Induction as a Phase of Teacher Development

Transcription

1 Induction as a Phase of Teacher Development

2 The following extracts are taken from papers prepared for the General Teaching Council, England and Wales by James Calderhead and John Lambert The quality of education in our schools has been repeatedly demonstrated to depend heavily upon the quality of the teaching personnel, their knowledge and skills and how these are managed and supported within the school. What particularly characterises the induction phase is its concern with developing a professional identity and acclimatising to the ethos of the school. Steffy (1989) supports a similar model of career development in teaching, again emphasising the importance of the induction phase in orienting the novice towards further professional growth, and emphasising the importance of induction and later in-service support in order to minimise career frustration and burn-out. Steffy holds forth an ideal to which she suggests professional development efforts should be directed, which is for teachers to experience a constant but manageable challenge in their work, continually learning from their own experience, contributing to the development of practice within their own school and profession as well as their own classrooms, and being able to retire at the end of their career with a sense of achievement and satisfaction. Whilst clearly an idealistic goal, it highlights a challenge for professional development efforts in education generally, and indicates the value of models of career development which specify the key points in a teacher s career, the developmental processes of professional growth and the different types of provision that are needed in both induction and in-service. The Difficulties of Novice Teachers One of the essential areas of knowledge to draw upon in designing induction schemes is that concerning the difficulties that new teachers experience. The transition of the new teacher from college to classroom has, in the past, been described in stark terms of helplessness and trauma. Terms such as transition shock and culture shock have been used to describe the new teacher s experience of the sudden shift from the idealistic, intellectual ethos of the college to the harsh realities of the classroom. With changes in the nature of teachers pre-service education, in particular the increased level of school-based work and the partnerships between Higher Education training institutions, Education Authorities and schools, and with the general acceptance of the need to support new teachers in school, such terms may be less warranted today. Nevertheless, the first year or so of the professional life of the teacher is still characterised by a number of common difficulties that have been repeatedly identified in studies of new teachers in several countries. For convenience, these can be considered in terms of four general categories: classroom skills, curriculum and planning, school culture, and personal/professional. 2

3 Classroom skills Among the most commonly reported difficulties of new teachers in schools are a number of classroom skills that are generally regarded as basic and essential. These include discipline, classroom management, motivating pupils, and catering for a wide range of different abilities. These are often also a source of great anxiety. Uninterested children and disrupted lessons are stressful and demoralising. A typical response from the novice to such managerial difficulties is to become more custodial and authoritarian. In fact, the first year of teaching has often been found to be characterised by a shift in attitudes from being concerned with helping children, to becoming more concerned with controlling children s behaviour. This change in attitudes has also been found to be accompanied by a change in practices, sometimes to the extent that management becomes an end in itself, where the teacher becomes more concerned with constructing and maintaining activities that keep children occupied and busy than with activities that intellectually challenge children and help them learn. Classroom management difficulties can be symptomatic of a wide range of problems, such as inadequate planning, a lack of curriculum knowledge, unimaginative activities, work that is poorly matched to children s abilities, etc. In addition, the task new teachers face in managing the learning and behaviour of thirty or so children is, an extremely complex and demanding one. Consequently, the various components of classroom management, irrespective of the coverage given in pre-service training, may continue to require essential support. Curriculum and Planning Learning to teach inevitably involves familiarity with the subject matter and the development of techniques for transforming this into learning activities in the classroom. Designing learning activities also requires teachers to draw upon their knowledge of children, their interests, their abilities, how long they take to complete different types of task, their knowledge of teaching strategies, curriculum materials and school conventions. For the novice teacher, much of this knowledge is accumulated gradually as it is required, and consequently the task of planning is one that they find difficult and extremely time consuming. Shulman (1986) and Wilson, Shulman and Richert (1987), in a series of detailed case studies of secondary teachers in their first experiences in the classroom, suggest that learning to teach involves relearning one s subject for the purposes of teaching. They suggest that the understanding of a subject that one has acquired as a learner is insufficient for teaching. The teacher requires a more extensive knowledge base with many interconnections, representing both a deep and broad understanding. They suggest that not only do teachers develop a more thorough understanding of their subjects as a result of having to teach it, they also develop a wide repertoire of knowledge that enables them to communicate an understanding of the subject to others knowledge of examples, anecdotes, 3

