faced with the challenges of establishing a new identity as a teacher and building
productive relationships with both pupils and colleagues, tend to be powerfully
amplified. What is important is the trainees’capacity tomake useof the feedback in
developing their practice, which may, in turn, be determined by their attitude to the
particular context in which they are placed.
In considering the different orientations of beginning teachers towards their
current context, we define that context quite broadly to include the nature of the
school, the subject department and the particular classes and pupils that they are
teaching, as well the role and status of the trainees themselves. A trainee’s
acceptance of the given context, notwithstanding the particular challenges that it
presents, and a desire to exploit its particular features to promote their professional
learning, is clearly linked to the other dimensions; it is likely to depend on the
extent of the trainee’s aspiration and their capacity to identify thefirst steps towards
its realisation, again revealing the interconnections between each of the different
dimensions.
7.3 Developing Research-Informed and Practice-Sensitive
Principles
Taking account of what research has revealed about teaching, learning to teach and
beginning teachers as learners, we sought to formulate a series of key principles to
underpin the practice of school-based teacher educators. These principles are
concerned with
- eliciting trainees’preconceptions
- structuring trainees’access to the curriculum of ITE
- sustaining the trainees’dual identity as teacher and learner
- promoting a deliberative orientation towards learning from experience
- expanding trainees’frame of reference.
Principle1:Trainees need to be given the opportunity to articulate their pre-
conceptions and so acknowledge their influence and begin to subject them to
critical scrutiny
Given the power that they exercise over beginning teachers’development, it is
essential for mentors to elicit their trainees’preconceptions, enabling the trainees to
acknowledge their influence and so begin to subject them to critical scrutiny. The
trainees’prior experiences serve not only to provide them with models of teaching
to which they aspire (or perhaps emphatically reject), but also to shape the lens
through which they view their subsequent experience and the advice and sugges-
tions for practice offered to them. Eliciting these roots through careful questioning
will help teacher educators both to appreciate the emotional attachment that trainees
might have to those ideas and enable them to support trainees in evaluating their
relevance and meaning in the new context in which they are now learning to teach.
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