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Beginning to teach history Most trainee-teachers begin their PGCE course with strongly-held views about teaching and learning. Some will have already taught history in different contexts, others will have gained valuable experience in teaching other subjects or by working as Learning Support Assistants. All trainee history teachers will be able to draw on their own experiences of learning history at school and at university. One of the biggest challenges for PGCE tutors and school-based mentors is to plan training programmes that build on trainees’ diverse experiences of teaching and learning and that meet the individual needs of trainees at different points in their course. Carefully-planned exposure to the accumulated wisdom of the history subject community, and structured opportunities for trainees to engage critically and constructively with different pedagogical approaches, underpin all quality training (see units 2.1 and 2.2, and 4.2). A crucial dimension of this is the on-going programme of reading which you plan for your trainees. So too are the opportunities which you provide for trainees to observe and analyse effective practice. The most obvious model of effective teaching is you! In university-based sessions you can demonstrate, and help trainees to analyse, quality practice. Your university-based training sessions can therefore have a double agenda: (i) The particular dimension of history teaching under scrutiny (ii) The teaching strategies and skills you use to help your trainees learn. At the beginning of the PGCE course you will may wish to make your classroom management skills explicit by building in time for reflection and discussion: “Now let’s stop and think about how I made my instructions for that task clear”, “What particular strategies did I use to structure the feedback session?” “At the beginning of the session, how did I check that you’d all done the preliminary reading?” “How did I ‘avoid a void’ before we watched the video?” You will need to think hard about the dimensions of teaching which you can model in this way at the beginning of the course. Trainees not only build their understanding of pedagogy by analysing the teaching of their tutor, but also through contact with varied and diverse practice. As your PGCE partnership develops, you might arrange for small groups of trainees to visit partnership schools in order to observe expert teachers in the classroom. You will also be able to capture the teaching of your expert mentors on video, using this material to help trainees analyse the strategies teachers deploy to secure effective learning. In the meantime, a readily available source of videoed history lessons is provided by the Key Stage 3 Strategy training materials. These resources vary in quality, but can provide a useful starting point for engaging trainees critically with different dimensions of teaching. Activity 9.1.1 Observation and analysis of expert teachers These videos are just part of the training support offered through the National Strategy for Key Stage 3. Whilst the Strategy is likely to provide the national context in which trainees teach for some years to come, it is part of your role to help trainees evaluate it critically. It is non-statutory in schools and it is generic rather than subject specific, therefore trainees need to be encouraged to trust in their own judgments when analyzing what is commended as good practice. You will need to consider the principles of the Strategy and the training support materials and decide how high a profile you want to give these in your own history training course. Activity 9.1.2 – How far will you relate your training course to the National Strategy for Key Stage 3? Probably the most powerful opportunity for analysis of and reflection on teaching and learning at the beginning of the PGCE is provided by discussion of the trainees’ own teaching. Most trainees are keen to have a go at whole-class teaching early in their training. A carefully-constructed programme of whole-class teaching gives trainees confidence and enables them to engage more directly with pedagogical issues. You will need to give a lot of thought to the context for trainees’ early teaching experiences.
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