4 experiments, analogies and demonstrations, for instance. Since children bring their own understandings to the classroom and develop new concepts in different ways, the teacher requires a wide range of such knowledge with which to influence children s learning. Part of the first few years of teaching will inevitably involve getting to grips with the subject matter of the curriculum and developing the further pedagogical knowledge that enables this to be most productively used in teaching. School Culture Becoming a teacher involves adapting to the workplace and possibly to a new culture. Unlike most professions, the new teacher has served a lengthy apprenticeship of observation through thousands of hours as a pupil at school. Nevertheless, the transition to teaching involves forming a different perspective on schools and education and becoming part of a professional community. Teachers in their first year of employment in schools become acutely aware that the school has certain traditions, values and ways of doing things. The taken-forgranted practices within the school are certainly influential in shaping the professional skills of the new teacher. More recent studies tend to suggest that the values and practices of the individual and the school interact in a more complex way (Zeichner and Gore, 1990). New teachers themselves vary in their abilities to negotiate their way into the culture of the school. Some of the values and practices of the school are accepted unquestioningly, in the case of others the new teacher is prepared to go along with them in order to fit in whilst actually holding alternative values or favouring a differing practice, and in other cases still, the new teacher will persist with their own values and practices which in some cases may even influence those generally held within the school. Furthermore, some researchers have suggested that a school is actually quite a complex social unit that is not characterised by just one culture, but more often by multiple cultures that are loosely held together through a common task and purpose (Tabachnick, Zeichner and Densmore, 1987). Consequently, the new teacher who is seeking a professional identity, and is attempting to function within a school that is governed by certain traditions, expectations and norms, is faced with a complex task of negotiating his or her way amongst the professional cultures of the school. To the unprepared novice, gaining acceptance amongst one s colleagues is an important part of feeling like a teacher and gaining confidence in one s abilities, though it is frequently a process that is accompanied by considerable uncertainty and some anxiety. Personal/Professional New teachers start out with their own image of teaching, and of themselves as teachers (Bullough, 1989; Bullough, Knowles and Crow, 1991). They may have 4

5 some idealised notions of what the task should be like, what they themselves will be like as teachers, how this relates to their own personality and their own particular strengths, and what they will expect to find satisfying or dissatisfying about their work in the classroom (Steffy, 1989) The personal element in becoming a teacher is widely recognised within the profession. Teachers frequently rank personality as an important ingredient of good teaching. Frequently, the reason given by teachers and senior staff for leaving beginning teachers alone to learn through their own trial and error is that there is something quite idiosyncratic and personal about a teacher s style, that their practice grows out of the kind of person they are and that the new teacher can only find this on their own (Calderhead, 1988). Possibly because of the high level of personal involvement in the task of teaching, the initial failures of the new teacher in the classroom can be experienced as quite traumatic. An inability to cope with the work, or difficulties in relating to the children or gaining their co-operation can be perceived not just in terms of the need to refine one s pedagogic and managerial skills, but in terms of some personal inadequacy. Failure in teaching can be perceived in terms of failure as a person (Evans, 1976; Bullough, 1989). This interconnection of the personal and professional dimensions of teaching can clearly make the task of learning to teach demanding and stressful. It also raises many questions about the nature of the support that is helpful to new teachers in the period of induction and the specialist skills that are required of those who provide that support. Learning in Induction Learning to teach is a complex, continuing process involving the mastery and use of diverse types and areas of knowledge. Learning the subject matter involved in the school curriculum is different from learning to establish a working relationship with children, which in turn is different from learning to organise and manage a class or to cope with one s own levels of anxiety or feelings of insecurity. One of the difficulties new teachers often experience is that learning to teach is multifaceted and can be quite different from the academic learning that they have become used to in higher education (Calderhead, 1991). Rather than the learning of known facts and principles, it often involves the analysis of practice, the evaluation of particular cases, and reflection upon one s own ideas and values (Boud, Keogh and Walker, 1985). A further complicating factor is that for experienced teachers, much of their work has become intuitive and neither the knowledge underlying their practice nor the processes by which it was learned are easily accessed for them to share with the novice teacher (Berliner, 1987). Consequently, the task of supporting new teachers in induction is one which requires a substantial amount of specialist training. 5

