Drawing back the curtain: Supporting beginning teachers to make the most of their first few weeks on placement

When you are a teacher everyone thinks they know how to do your job and suspects they could do it too.  By virtue of having been a pupil themselves at one point, the school environment and job of teaching feels sufficiently familiar to be open to conjecture.

Every year I listen to prospective teachers discuss with conviction what they think a good education should look like.  Sometimes this is based on experience in school as a teaching assistant or while on work experience but, more commonly, these views are based on their own memories of school.  Upon beginning their teaching training, they are confronted with two options: continue to hold to their views built on preconceptions shaped by their own singular experience, or allow their preconceptions to be disrupted by their growing awareness of the complexity of teaching when viewed from the other side of the teacher’s desk.  How they respond to the disruption of their preconceived ideas is critical for their ongoing development – their professional growth will be connected to the development of teacher dispositions such as humility, open-mindedness and self-awareness (Ogusthorpe, 2013).  Equipping them to critically evaluate their own preconceptions from the off is a really important part of this development. 

Behind the Curtain

In the initial weeks of training, beginning teachers spend a lot of their time observing more experienced colleagues.  Either they quickly bore of the exercise, not appreciating its value, or they are hyper-vigilant in their recording of what they can see happening in the classroom, as if in doing so they will assume the qualities of the teacher they are observing through osmosis.  In both cases, without guidance, they are likely to be drawn to notice ‘poor proxies for learning’ (Coe, 2013, p.7), rendering the whole observation exercise pretty worthless.

So much of a teacher’s role happens ‘behind the curtain’ (Crooks, Haydn & London, 2023).  Drawing back this curtain is a vital part of the mentor’s role in these early days of a beginning teacher’s journey.  Beginning teachers need the many different elements that come to bear on the learning process to be revealed to them.  They need to have made visible to them:

• the influences that inform curriculum creation – for example the role of national policy, decisions around the purpose of the curriculum, pragmatic decisions related to examination specifications. 
• the thinking and ‘professional wrestling’ (Riley & Byrom, 2008) that sits behind the planning process.
• the preparation that goes into creating the finished ‘product’ of the lesson.
• the context of the school – for example how its policies and behaviour systems influence planning. 
• the micro-decisions that a teacher is making at every stage of the teaching and enaction process – for example, decision such as when to slow down, check for understanding and reteach or when to quicken the pace and skip an element of the lesson because the intended learning has already been secured.
• how teachers assess to work out if pupils are learning – understanding that what is taught is not necessarily learnt. 

A Flying Start

These elements are not always evident to the novice eye, as revealed by the page upon page of observation notes beginning teachers gather about how pupils are behaving or how much effort they seem to be putting into a task.

Equipping the beginning teacher to get off to a flying start will necessarily involve helping them to see how they can best utilise their observation opportunities at the start of their training – what they need to notice in the lesson itself, but what they need to see to understand about the context surrounding that lesson.

Strategies for supporting your mentee to use their initial observation period wisely, can be found in a previous blog: What am I meant to be looking for?  Supporting beginning teachers to undertake effective observations of other teachers

It will also involve supporting them to see why approaching this new endeavour with an open, curious mind, and a willingness to have their preconceptions (and even strongly held beliefs) challenged and reformed, will be an essential part of the process. 

It may also be helpful to share this blog with your mentee as you begin this discussion:  Optimistic, Observant and Open: What makes a successful PGCE/ ITE student?

References:

Coe, R., (2013), Improving Education: A Triumph of Hope Over Experience, Inaugural Lecture, CEM/ University of Durham.

Crooks, V., Haydn, T., & London, L (2023), A Practical Guide to Mentoring Beginning History Teachers, London: Routledge. (In Press: December 2023)

Osguthrope, R.D., (2013),Attending to Ethical and Moral Dispositions in Teacher Education, Issues in Teacher Education, Volume 22, Number 1, Spring.

Riley, M., & Byrom, J. (2008). Professional wrestling in the history department: a case study in planning the teaching of the British Empire at Key Stage 3. Teaching History 112, 6–14.