class would be the pedagogy of that lesson so for example my biology lesson the other day the pedagogy of that would have been in the spirit of independent learning but today it was more teaching so there are 2 different pedagogies for example. That would be my understanding.

  • There were clear tensions betweenuniversity and school based approaches to pedagogy:

Mentor: And also when they do the second lesson when they do.. using the mark schemes lots are finding it really difficult to mark even when you give them the answer and you say.. Try to train them when they are doing SATsbecause we do a lot of the SATs papers and try to train them to think: these are some standards answers and then they will say so in which question if we put this is the right answer.. well they need to think what the question wanted, what those answers are, did that all fit in to that. So teaching them how to access those questions and be able to answer them.”

Case study 2

Although attempting the enquiry based learning task, the mentor found great difficulty in working outside of his ‘comfort zone’ as directed by the EBL task. In the course of the activity this revealed a lack of vocabularyrelated to pedagogy and illustrated some of the immediate tensions the trainee experiences in moving between school based and university based elements.