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_ English Teachers: a diverse community of learners Negotiating the sameness and the tensions Connections between professional and student learning communities What are pre-service teachers learning and how are they learning? Teachers learning how to know their students? Professional learning: obligation or accomplishment? school (university) stuff’ and ‘practical stuff’ Writing critically reflexive narratives as a focus for professional learning Critical inquiry as professional learning _ Page 11 _
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professional learning

what are pre-service teachers learning and how are they learning?

   

As pre-service teachers enter the final year of formal structured learning before entering the teaching profession, their focus may tend to be on the content that they will be teaching. In many ways that’s not surprising. Deborah Britzman writes (in Practice makes practice, 2003) of the state of insecurity, anxiety and responsibility that pre-service teachers regularly experience: they need to know it all, they feel they’ll be judged by their students and supervisors as to how much they know, and yet they acutely appreciate the impossibility of knowing it all. Certainly the rhetoric about essential knowledge and essential learning that teachers should be teaching is encouraging this insecurity.

It is interesting that the website of the Standards for the Teaching of English Language and Literacy in Australia URL www.stella.org.au presents the need for teachers to ‘know their students’ above the need to ‘know their subject’. In fact, the website, like several other iterations of professional standards, breaks up teachers’ knowledge into three categories:

STELLA Standard Statements

bulletTeachers know their students

bulletTeachers know their subject

bulletTeachers know how students  learn to be powerfully literate

 

James Britton (1970) also thinks about teachers’ knowledge more in terms of knowledge about particular students. He speaks in terms of needing to ‘begin from where the [students] are’ (p. 134).  In terms of the teacher quoted above, it means constantly making the connection between what teachers are ‘going through’ and what ‘what our kids are going through’ and what they have gone through in the past.

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It could be argued that the notion of essential knowledge  in English assumes (1) that there is a body of important knowledge in English that exists and which people agree on, (2) that this body of knowledge exists independent of learners’ construction of that knowledge, and (3) that this knowledge exists independent of the particular socio-cultural setting of different  student learners. Also you might feel that it implies that English knowledge must be transmitted to students. To what extent do you agree with these views? Would you like to contest those assumptions? How?

 

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_ English Teachers: a diverse community of learners Negotiating the sameness and the tensions Connections between professional and student learning communities What are pre-service teachers learning and how are they learning? Teachers learning how to know their students? Professional learning: obligation or accomplishment? school (university) stuff’ and ‘practical stuff’ Writing critically reflexive narratives as a focus for professional learning Critical inquiry as professional learning _ Page 11 _
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voices
"“… the most unsettling moment in learning to teach: the realization that the teacher’s role and the teacher’s identity are not synonymous. The newly arrived teacher learns early on that whereas role can be assigned, the taking up of an identity is a constant and tricky social negotiation.”

Deborah Britzman
(1994, p. 54) ".

 

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