Recently there has been growth in researching teacher agency. Some research has considered the relationship between teacher agency and professional learning. Similarly, there has been growing interest in professional learning communities as resources for professional learning. considering what factors might affect the utilisation (or otherwise) of affordances for teacher agency.The paper concludes with several recommendations for developing effective professional learning communities as an affordance for teacher agency.
Recent developments in initial teacher education (ITE) have produced a number of school-centred models. These mean that student teachers may now spend more of their time in schools than has historically been the case. In some of these models, student teachers are more clearly part of the school as an institution than might be the case in more university-led models. This change of 'home' location for student teachers means that schools may have an increased responsibility for their pastoral needs. This paper reviews existing academic literature on student teacher stress, anxiety, emotions and identity in relation to ITE school placements to consider what recommendations have been made about how these pastoral needs should be responded to and who should make that response. It finds that recommendations mostly relate to universities developing student teachers' skills and emotional and personal resilience before they begin school placements. Where in-school responsibilities are considered, this either stops at the level of individual mentors or there is no detailed consideration of how schools as institutions should organise their response. The paper then considers the small body of existing literature on how schools should meet the pastoral needs of teachers to suggest principles for planning a pastoral care system for student teachers in school-based ITE.
Studies of learning transfer within the paradigm of cognitive psychology suggest that transfer of learning from one task to another occurs rarely. Within a situated learning paradigm the idea of learning transfer can become even more problematic. Courses of initial teacher education comprise school‐based and higher education institution (HEI)‐based components. Within a situated learning paradigm it is not clear how easily learning that takes place in the HEI transfers to enhance performance in the school setting. Given the problems of learning transfer and the strengths of situated learning approaches, does the HEI‐based component play any role in developing performance in the school? This paper considers the role of the HEI‐based component of Post Graduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) courses in developing the classroom practice of students, the conditions that assist in the transfer of situated learning and some of the implications of these for the design and practices of PGCE courses
This paper reports on research into the ways in which student teachers' experiential learning is mediated by socioculturally situated narrative resources. The research uses Wertsch's idea of the narrative template as a co-author of individual narratives. This idea is developed to be useful in the particular context of initial teacher education (ITE). Transcripts from post-lesson observation discussions between student teachers, school-based mentors and university-based tutors are used to analyse the processes by which beginning teachers master the use of narrative templates for making sense of and, therefore learning from, their experiences. This research is put into the context of debates about the centrality of 'on the job' learning to ITE and developing interest in recent decades in models of teacher knowledge and teacher learning.
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