- the old humanists;
- the public educators; and
- the industrial trainers (Williams 1961 / 2011 ).
In so far as these social forces coincide with, respectively, the cultural, the social
and the economic purposes of education, we can still see these tensions being
played out, albeit on a more global scale, in the education systems of developed
nations today.
So, it seems logical to expect that the shape and form of teacher education will
be deeply influenced by the agreed purposes of education. If we do wish to see
education, at least in some significant part, as an engine of social and economic
transformation, then what kinds of teachers do we want and how should we prepare
them?
Many of the debates about the form and structure of teacher education pro-
grammes have centred on questions about the nature of teaching and what forms of
knowledge, skills and experience are required in order to fulfil this definition. In a
review of literature of teacher education in the twenty-first century, a team of us at
the University of Glasgow (Menter et al. 2010 ) suggested that it is possible to
identify four paradigms of teaching, each of which will lead to rather different
approaches to the formulation of pre-entry programmes.
- The effective teacher—with an emphasis on technical skills
- The reflective teacher—with an emphasis on values and review
- The enquiring teacher—with the adoption of a research orientation
- The transformative teacher—with the adoption of a‘change agency’approach.
Moving from thefirst to the fourth, each paradigm incorporates those with a
lower number but builds upon it. These might be seen as positions on a spectrum of
professionalism which, using the terminology developed in the 1970s by Hoyle
( 1974 ) moves from‘restricted’professionalism at one end to‘extended’profes-
sionalism at the other.
At the restricted/effective end of the spectrum, there is a view that the best place
to learn to teach is alongside an experienced and successful teacher, through an
apprenticeship model. This is sometimes depicted as a‘craft’view of teaching. The
skills of teaching are learned by observation and by imitation and in turn by being
observed and receiving feedback from the experienced teacher. On this model,
knowledge of the subject content of the teaching is assumed to be present, in other
words the trainee is already well versed in the subject and all they require is
enthusiasm and an ability to learn from observation and feedback. If this is a limited
view of becoming a teacher for a secondary school teacher of a particular subject it
is even more challenging for the elementary or primary school teacher whose
subject knowledge will need to range right across the school curriculum. This
position has been well exemplified by a recent Secretary of State for Education in
England, Michael Gove, in his foreword to the Government White Paper mentioned
above:
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