The peculiar problem of Teacher Education
School teaching is a peculiar profession for the newcomer. Such is the nature of the educational ecosystem that, by the time student teachers start their courses of initial teacher education, they have spent approximately 15,000 hours (Rutter 1979) in classrooms, experiencing teaching vicariously at close quarters, as students. What is almost unimaginable in other professions - law students with 15,000 hours in courtrooms, say, or dental students with 15,000 hours observing dentistry - is common for student teachers. Furthermore, many student teachers have taught on a casual basis, teaching family members, on work experience, volunteering as youth leaders and so on. So nobody starts a programme of ITE as a complete beginner; all start with very considerable experience of being taught and many start with some experience of teaching.
The consequences of this ‘peculiar problem’ are various. One is that some student teachers start their courses already knowing how to teach. In my 25 years involvement with teacher education a small but not insignificant proportion of student teachers (at a guess, 5-10% of any cohort) have made such good use of their personal experiences that they are capable teachers almost from the start of their course. That is, they can convert their subject knowledge into pedagogical content knowledge (Schulman 1987), they communicate this clearly and at an appropriate level for their pupils, they understand children and form mutually respectful relationships with them, they use questioning and other means to discover what children have, and have not, learned. In some instances they can plan coherent and challenging sequences of lessons. Such students might develop their teaching expertise through informed reflection on practice, but they cannot benefit from being given information about how to teach; they know this already.
At the other extreme there are student teachers who have not learnt how to teach from their personal experience, or perhaps cannot transfer learning from personal experience into new situations. Such students use inappropriate teaching methods, and continue to use them even when they know that they are ineffective. This phenomenon can also be explained with reference to their 15,000 hours of personal experience:
… the role models that novice teachers observed while they were children continue to hold tremendous sway. Often, despite their intentions to do otherwise, new teachers teach as they were taught. The power of their “apprenticeship of observation,” and of the conventional images of teaching that derive from childhood experiences, makes it very difficult to alter teaching practices and explains in part why teaching has remained so constant over so many decades of reform efforts. (Kennedy 1991, 15)
Whilst some student teachers start their courses already knowing how to teach, and others start resistant to change; the majority are neither wholly competent nor completely resistant, because their ‘apprenticeship of observation’ has enabled them to be good at some aspects of teaching but not others.
This ‘peculiar problem’ creates a challenge for Initial Teacher Education (and perhaps for teacher development more generally):