This research gave voice to teaching assistants, exploring their experiences and perceptions. A small-scale case study approach was adopted, which aimed to interpret and explain human actions and thought through descriptions, capturing first person accounts. Qualitative data was collected from two focus group interviews. Participants were employed by Primary, Secondary and Special Schools. The research found that the main entry route into the role of teaching assistant was that of parent-helper. Previous skills and experience were not drawn upon or utilised by the schools. Differences in job titles were not reflected by the roles performed by the participants. For teaching assistants to be considered to provide ‘value for money’ a different approach to their deployment is required. The message voiced by teaching assistants was that there needs to be a clear career and related pay structure, with relevant job descriptions, which takes experience and qualifications into account.
The purpose of this small-scale study was to explore the aspirations of a final year cohort of students on an Education Studies degree programme at one School of Education, within a London university, with the intention of widening graduate employment opportunities. The Education Studies
degree attracts candidates who are almost always aspiring for a career in the teaching profession, and in particular, the primary sector. The responses collected via a survey revealed that thirty per cent of respondents were going to take up jobs in non-graduate employment, a job that they
could have secured without a degree. The School of Education, in a bid to increase graduate employment opportunities, widened the choice of career routes into teaching by providing two additional teacher training courses for the post compulsory sector. This is the first phase of the research.
The following phase, planned for next year, will track the students into their teaching roles in order to evaluate the popularity and success of these graduate courses.
Reflective self-questioning arises within the work-place when people are confronted with professional problems and situations. This paper focuses on reflective and 'situated reflective' questions in terms of self-questioning and professional workplace problem solving. In our view, the situational context, entailed by the setting, social and personal/individual perspectives, is interactional. The supporting empirical data is drawn from our work with two groups in their tertiary phase of education:professional trainers within a large corporate organisation and para-professionals within a large college system; each embraces phenomenological principles. The discussions of situated reflective practice (SRP) entail those circumstances where change is visited upon the individual by forces outside their immediate control. The positive sense of SRP is that it can prepare an individual for anticipated change, and is therefore considered a method of change management. The situation acts as a catalyst for the thought.
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