Making sense of learning to teach: learners in context

Abstract

The focus of this paper is on student teachers' learning during the course of a one‐year postgraduate programme and the importance of the interaction between learner identities and the contexts in which student teachers learn to teach: a relationship that is critical to our understanding of beginning teachers' development in whatever specific context it occurs. The research is based on a series of post‐lesson interviews, conducted with 25 student teachers following a one‐year postgraduate course within two well‐established school‐based partnerships of initial teacher training in England. Four interviews, conducted with each student teacher over the course of the year, explored their thinking in relation to the planning, delivery and evaluation of an observed lesson, and their reflections on the learning that informed, or resulted from, that lesson. Contextual factors seen as facilitating and constraining the student teachers' learning were identified. In order to explore the student teachers' approach to learning from experience, data were also analysed at the level of the individual, using a framework which enabled us to plot the student teachers' attitudes and approaches to learning from experience as orientations within a number of different dimensions. Here we seek to integrate, through a series of case studies, our analysis of the relationship between the contextual factors and the student teachers' attitudes to learning from experience. We highlight the complexity of the process of learning to teach and argue that, while it is tempting to focus solely on improving programme structures, both in schools and higher education, we need also to address the student teachers' own conceptions of professional learning, if they are to realise their full potential.

Keywords:

• initial teacher education
• student teachers
• student teacher learning
• practicum