Initial teacher training (ITT) market review report - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
I have been reading this recently published document on the subject of initial teacher training (ITT) in England. Anyone involved in teacher education should read it. The DfE have been analysing in detail the current patchwork of provision and have come up with recommendations for reform. Overall, I can see a lot of merit in simplifying the system of routes into teaching and no doubt provision varies a good deal in quality. Although there are existing standards needed for accreditation to train teachers, in practice there is inevitably variation in delivery and, as the review found out, some courses are out of date with regard to education theory.
Interestingly, I understand that every single Ofsted inspection of accredited training bodies has been graded Good or Outstanding. I'm not sure how reliable that it, and within every institution there will be stronger and weaker departments. Often they are likely to change in quality as staffing changes. The quality of any system is constrained by people who deliver it.
I come at this from my little corner in the field as a visiting lecturer and subject tutor at the University of Buckingham. For a few years now, I have been delivering training three days a year to trainees on the PGCE and IPGCE courses for Buckingham. Many of the trainees are already practising teachers in the independent sector. They wish to have QTS status for their careers.
As a long-standing teacher in the past I was also aware that newly trained teachers arriving at my school had a some major gaps in the knowledge of second language learning theory and methodology.
There is a lot to take in in the review, but one section immediately stood out to me, so I'll quote it here in full.
We know there are those who fear that a strong emphasis on evidence in teacher training and professional development will reduce teacher autonomy by dictating a set of narrowly prescribed or mechanistic teaching behaviours which will be expected of all teachers. We do not share this perspective. On the contrary, our view is that while teaching is without doubt a highly skilled activity, training which is based on evidence, including relevant aspects of cognitive science, or the science of learning, will enable teachers to be more critically reflective and more, rather than less, professionally autonomous and self-efficacious; it will equip them to understand and evaluate, in light of research, the very many approaches they will encounter in different contexts once they start teaching. As Howard-Jones and others (2020) note: “In addition to dissipating neuromyths, the sciences of mind and brain have the potential to inform the processes by which teachers critically reflect upon and develop an understanding of their day-to-day decisions (p.12).
With the advent of the new Institute of Teaching my concern would be exactly the one picked out by the review in the paragraph above. Given the current direction of travel in England in MFL (with the TSC Review of 2016 and now NCELP), is there a risk that to gain accreditation providers will end up having to deliver the NCELP methodology with its three pillars of phonics, vocabulary and grammar taught in a very explicit way, with apparently less emphasis on communication and implicit learning? Will there be a new generation of language teachers who are all trained in delivering lessons which begin with explaining and practising sound-spelling correspondences (SSCs) using isolated words? Will these teachers have to deliver a relatively large amount of declarative knowledge? Will they be urged to use ready-made NCELP resources? Will they be told to get students to learn individual words via Quizlet or similar? Will they be urged to avoid teaching 'by topic'?
If you read my blog, you'll know that NCELP resources are not really my cup of tea at all and that I believe there are more engaging ways to develop skill and self-efficacy in students. But that's not my real point here. The argument is that trainee teachers need to learn a particular methodology to then be able to examine other approaches critically (see the above quotation). There may be something in this. The new teacher has an awful lot to take in, with a lot of theory, procedures and techniques to master. The review elsewhere proposes a four week intensive school-based session where teachers apply what they have learned and get detailed feedback. I like this idea. In the time available, it is unlikely a teacher in training can weigh up and apply a wide range of approaches, so it may make sense to focus on one.
(By the way, long ago this was my own experience at the University of London, whose preferred methodology was the Oral Approach - "death by question and answer" as it was lovingly called. I was able to study this carefully, apply it and eventually come to realise its limitations. More recently, other teachers learned different approaches such the St Martin's approach.)
Now, if an accredited training organisation has a degree of freedom to choose its methodology, as long as it includes phonics, vocabulary and grammar, then I wouldn't have a problem with that at all. Non-NCELP approaches achieve that goal, for example lexicogrammatical EPI Ã la Conti (very popular at the moment), Knowledge Organisers and adapted text book approaches (hybrid audiolingual/communicative/grammar/topics etc). It would make sense to me for training bodies to explain the basics second language acquisition and cognitive science research, but then to explain one methodology in more detail.
Ultimately, this comes down to an issue of top-down uniformity versus individual freedom of institutions to decide what to teach. We are moving further in the direction of the former, as the Institute of Teaching idea seems to confirm. I am pulled both ways on this. I dislike the idea of a 'free-for-all' and mixed quality, but am even more suspicious of DfE diktat influenced by current fashion. Let's remember of course that the DfE is currently very enamoured of certain branches of cognitive science research, not every aspect of which may be relevant to every subject discipline.
At Buckingham, as an occasional lecturer, I have a good deal of freedom to teach what I wish, as long as I work according to the general strands laid out by the university, for example: subject knowledge, assessment, teacher well-being, teaching the full range of students. We are encouraged to exercise some academic freedom. I value that freedom, but recognise it creates a risk of varied practice across institutions. If they were to tell me to teach a particular method, I would not do the job. I want new teachers to be aware of different approaches and theories and to be critical practitioners pretty much from the start. Some get it quickly, others less so.
I am certain that what we don't want is a generation of language teachers who all emerge from training using the same method. As I often like to say, and as the TSC and NCELP repeat, there is no best method for every circumstance.
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