Distributed practicum supervision in a managed learning environment (MLE)

Abstract

This evaluation‐research feasibility study piloted the creation of a technology‐mediated managed learning environment (MLE) involving the implementation of one of a new generation of instructionally driven management information systems (IMISs). The system, and supporting information and communications technology (ICT) was employed to support collaborative approaches to practicum supervision in a ‘borderless’ manner. The generation and utilization of information by student teachers and their supervisors was monitored and evaluated in order to ascertain how teaching competence development and reflective practice could enhance professional decision‐making in information‐rich settings involving the use of IMIS technology. Patterns of communication across the triad of the university tutor‐supervisor, school‐based cooperating teacher and student teacher were investigated using a multi‐site case study involving two schools and one university. The efficacy of the instructional information management system in supporting evidence‐based practice by student teachers, and those who supervised them was also evaluated.

Keywords:

• E‐learning
• Informated
• Management information system (MIS)
• Managed learning environment (MLE)
• Practicum supervision
• Student teachers

Notes

1. E‐learning: is broadly accepted as learning with the help of information and communication technology tools including interactive TV and e‐technology to support traditional delivery, for example, using whiteboards and video conferencing and networked information technologies such as wireless. Also the associated new media tools that comprise collectively of new forms of digital communication and information technologies, the use of email, the Internet, intranets, the Web, multimedia, desktop publishing and the authoring interactive materials (DfES, 2002, p. 2).

2. The fieldwork on which this research was based was conducted in Western Australia. This State has a geographic area of 2.5 million square kilometres and a population of 2.2 million people of which 1.6 million reside in the Perth metropolitan area. Perth is a primate city, State capital and centre of State government and public administration. There are five universities (four of which are public and one private), all of which offer modularized courses and programmes in initial teacher education. Consequently, the pressure on primary and secondary schools to accept student teachers throughout the school year is both continuous and acute. The major employer of teachers is the State Education Department, the central offices of which are located in Perth. Given the demography of the State, and the marked rural‐urban divide teachers are contractually obliged to undertake protracted periods of ‘country service’ in order to ensure that state schools are properly qualified and appropriately staffed. While teachers are initially trained in urban university settings, the majority of them, who are usually younger and unattached, tend to find that their first teaching appointment is in a country school, some of which are really remote and isolated. The early experiences of newly appointed teachers represents something of a ‘culture shock’ after the prior experience of city living and the oft ‘taken‐for‐grantedness’ of reduced social, cultural and material amenities that this affords. The genesis for the research reported in this paper was fourfold, namely, to provide prospective teachers about to commence their professional induction year with some prior experience of country schools and their communities; to test the feasibility of employing the ‘outreach’ capacity of new ICT in using a wider range of schools than is ordinarily available in urban and suburban areas in the Western Australian context (with implications for similar ones elsewhere); to evaluate the efficacy of this in a specific technology‐mediated learning environment, and to investigate an associated pedagogical model of practicum supervision utilizing supervisory triads.

3. Informating was first coined by Zuboff (1988), and refers to the generation and dispensation of information across organizational boundaries, creating an information rich environment that now includes data previously stored in individuals' heads, in conversations, in filing cabinet drawers and/or on widely dispersed pieces of paper.

4. The student was training to become an art teacher and was experiencing some difficulties in manipulating an unfamiliar graphics package.