Combining support and challenge

In response to these distinctive features of the process of learning to teach, the first principle underpinning our practice must be to combine support with challenge. Teaching is complex and demanding. The professional craft can seem inextricably bound up with the personal. Most challenges and difficulties are keenly felt. Our trainees need affirmation and encouragement. All the more so given that they are adults embarking on a (new) career, perhaps questioning whether it really is the right move for them. Support without challenge, however, will not bring about learning. Nor will challenge alone. If trainees’ existing achievements and understandings are not valued they will feel little encouragement to take on more. If they are not questioned, the trainees will never move beyond them.

Acknowledging their own ideas

The first step must be to help our trainees recognise the assumptions that they hold about history and about teaching and learning. Then they can begin to articulate them. In the university we can exploit the range of trainees’ views by setting up decision-making or ranking tasks (See resource 2.1.9 for an example). This forces them to make selections and defend their preferences. As they become aware of others’ views, so we can encourage them to explore the reasons for their own choices, and to consider what has shaped them.

In school, trainees can obviously observe a wide variety of practice. Later they’ll need to find out about the teachers’ reasons for choosing those particular tasks, learning objectives or subject content. But at first trainees need to be encouraged to share their own impressions of the strategies that they observe, and to consider why they respond in those particular ways. Only when we know where the trainees are coming from, can we identify how to build on the ideas they have and where we might begin to challenge them.

Recognising that others’ ideas are also open to debate

Challenges to their own ideas are easier to accept if the trainees feel that they can also question the ideas and suggestions that others put to them. It’s relatively easy to invite debate within the university context, but the complex power relations between mentor and trainee may make this much more awkward in school. Open discussion that allows for real learning (rather than suppression of views that the trainee feels are ‘unacceptable’) has to be very carefully cultivated. Unit 4 offers a range of suggestions as to how it can be achieved.