Teacher education: the transformation of transitions in learning to teach

Learning to teach is transformative, complex and life-long. It involves a series of transitions, which are rarely linear or smooth, from one situation to another. It is good that these transitions and their consequent transformations are the focus of much research into this aspect of teacher education and this issue of JET contains papers that exemplify various transformations that take place along the varied journey that is learning to teach.

Maria Assunção Flores from the University of Minho in Portugal addresses that transition which every teacher educator will immediately recognise: when a student teacher stops worrying first and foremost about her own teaching and has as her first concern her pupils’ learning. This is a major step forwards in the development of a teacher’s identity and Flores demonstrates that during their initial teacher education (ITE), student teachers describe the transitions between feeling like a student, but thinking like a teacher. This encompasses inner tensions and dilemmas experienced when confronting present and past experiences; developing an awareness of the complexity of the classroom context and also student teachers’ professional aspirations and concerns. Although this is necessarily a small and localised study, it is an example of an academic article that has potential impact beyond the immediate context, by providing as it does convincing evidence for the importance of ‘explicit pedagogies’ for the development of teacher identity during ITE and the role in this of the teacher educator.

It is well known that professional transformation occurs during and after the practicum in ITE (Beauchamp and Thomas 2009). However, teaching practice is a time when events along the journey of learning to teach can magnify in both helpful and unhelpful ways. The next paper in this issue, by Oliver McGarr from the University of Limerick in Ireland, focusses on behaviour management issues for student teachers, harnessing the power of virtual simulation. Much has been written about the affordance – or lack of it – of computer-generated simulations in education (see for example, Lee 1999; Wishart et al. 2005). This article provides a helpful review of the growing deployment of computer-based simulation in ITE, with an engaging discussion about the ‘real’ and the simulated experience and how these can be mediated by the teacher educator.

Much research is emerging on curriculum and pedagogic reform in China. JET is chronicling many pieces of this complex jigsaw (see for example Lai and Lam 2011; Zhou, 2014; Qiao and Yu 2016) and the next article in this issue presents a transformational intervention in ITE in China that enables a transition from the traditional Confucian culture of teaching and learning to a more pupil-centred approach. The author, Lynne Machin, from the University of Staffordshire in the UK, demonstrates how this transformation in learning to teach leads not only to an increase of the classroom effectiveness of the student teachers who experienced it directly but also to the diffusion of changed practice in others. Far from being an example of western policy borrowing, this study represents a collegial and scholarly alignment of thinking about teaching as an intellectual activity.

Learning to teach in any phase of education, as a career-long endeavour, is inextricably linked with effective mentoring, again as recorded over the last many decades in JET (for example, Colley 2002; Bullough and Draper 2004; Mizukami, Reali, and Tancredi 2015). Andrew Hobson (University of Brighton, UK) and Bronwen Maxwell (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK) take up this theme in the next paper, reconceptualising and critiquing the architectural design features of good institutional mentoring, exemplified through the Further Education sector. The new model they propose opens possibilities for much future research into this transformational process, for both mentor and mentee, in a range of international and professional contexts.

One aspect of the recent discussion in this journal (see JET Volume 46, Issue 1, 2020) of recruitment and retention in the teaching profession that has not received much attention is that of ITE attrition. The transition from student to teacher, as discussed in our opening paper, is reversed in our next article. Carla Bohndick, of the University of Hamburg in Germany, takes up the matter of student drop-out in her study into the differences between ITE students and those of other subjects in German Higher Education Institutions (HEI). Her findings indicate in that context that ITE students show a lower rate of drop-out. This is discussed in relation to social and academic integration and the significance of this for practice and research in teacher education.

Our final article touches on a different transition: that from teacher to researcher in relation to teacher educators in HEI in the UK. These academics experience a unique tension in terms of accountability, as they are subject to the rigours of compliance with two powerful levers in the UK Higher Education system (Duggan and la Velle 2019). The first is that of OfSTED, the Office of Standards in Education, a Government body that inspects teacher education provision, the outcomes of which determine the subsequent recruitment quota. The second is the Research Excellence Framework (REF), a 5-yearly exercise to gauge research quality in university disciplines, one of which is Education. Moira Hulme (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK), Jeffrey Wood (Birmingham City University, UK) and Xin Shi (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK) undertake a detailed analysis of published research in teacher education from UK HEI. They confirm and discuss the finding of a direct association between publication productivity and the type of HEI, showing an inverse relationship between the level of engagement in teacher education provision and the production of research that was judged by the REF panel as being of high quality. This confirms the conclusion of Professor Andrew Pollard, the Chair of the Education panel in the 2014 REF, who, as soon as the outcome was published, wrote:

The activity required to compete successfully in social scientific terms is, in my opinion, becoming increasingly distinct from the activity required to flourish in the rapidly changing fields of teacher education. The pressure, which this puts on staff working in Education, is sometimes extremely acute. (Pollard 2014)

This journal plays a major role in ensuring the quality of research published in the field of teacher education. It is vital that much of this emanates from practice in that field. The teacher educator, as both a consumer and a producer of research is a key player, ensuring that the education of teachers is research informed, research led and research engaged (Universities Council for the Education of Teachers 2019; la Velle and Kendall 2019).

In this spirit and as is our usual practice, this issue of JET contains three Research-in-Practice pieces, all from China. These short communications are offered to authors to publish innovations in teacher education. The first (Hongxing and Rui) describes the power of action research using English as a medium of instruction to create a symbiotic relationship between language learning and course content knowledge. Play-based learning and the development of teachers’ pedagogic content knowledge is the focus of the next short paper (Chi and Ho), which provides another insight into the educational reforms occurring in contemporary China. Our final contribution (Yung) provides an engaging autoethnographic insight into a university teacher’s journey to becoming a teacher educator by undergoing a school-based teaching practice. The importance of recent and relevant experience cannot be denied, but for teacher educators this needs to be weighed against the demands on us as academic researchers. A precarious balance?