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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

professional learning: obligation or accomplishment?


Traditionally, during their final year of a teacher education degree, pre-service teachers talk about the strange contradictions of identity they feel: they are, during one week, students at university (in lecture theatres and workshops, often with little ownership over their learning) and then, in the next week, professionals in schools with some degree of professional autonomy in a classroom). In one sense it is best to acknowledge this problematic ‘dual identity,’ and yet many experienced teachers also speak of their sense of being a learner and a teacher throughout their career. Perhaps the pre-service duality in identity is not peculiar to these early years. At the very least, it is worth reflecting on the apparent dichotomy between learning (at university) and doing (at school). Preservice teachers are often very conscious of how quickly they are learning while on teaching rounds in schools, and can sometimes draw pejorative comparisons with the learning they are doing at university.

Teacher educators would like to think that learning at university does not always have to feel like it is constructed by others for ‘neophyte’ teachers just to ingest and accept. Rather, they often express a desire that their teaching students can construct their understandings of teaching and learning in a similar way to the dynamic, collaborative learning that Ruth Graham (quoted above) constructed her professional learning identity.

Consider also how URL Prue Gill, a highly experienced teacher, talks about the collaborative nature of her first year of teaching. Initially, she is talking about a close team-teaching, mentoring dynamic that operated between her and a more experienced colleague, but she goes on to frame her learning throughout her career in similar terms with a range of colleagues:

 

We shared the majority of our teaching each class – if my partner prepared one text in detail, I prepared another. We negotiated all our planning and preparation. We worked out where our strengths lay, and what we could learn from each other. This was so very different from the sink or swim approach that so often characterizes young teachers’ first experiences. It was a wonderful way to start an apprenticeship.

And when did the apprenticeship end? I’m not sure that it has. I learn or re-learn constantly.

Prue Gill, teacher of thirty years experience, talking about her first year of English teaching
(So, you want to become an English teacher?, English in Australia, 126, p. 26.)

 

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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
“Most of us who have been teaching for years can still relate to the classroom situations [as recounted by pre-service teachers following  their teaching rounds]. After teaching boys only for 30
years, I am now in a co-ed school, and I'm having to learn to teach all over again. What was that about the
teacher being the greatest learner in the classroom? Absolutely!!"

Supervising teacher for preservice teacheron teaching rounds ~August 2005

 

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