I feel we need to bring about a look at pre-service teacher education as a humanistic process.
In his work around andragogy, Malcolm Knowles asserted that adult learners want to be in control of their own learning, whereas children prefer others to be in control – the pre-service teacher as a learner therefore straddles both camps; learning how to be in control of the learning of others whilst being in control of their own learning at the same time.
Knowles indicated that most adult learners have their own particular views of themselves and their needs, and are therefore goal-oriented in meeting those needs. To develop Knowles’ views, he also felt that adult learners bring a vast array of life experiences and knowledge, which can be a valuable resource for learning and reflection; they are more concerned with learning in order to solve problems or complete tasks, and have a need to be valued – all of these are the qualities of the teacher.
Teaching is, at its heart, humanistic; we are never complete, as humans are unique, fickle, contrary, responsive – the goal of the teacher is to create what Deng calls the ‘fruitful encounter’ for the students with the knowledge and skills within the curriculum, so teachers don’t just teach, they ‘reach’, as Ayres put it – they arm students with the tools that can help them change their worlds.
ITE is more than just ‘training’ – it is education, and it is empowerment; the role of pre-service teacher development is one of the giving of agency to new entrants to the profession, so that they can build their practice wisdom and find their space in the sector, unfettered by compliance to reductive and generic statements. The ITTECF, therefore, provides the undercoat for all new teachers – the seal; it is the teacher themselves – the adult learner – that adds their gloss.
A teacher needs to be both a craftsperson and a technicist; they cannot be one without the other, but must learn to blend the two. To distinguish themselves as one of the more effective teachers they must combine the respective dimensions of professional knowledge in order to develop professional judgement; it is, therefore, the role – nay, duty – of the pre-service teacher educator to foster such judgement, alongside developing the novice as a competent practitioner. The teacher is a professional, as well as someone who believes deeply in the moral, ethical, and – not over-reaching – the philosophical influences of their work.
A professional teacher exercises judgement and discretion, drawing on a body of theory and their own reflections to discriminate appropriately between good sense and common sense, and to know the difference between the two. The professional teacher has identity and autonomy, and knows their own value. The professional teacher engages critically with evidence in a scholarly manner, not only understanding it but interpreting it, contextualising it and forming critical judgments thereupon. The professional teacher is aware that their chosen profession makes demands upon them – they must have practical, technical know-how – they must know how; they must have a strong conceptual understanding of teaching, and of the wider field of education.
The role of the teacher educator, then – or indeed, the wider role of the teacher education system – is to enable the pre-service teacher to strike that balance between hands-on teaching and the process of learning to teach – a combination of teacher and learner.
There are multiple challenges inherent within the art, craft and science (Pollard) of teaching. Teachers need a range of knowledge about many things: their students; how learning ‘works’; subject matter and curriculum intentions; pedagogy; the complexity of the classroom; the competing concerns of the classroom; the subtleties of student interactions; adaptive and responsive practice; interpretation and judgement to make decisions based on contingent needs. The classroom complexities are innumerable; the needs are many and varied, the students unique.
Teachers as learners, on the other hand, have a fresh set of challenges inherent within their journey to competence: they have to enact the professional knowledge they are acquiring through their education and training, often ‘to order’ for their mentor; they cannot simply apply generic ‘rules of thumb’ (Hagger) or see teaching as a set of codified statements that need to be met as a form of technicist compliance; the effective practice they may observe is hard to articulate or emulate without an understanding of the underlying context; learning to teach requires self-awareness, sensitivity and humility. All this is coupled with their own lives, and their ‘calling’ as a teacher – their ‘core values’ (Korthagen) may not align directly with their placement school approaches. They may not even know what their core values are, and they lie awaiting to be discovered.
Experiences fill the reservoir from which the professional teacher will draw, every year of their career. Alongside this, they develop a repertoire of strategies and interventions that they can arm themselves with; through experience, reflecting, evaluation and dialogue they develop the critical and practice wisdom to know which of these ‘tools’ to deploy and when.
Novice teachers are complex beings; they are students as well as practitioners, and each comes with their unique set of circumstances, beliefs and deeply entrenched preconceptions about education, drawn from their own experiences as a student and myriad other contextual factors. The challenge is helping the pre-service teacher reframe their lens of meaning from that of student to that of teacher.
All novice teachers are also highly individual, bringing with them their cohort diversity; teacher education ‘looks very different depending on where we start’ (TEE, 2017). The development of the teacher within a diverse cohort therefore must acknowledge the different starting points, different trajectories and different preconceptions of the aspirant individual, ensuring that every pre-service teacher in the cohort isn’t thinking about different things over the course of their journey, but thinking about the same range of things in different ways.
From the outset, therefore, pre-service teachers are grappling with a wide range of issues, some of which do not fall under the auspice of the training and education programme to solve. They have differing aspirations, intentions, frames of reference, attitudes, beliefs, cultures of performance and, perhaps most significantly in this novice stage, very different ways of responding to critical feedback.
Schools are at the heart of their local cohorts; it takes a ‘village’ to raise a teacher – all of these are communities comprising of humans, so the way we teach our teachers should be humanistic too.
Henry Sauntson is SCITT Director at Teach East.