A response to 'The importance of teaching'
[First published in 2011]
The government are about to1 publish a white paper on education2 that will set out intentions for the future of teacher education (teacher 'training'). The expectation is that there will be a shift from University-based teacher education, to school-based training. By university-based, the government will mean such routes into teaching as the Post-graduate Certificate in Education, or PGCE, which has long been considered the major way of preparing to teach in secondary schools. However, such courses have not really been University-based for many years. Indeed, there are good reasons to believe that the PGCE represents a 'gold standard' in teacher preparation that has evolved towards an optimal mode of teacher preparation.
I was trained on a PGCE course about 30 years ago. At that time, I spent twice as much time in the University, as in schools. Moreover, the school-based practices were blocks of time in school, with minimal input from teaching staff, largely seen as an opportunity to practice the theoretical ideas being taught in the university lectures. The PGCE today is quite unlike this. The students admitted have good degrees in their disciplines – and, often, higher degrees – making them strong subject specialists. During the 36-week PGCE course these students spent two-thirds of their time working in schools. Moreover, this work is interspersed with time in the university in a schedule allowing university-based teaching to carefully support, prepare for, and allow careful reflection upon, school experience. University teaching is not lecturing about abstract theory, but introducing basic principles of learning and pedagogy, essential information about school structures and the curriculum, and a detailed induction into the nature of subject-specific pedagogy: things that the new teachers can apply directly in the classroom.
In the schools, where these 'trainees' spend most of their time, teachers act as their mentors and managers. Schools are partners with the university, and the teaching is shared between university and school staff. Unlike the 'being left to get on with it' mentality of teaching practice during my own training, these days the new teachers are carefully inducted, working alongside an experienced teacher who provides a structured introduction to teaching. Each trainee has a flexible, individualised learning plan, and negotiates with their mentor the rate at which they incrementally take on more responsibility for teaching classes. Trainees work within overlapping communities, as both members of school teaching departments and as part of a group of peers within their subject specialism, supported by an expert subject-specialist educator within the University. It offers the best of both worlds.
In the past decade, the Post-graduate teaching certificate has really become a gilt-edged award, as courses have developed to reflect the Master's level status of the qualification, making sure that trainee teachers are working at the forefront of scholarship in their specialist area: science education, or maths education, or English education etc. In particular, PGCE courses provide trainees with the knowledge and skills that support classroom enquiry. Trainees undertake small-scale research projects during school placements, which ensure that they have the skills to critically draw upon existing research, and practically tackle problems in their own teaching. In my own institution, this work is impressive enough for us to have started an on-line journal to share PGCE student work with the teaching community (http://jotter.educ.cam.ac.uk/). This prepares PGCE graduates to be full professionals:
- experts in their own discipline;
- experts in the teaching of their subject;
- and skilled to tackle problems, and find ways to improve their own practice.
Many teachers prepared through this route, go on to complete practice-based Master's degrees in education.
The excellence of many PGCE courses has been demonstrated not only by Ofsted inspections3, but also by the evaluations of both the graduates who take this route into teaching, and the schools in which they work. Over many years the PGCE has evolved to balance the needs of providing a solid grounding in the theoretical basis of effective teaching; positive and carefully supported classroom experience; induction into working in teams in schools, and levels of critical, analytical and research skills expected of a Master's level qualification. It is indeed the 'gold standard' in initial teacher education, and would only be sacrificed by a government who values a cheaply prepared and uncritical teaching force, over a body of professionals who are experts in teaching their subjects. Let us trust that does not prove to be the case.
Keith S. Taber
1 This piece was written in 2010 (when much of my teaching was on the PGCE programmes at Cambridge) and published as a blog posting on the Academia social media site (an edited version was also published as an opinion piece in 'Science Teacher Education'). Having recently had to think back to this in the context of the current 'market (sic) review' of Initial Teacher Education ('training') being carried out in England (see 'Reviewing initial teacher education'), I discovered that the original blog posting seems to have now disappeared from the www.
[Despite clear indications that the UK government wished to move the responsibility of initial teacher preparation away form Higher Education 'led' partnerships to school-based consortia, this only happened to some extent. If initial teacher education is considered a market, it was clear that many (if certainly not all) of the the 'clients' preferred to train in the university-school partnership routes. Whether the current [2021] 'market' review, which seems designed in part to make it more difficult for Universities to remain as key partners in I.T.E., will change this situation remains to be seen.]
2 The importance of teaching. Presented to Parliament
by the Secretary of State for Education, November 2010
3 Ofsted is the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills – a government directed inspection service.
Work cited:
Taber, K. S. (2017) Working to meet the needs of school pupils who are gifted in science through school-university initial teacher education partnerships, in Sumida, M., & Taber, K. S. (Eds.). Policy and Practice in Science Education for the Gifted: A.pproaches from diverse national contexts. Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge. pp.1-14.
