Comments on: The Death of Educational Theory: Teacher Training

By: Andrea

Andrea — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 06:45:34 +0000

I read this article and the management of schools article yesterday morning and they stayed with me the whole day. Perhaps at this point I should say that what I was doing the whole day was attending lectures and seminars for my Primary PGCE. My first lecture was about early children’s writing, and was split roughly 50% educational theory about early writing, 20% children’s examples of early writing and research projects that back up/disprove the theory and 30% on how his might effect our practice as teachers. I then went to a seminar in which we talked about ‘professionalism’ which I thought I was going to hate but it turned out the point of it was to highlight that we are not skilled technicians delivering the curriculum but we need to be flexible as teachers, responding to new educational insights and constatly re-evaluating ourselves and challenging policy from above to make sure we are serving the children in our classroom properly. And the day went on. Perhaps I chose a day that was particularly highlights my point, or perhaps my HEI puts more of an emphasis on a mixture between theory, research and practice, but my experience of teacher education is completely at odds with these comments.
Throughout the whole of the course (admittedly only 7 weeks) we have been told that the theory should be the foundation of our teaching. We have been told we need to find out what we believe in as teachers before we can become the best teacher possible. We have been given lectures, essays and time to explore this before all else. I completely disagree that there isn’t enough time to develop this fully in one year, which is why we are encouraged to continue our research and interests beyond the PGCE (although if it was 2 years I wouldn’t be complaining.)
I’d also like to argue that the time spent in schools is so important to seeing the theory in action. I spend half my course in a school setting and half at university. The university side teaches me both content and theory, the placements show me these in practice. I might know everything there is to know about how about educational policy (my area of interest) or child development etc. but what I need practice in is working out whether the ‘National Reading Strategy’ works in practice and why not. You can only get this in a classroom. Which is why most educational policy that comes out now-a-days is full of rubbish – they don’t ask the people in the classroom what works and what doesn’t.
I assumed the PGCE would be tips and skills for teaching, which is why in my head I planned to do an MEd one day. Turns out there’s enough theory there to keep me going for a while.

By: julia

julia — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:27:48 +0000

The key statement in your piece is: “The problem is that students simply are not given the time necessary to read around, to get to grips with competing theories in pedagogy, and are instead sent almost immediately into the field to gain practical experience.” This is deliberate and ideological. The whole notion of competing theories — or even theories — is antithetical to an education system which imposes a limited, prescriptive and proscriptive “national curriculum” on every child from Shetland to Shepherds Bush and then checks the efficacy of the operators (sorry, teachers) by measuring “outcomes”. This is more than a conveyor belt, it’s a massive industry which is making nice money for construction, publishing, consultancy and many other businesses. Trainee teachers are simply being taught how to run the machines.

By: DavidR

DavidR — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 12:22:35 +0000

As a teacher for the last 18 years I think this is absolutely right, but how many teachers, especially in the primary sector can say “as a teacher for the last 18 years”? One of the points of reducing the theory and practice of educating to an administrative/training model of delivery is that recent successive governments whether New Labour or Tory are not committed to creating educationalists who stay in education and work their way up to the top of the pay scale. Rather, they want a revolving door of teachers who stay at the lower end of the scale and then go on to careers outside of education. Paulo Freire talked about education being conceived as a knowledge factory as children pass along the conveyor belt. The teachers are passing on a conveyer belt too.

By: Drew Shapter

Drew Shapter — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 07:10:06 +0000

Great read, I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the series. I think it’s a contemporary problem, less thinking about how to do something properly and more mistakes made by just getting on with it. Specifically, it seems to affect social and welfare services; education as you mentioned, but also childcare services and the national health service have been badly tarnished by what I see as exactly what you have identified. Our society idolises doers, but not thinkers but these are the people that are really changing the world. I await the rest of the posts with anticipation.