Teacher fabrication as an impediment to professional learning and development: the external mentor antidote

Abstract

This paper reports findings from a study of the work of ‘external mentors’ associated with three programmes of support for the professional learning and development (PLD) of secondary science teachers in England. Focusing on outcomes from analyses of data derived from interviews with 47 mentees and 19 mentors, the paper supports and extends existing research on the construction and maintenance of fabrications in schools, and identifies omissions in the evidence base relating to teacher PLD. It is argued that the kinds of fabrications revealed by the teachers interviewed for this research present a serious impediment to their opportunities for school-based PLD, and that the deployment of external mentors (i.e. those not based in the same schools as the teachers they support) can provide a potentially powerful antidote to this. A number of implications for policy and practice in teacher professional learning and development are discussed. Amongst these, it is argued that more teachers should have the opportunity to access external support for their PLD, and that policy makers and head teachers should seek to reduce the degree to which teachers’ ‘performance’ is observed, inspected and assessed.

Keywords:

• teacher professional learning and development
• CPD
• fabrication
• performativity
• external mentor

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the Gatsby Charitable Foundation and Institute of Physics for supporting the research reported in this paper. We are also indebted to Pat Ashby, John Coldron, Angi Malderez and the anonymous reviewers of the Oxford Review of Education for their helpful comments and suggestions in relation to the development of the paper.

Notes

1. The official role titles of those undertaking this work, to whom we collectively refer as ‘external mentors’, were ‘Regional Mentors’ (for the PEP), ‘Regional Advisors’ (SASP) and ‘Teaching and Learning Coaches’ (SPN), respectively.

2. For the purposes of this paper we use the term CPD, as it has been used by many of the authors of the literature reviewed here, to refer to formal or planned attempts to bring about teachers’ professional learning and development. We nonetheless regard the term as unsatisfactory since as Earley (2010) suggests, professional learning or ‘continuing professional development’ in the sense of meaningful advances in teachers’ knowledge or expertise may or may not result from activities designed to bring it about. We should also note that many opportunities for PLD are informal, unplanned and ad hoc, but that an explicit focus on these is beyond the scope of the present paper.

3. In contrast to external mentoring, we take school-based mentoring to refer to that which is undertaken by a mentor (usually but not always a more experienced or ‘senior’ teacher) who is employed by and based in the same school as the mentee, and which normally takes place within that school. We see coaching as one of a number of potential roles that mentors can play (Malderez & Bodoczky, 1999), and one which relates to attempts to support an individual’s development of one or more job-specific skills or capabilities (Hopkins-Thompson, 2000).

4. For further information about PEP and SASP, see Shepherd (2008); for SPN, see Jenkinson, Turner, Lambley, and James (2011).

5. We use inverted commas here to acknowledge that the distinctions between qualitative and quantitative research, methods and data are somewhat simplistic and exaggerated, as Hammersley (1996) and others have shown.

6. As beginning teachers, all PEP mentees had school-based mentors for much of the time that they had access to an external mentor. As mostly more experienced teachers, the majority of SASP and SPN mentees did not. State/‘maintained’ schools in England are required to provide mentors for student teachers and newly qualified teachers (NQTs), but there is no obligation for them to do so once teachers have completed their NQT Induction, which is typically at the end of their first year in post. As a result, whilst around a third of second year teachers reported in a recent survey that they had a school-based mentor (Hobson & Ashby, 2012), only a small minority of teachers do so after this point.

7. We explore the factors influencing take-up and non-take up of external mentoring in some detail elsewhere (Hobson et al., 2012). Some of the reasons given for non-take up included: teacher workload and associated time constraints; satisfaction with school-based support; and school gatekeepers not facilitating contact between teachers and external mentors.

8. The Association for Science Education (ASE) is the UK professional association for teachers of science. Its primary aim is to promote excellence in science teaching and learning.

9. We use the term ‘significant other’ (Sullivan, 1953) to refer to those people whom individuals perceive to have importance and influence in relation to their self-concept and/or wellbeing.

10. Here and elsewhere, where frequencies are provided they are indicative and should not be taken to represent the precise number or proportion of interviewees who stated or held a particular viewpoint. In this instance, not all teachers who were interviewed gave clear indications of the degree to which they could be open with school-based colleagues about their perceived limitations as teachers.

11. The five less positive responses here can be largely attributed to these teachers feeling that the support of an EM was superfluous, since they were able to be open about their PLD needs and to access sources of appropriate support within their schools. A full range of factors influencing the impact of external mentoring is outlined in Hobson et al. (2012), chapter 5.

12. For further development of and support for this argument, see Hobson and Malderez (2013).