The Scottish government’s recent delivery plan, which contains detailed proposals for the improvement of the nation’s education system, is to be warmly welcomed. It has purpose, clarity and an emphasis on pace.
At the heart of Delivering Excellence and Equity in Scottish Education is a group of children, young people and families whose prospects are blighted by the multiple effects of poverty: indifferent health because of poor housing and diet; lack of access to school uniforms and outings because of low wages; delay in speech development from having fewer opportunities to speak and fewer topics to speak about. Anything that even begins to impact on these realities is to be welcomed.
One of the six drivers in the report is teacher learning - another good thing. Part of this section includes plans for (another) review of initial teacher education (ITE). Governments around the world engage in this practice whenever they are worried about teaching.
In Scotland, we’ve had reports considering the issue from the McCrone committee, in 2000 and again in 2005, followed by the Donaldson report of 2011, as well as “aspect reviews” on the main planks of Curriculum for Excellence.
These reports usually find that students of teaching would like to know more about how to manage classroom behaviour, how to teach children to learn to read, how to work with children with specific learning difficulties, such as autism. In fact, they want to know more about pretty much everything.
What this shows is not that initial teacher education isn’t doing its job, but that it is. Young teachers are ready to begin but know that they have more to learn.
Competent beginners
The phase of initial education is often assumed to be the main place where teachers learn and where teachers become the finished article. This is nonsensical. How can an initial phase of professional education do anything but produce competent beginners?
When I’m reforming ITE curricula, there’s a queue at my door. What are you doing about foreign languages? About looked-after children? And Asperger’s syndrome? Outdoor education? Poverty? My team has to balance the tension between width, where a reasonable range of topics is taught, and depth, where topics are taught in enough detail to be meaningful. You only have a short time in which to do this. And then, just to put the tin lid on it, a number of studies have shown that anything taught in the initial phase “washes out” after five or six years in schools.
That’s why reviews of initial teacher education don’t produce radical changes, such as closing the attainment gap, in the profession as a whole. Because they can’t. (The clue is in the word “initial”, duh.)
Two important points follow. Firstly, just because ITE can’t reform the whole system on its own doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be rigorously monitored. Secondly, we need to look more closely at what happens to teacher learning after the initial phase.
University of Glasgow reforms have gone some way to addressing these issues. Programmes now introduce students to “inquiry learning”, where they find out about aspects of their own classroom practice and tutors accompany students into schools to understand what is happening in their classrooms and why pupils are or aren’t learning.
But these strategies did not originate from ITE colleagues. Nor did they arise from extraneous programmes, or stand-alone CPD sessions (which have been shown to have little impact on school development). Instead, they emerged from continuing professional learning connected to the daily work of schools.
Teachers have to think about their classroom practice by reading up on what is known about it, forming a topic of inquiry in which there is a strong emphasis on collaboration, finding out about it in a way that is shared by other professionals and coming up with ways of improving their own practice. Yes, there it is in black and white: the holy grail of teacher learning. Working with a tutor or mentor - and each other - enables teachers to think about their classroom practice in new (and usually better) ways.
New Zealand has been quietly putting all this into practice for the past 12 years. Professor Helen Timperley, of the University of Auckland, and others have constructed processes of teacher learning that span entire careers.
Her teams link up with teachers throughout their working lives who themselves generate the issues on which they wish to make progress. Once a learning aim for pupils is established, teachers have first to think about what they need to learn to help their pupils learn. This is a step often missed at the policy and professional level. If a child is not learning to read, the teacher needs to expand their own knowledge then and there rather than try to remember ideas they were taught years or decades previously. Staff would then have access to, say, a literacy expert from the school or university who helps to equip them with the teaching approaches necessary to improve their pupils’ reading skills.
There has to be some external impetus or learning communities can become complacent: we need some grit to make a pearl.
And here’s the pearl: in a study of 300 New Zealand primary schools where professional development facilitators worked with teachers to improve literacy, pupils on average made 2.5 to 3.2 times the expected rate of progress in writing and 1.5 to 1.9 times the expected rate of progress over two years. Could a process like this increase our Scottish studies of literacy and numeracy results, not to mention those for Pisa (Programme for International Student Assessment)?
Instead of putting money, time and effort into yet another review of ITE, why don’t we put the same human capital into a well-planned programme of national, school-based, collaborative, career-long teacher learning? For the children at the heart of the government’s policy who have so few choices and chances, we need to carry out this work.
Dr Beth Dickson is a senior university teacher at the University of Glasgow School of Education
