Even the most experienced teachers can struggle to innovate their teaching practice. But how well are we serving these tutors in realising that end point? My research highlighted the value of explicitly scaffolding teachers’ reflection on their practice with theories of teacher development and learners and learning – to support their development as teachers but also keep expectations in check and motivating.
There is an increased expectation that teachers in further and higher education should be trained in teaching, learning and assessment. The most common route to this end is a one-year Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education programme. In general, there is evidence of broad benefit from such programmes, but their contribution to developing the teacher’s conception of teaching/learning such that it supports parallel changes to their actual teaching practice is not so well-established.
There are several models regarding how teachers’ conceptions of teaching/learning evolve as they ‘learn their trade’ and become more experienced at it. Such models generally set out typical stages of development, across which the theories of learning implicit to each can be mapped. At root, all are concerned with the ‘sage to guide’ evolution. A particularly useful framework in my view is that of Kugel (1993), which includes five stages of development. This sees the teacher move from ‘survival mode’, focused on themselves, to a greater focus on the student’s vantage point. From there the teacher typically moves from an understanding of learners and learning as passive (with an accompanying pedagogy that we might term ‘teaching-as-telling’), to a sense of learning and learners as active (and a practice of ‘teaching-as-prompting’), and eventually to seeing learners and learning as ‘pro-active’, with a practice we could describe as ‘teaching-as-facilitating dialogue’, to draw on my colleague Diana Laurillard’s work.
