Effective ITT / ITE
Partnership development
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Task for trainees
Focus
Student teachers should be encouraged to perceive education as a discipline based on a bedrock of constant principles, but whose operation requires continuous shifts in thinking and changes in strategy, and not only for those at the start but also by colleagues already established in their careers; objectives and intentions will always need to mutate in order to achieve core aims based on human values. Making student teachers aware that HEI and school training partnerships can play an important role in the field of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) is a valuable message to communicate. Part of the operational challenge lies in recognising that professional knowledge and understanding is an area which needs maintenance and development to keep abreast with changes in languages education. Recognition that this is a career-long commitment can be exemplified by tutors’ and mentors’ collaboration in professional development activity and inquiry that is open to student teacher assistance and involvement; student teachers’ own inquiry for curricular assignments may prove a catalyst for such Partnership-based collaboration which ITT MFL seeks to encourage via its interactive seminar (i-sem) programme. (For example, see ‘optionality’)
By engaging with the notion of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) for school-based colleagues via the instrument of effective partnership, student teachers might transfer the principles to their own approach to CPD, thus contributing to a meaningful and continuous process of school improvement.
On the ITT level of collegial interaction, the student teacher MAY be operating in a field of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) beyond the scope of the QTS (Q) standards, however study of this topic has the potential to address aspects of the following QTS standards in particular:
| Professional attributes | |
| Communicating and working with others |
Q4, Q5, Q6 |
| Personal professional development |
Q7, Q8, Q9 |
| Professional skills | |
| Team working and collaboration |
Q32, Q33 |
On the Partnership level of collegial interaction, engagement with this notion has the potential to address aspects of the following ITT training requirements in particular:
| Training requirements | |
| Programme design requirements |
R2.1, R2.2 |
| Management and quality assurance | |
| Partnership requirements |
R3.1, 3.2 |
Group discussions
Your Mentor or other colleagues in school may have told you they might expect you to “bring some fresh ideas from University / college into the languages classroom and department”.
Discuss what they mean by this; how is it that you might know more than they do about a particular issue?
How do you think school-based colleagues do, or should, benefit from being in partnership with a HEI / University / college?
How do YOU intend to ‘keep up’ when you are in post in a few years’ time? Will you or can you keep in professional contact with your HEI / University / college in some way?
Observation focus
Some school-based colleagues may have had recent involvement with HEI-led inquiry or research into an aspect of languages teaching and learning (for example, the role of target language, assessment for learning, or language learning strategies).
Observe one of their lessons, and interview the teacher afterwards to find out which particular aspects of the lesson, and his or her practice in general, that he or she felt have benefited directly from involvement in this research inquiry activity.
Check your planning
Some time during the coming week(s), it is highly likely that planning activities into your lessons is going to be directly linked to exploring languages teaching and learning issues for a formally assessed assignment (for example, teaching a point of grammar or including a target language film or poem to enhance cultural understanding). Whatever the assignment-linked planning may entail, colleagues may well be interested in the questions you are trying to address in relation to their own practice or developing departmental policy.
So:
1 Have you planned to ask your Mentor if there is something student teacher and languages department can do to help each other via assignments set by the HEI?
2 Have you planned to keep all departmental colleagues informed formally and briefly of your assignment-led activity as you work through it?
3 Have you planned to keep your HEI tutor(s) informed formally and briefly of the expression of this kind of interest by school?
