Tracey Maloney
Director of Initial Teacher Training
(Article first published in eQ’s Curriculum Journal, SeQuence.)
“A year of dangerous doing” …Not what I expected to hear when I asked one of our recent alumni how the last year had been for her. ‘I came to realise that teaching is so terribly important, every lesson must be right. I knew I had a lot to learn and practise but I became aware that there wasn’t any time to lose for the pupils I taught. So, it felt like it was a year of dangerous doing’.
This alumna, also a career changer, opened her final presentation with a slide showing artefacts from her own schooling, a Rubik’s cube, Wham, and an extraordinarily large mobile phone. It served as a reminder to those of us who have expert colleague status, that expertise is hard won, a journey often charted through vast liminal spaces.
There is an important point to be made here about high stakes learning, acquiring expertise when working in situations that carry huge importance, understanding the vital significance of every lesson to the overall education of pupils. This is why we, as Teacher educators, share many parallels with the medical profession and the ways in which they, over time, make expertise and judgement visible to novices.
Being evidence-led is another trait that we in education share with the medical profession, our evidence base at eQualitas is updated to incorporate the most up to date educational research, our trainees value their training days for the evidence and research that they can interrogate within their subject or phase community. However, it is the gradual expertise that is gained within school, exercising judgement, incrementally acquiring expertise that trainees value so greatly. We know that this does not come about by accident. At eQualitas we talk endlessly about ‘designing in’, not leaving training experiences to chance, something we know that schools also do on our behalf; designing and crafting learning experiences that offer analysis of expertise for trainees.
The landscape of ITE is shifting to making doing feel a lot less dangerous. The advent of intensive training and practice enables us all to craft very specific learning experiences for trainees, focusing on a granular element of practice
‘Part of the challenge of learning from representations of practice is knowing how to look, what to look for and how to interpret what is observed’ (Grossman, 2018)
The ability to decompose practice depends upon the existence of language and structure for describing practice – Grossman describes it as the ‘grammar of practice’. Along with mentors, we are building the language for describing practice, centred around instructional coaching and being explicit with the definitions and terms related to both our substantive and disciplinary knowledge, in addition to decomposing the daily complex interactions of an expert teacher.
Grossman uses the term ‘learning inside practice’ and I’m not sure we could have come up with a better phrase to describe what we do at eQualitas. Our trainees are continually applying what they learn from their subject and phase community training days, supported by schools who are representing that practice in subject and phase departments. The eQ tutor completes the cycle of enquiry by further facilitating the decomposition and approximation of practice.
So, yes there is a shift in ITE, but one that more readily incorporates the methodology that is proven to be the most effective in achieving mastery in the aspects of the role of a teacher.
If we remember back to our own early novice teaching days, we would all confess to feeling that there were times when we felt amid some dangerous doing. We hope that with the advent of ITaP we can offer trainees the opportunity to enact elements of practice with a high degree of support, so beginning a virtuous cycle of enquiry across the partnership.