'The Work of Teacher Education' : Final Research Report

Partnership teacher education – in which schools work with universities and colleges to train teachers – works and there is abundant existing evidence in support of this fact. But our small-scale study across England and Scotland shows that it is the higher education tutor who seems to make it work, often at the cost of research-informed teaching and research. The most time-intensive activity for the higher education tutors in our sample was maintaining relationships with schools and between schools and individual trainee teachers. The need to maintain relationships to such a degree is caused in part by the creation of a marketplace of ‘providers’ of teacher education who compete for funding on the basis of inspection and quality assurance data and also by the very early school placements that characterise the English model of initial teacher education in comparison to other European models such as that of Finland

Innovation in Teacher Education:Collective Creativity in the Development of a Teacher Education Internship

This article reports on research into the development of a teacher education internship scheme at Oxford University from 1973 to 1987. Based on an analysis of an archive of documents and interviews with key protagonists, the paper uses insights from cultural-historical theory to show how the scheme emerged interactively within a multi-layered social system. The article makes a contribution to the history of teacher education and how we theorise change in the field by providing an empirical description and analysis of one highly influential programme internationally and using the tools of CHAT to theorise innovation

Actual texts, possible meanings : the uses of poetry and the subjunctification of experience

Jerome Bruner's experiment over 30 years ago suggested that imaginative literature had greater affordances for the ‘subjunctification’ of experience by those who heard it read aloud than did transactional prose such as a news article. By ‘subjunctification’, Bruner meant the capacity to use the resource (the short story, for example) to transform one's experience of the world, to render understanding in more complex ways and to do more than get things done as they have always been done. This paper reports on a small-scale replication of the experiment that sought to measure differences in the affordances of poetry being read aloud compared to hearing a short story or a news article

Academic work and proletarianisation : a study of higher education-based teacher educators

This article reports on a one year, mixed methods study of 13 teacher educators at work in English and Scottish higher education institutions. Framed by cultural-historical activity theory, itself a development of a Marxian analysis of political economy, the research shows how, under conditions of academic capitalism, these teacher educators were denied opportunities to accumulate capital (e.g. research publications, grants) and were proletarianised. The reasons for this stratification were complex but two factors were significant: first, the importance of maintaining relationships with schools in the name of ‘partnership’ teacher education; and, second, the historical cultures of teacher education in HE

Formative interventions and practice-development: A methodological perspective on teacher rounds

Highlights • We examine Rounds in education from a methodological perspective. • In doing so, we class Rounds as a formative intervention and compare it to another means of formative intervention—Developmental Work Research. • We raise three methodological issues about both types of formative intervention: the role of theory; the relationship between the individual and the collective; and the meaning of collaboration

Teacher Development 3.0: How we can transform the professional education of teachers

We are a group of teachers, school leaders, teacher educators and researchers who want to promote the development of teaching as a profession in the best interests of children, young people and society as a whole. We are particularly interested in how universities can support a profession-led model of teacher development. We reject the terms of the polarised debates that are currently dominant: with regard to initial teacher education, ‘reform’ and ‘defend’ positions have become so entrenched that sustainable change for the good is ever more difficult to achieve. With reference to teaching, ‘traditional’ and ‘progressive’ have become meaningless terms flung around in the echo chambers of Twitter. In this pamphlet we promote 4 design principles that we believe are essential in transforming the professional education of teachers, both at the beginning and throughout their careers. We propose: * A long-life teaching profession; * Schools, universities and teachers at the heart of their communities; * Education as cultural and societal development as well as individual advantage; * A continuum of professional learning. We believe we need to take a long term view about the future of schools and teaching as a profession, responding to the significant societal challenges we face. We also offer 4 key design questions for teacher educators that might help them to enact the principles of Teacher Development 3.0