6 Support for New Teachers in School As the difficulties of new teachers in school noted above indicate, the training needs for new teachers vary substantially in nature. Some of the new teacher s needs are informational (how the school operates, conventions within the school, access to resources, etc), some are concerned more with the development of existing professional skills (improving class management), some are attitudinal (developing appropriate attitudes towards teaching, colleagues, parents), some are personal (coping with the stresses of the job, negotiating working relationships), and some are concerned with support in professional learning (help in analysing practice, appraising one s own values). Since the training needs of new teachers vary substantially in kind, the type of support required also has to take account of this, taking a variety of different forms. The Purposes of Induction Induction schemes can be seen as fulfilling multiple functions easing the college-school transition, promoting the initial professional development of the teacher, ensuring that appropriate skills and habits are acquired at a crucial, formative stage in a teacher s career, developing professional attitudes towards teaching, or reducing the drop-out rate through providing appropriate support at a potential troubling time for teachers and thereby increasing job satisfaction. The priority that is given to the different purposes of induction may vary from one induction scheme to another. Such schemes operate for the benefit of the school, the profession and the individual teacher and some degree of balance amongst these interests would seem to be essential to obtain optimal benefits. It would be easy, for instance, to devise an induction scheme aimed at helping the teacher to fit the school, but this would be a very normative conception of induction, leaving our of account the need for schools to change and the potential of new staff to contribute to change. New teachers bring with them their own areas of interest and expertise, which an induction scheme might help to develop and employ within the school to the satisfaction of both the teacher and the school. One might also argue that induction into a profession should have an empowering effect, enabling the new professionals to take charge of their own development and to see their own work within the context of the wider role and responsibilities of the profession. In the following discussion of means of supporting new teachers in school, consideration is given to how the individual teacher s interests might be served by induction as well as those of the school and the profession. Mentoring The role of the mentor has been identified as a crucial one in the professional development of the new teacher. The idea that the new teacher will learn simply from experience and the occasional opportunity to talk over their practice with 6

7 someone else is no longer tenable. In order to make experience in school a productive learning opportunity, a more proactive stance is required and the role of the mentor has been developed to fulfil this need. The mentor is frequently expected to fulfill several distinctive roles at different times counsellor, guide, expert, friend, for example and some of the roles require additional training for the experienced teacher. Helping new teachers to talk about their practice, developing a shared language to describe practice, acquiring skills in classroom observation, providing diagnostic and constructive feedback on teaching, helping the new teachers, set their own targets, and developing an understanding of professional growth that enables them to identify new teachers capabilities and the support that might be most useful are areas that many mentor training courses focus upon. While the new role of mentor is still in its formative stages in many schools, Shaw (1992) points out that the skills of mentoring (eg counselling, target setting) are valuable in many other contexts within the school. Others have also pointed to the importance of the learning gains of the mentor, who is introduced to a new and potentially satisfying role at a time when their career may well have reached a plateau (Steffy, 1988; Thies-Sprinthall and Sprinthall, 1987). REFERENCES 7

8 Berliner, D C (1987) Ways of Thinking about Students and Classrooms by More and Less Experienced Teachers. In Calderhead, J (Ed.), Exploring Teachers Thinking. (p ). London: Cassell Education Limited. Boud, D, Keogh R, Walker D Reflection: Turning Experience into Learning (1985) London: Kogan hiryfdr0c&oi=fnd&pg=pa7&dq=%22boud%22+% 22Reflection:+turning+experience+into+learning%2 2+&ots=mwPEbBR8LA&sig=xdZqpVIrEkHjmqz2E IDeph_AnXI#PPA5,M1 Bullough, R V Jr, Knowles, J G, & Crow, N A (1991) Calderhead, J (1988) Calderhead, J (1991) Wilson, S, Shulman, L, & Richert, A (1987) Shaw, R (1992) Thies-Sprinthall, L (1987) Emerging as a Teacher. London: Routledge. Teachers Professional Learning. London: Falmer The Nature and Growth of Knowledge in Student Teaching. Teaching and Teacher Education Journal Different Ways of Knowing: Representations of Knowledge in Teaching. In J. Calderhead (Ed.), Exploring Teachers Thinking (pp ). London: Cassell. School-based Training: the View from the Schools. Cambridge Journal of Education, 22, pp Experienced Teachers: Agents for Revitalization and Renewal as Mentors and Teacher Educators. ddetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ericextsearch_s earchvalue_0=ed284340&ericextsearch_searchtype_ 0=eric_accno&accno=ED Steffy, B (1989) Life Cycle of the Career Teacher. London: Chapman Publishing nav?contribid=527772&prodid=book10213 Zeichner, K, Tabachnick, B R Individual, Institutional and Cultural Influences & Densmore, K(1987). on the Development of Teachers' Craft Knowledge. In J. Calderhead (Ed.) Exploring Teachers' Thinking London: Cassell.. 8

9 Zeichner, K, & Gore, J Teacher Socialization. In W. Robert Houston (1990) (Ed.), Handbook of Research on Teacher Education, New York: Macmillan. 9