Extending the teacher educator role: developing tools for working with school mentors

Abstract

This article considers the ways a group of university-based teacher educators work with school-based mentors (cooperating teachers). Owing to a number of changes in teacher education policy in England, feelings of marginalisation from the teacher educators are presented before exploring how they undertake their work with school mentors. Using a cultural and historical activity theory lens through which to view interview data, the analysis explores how teacher education activity has changed over the nine years since first interviewing the teacher educators. The findings identify three tools which mediate the work with school mentors. How the teacher educators perceive these tools is analysed in order to compare work intentions driven by the object motive of the teacher education activity with those advocated in the teacher education research literature. Collaborative working practices established by appropriating tools developed from scholarship activity around subject journals, research projects and mentor collectives suggest ways forward for enhancing the teacher educator role. This role is diversifying in teacher education in England with the introduction of new school-based training routes for beginning teachers. Consequently, there is growing need for greater clarity around the work, training and professional development opportunities for teacher educators in England.

Developing teachers: adopting observation tools that suspend judgement to stimulate evidence-informed dialogue during the teaching practicum to enrich teacher professional development

“…The tools used as evidence of classroom practices aim to provide pre-service teachers with structured opportunities to reflect upon and possibly rethink their beliefs. This, in turn, allows them to improve their teaching practice (Clarke 1995, Timperley 2001, Cochran-Smith and Lytle 2009, Earl and Timperley 2009, Ure 2010, Kriewaldt and Turnidge 2013, McLean, Davies et al 2013, Douglas 2017. We argue that specific structures and tools are necessary to ensure professional conversations between mentor teachers, university educators and pre-service teachers that are valuable for development.…”

The role of opportunities to learn in early childhood teacher education from two perspectives: A multilevel model

“…The results only provide first evidence for the relationships between opportunities to learn reported by teacher educators, those perceived by pre-service teachers and professional knowledge. Secondly, we have no additional data on the teacher educators, such as their own qualifications and professional development, even though prior research has identified them as a heterogeneous group (Douglas 2017;Swennen et al 2010), which might have affected our results. Third, one should note that the same applied to the pre-service teachers, as we lacked a measure of their initial level of knowledge.…”

The IAFOR International Conference on Education – Hawaii 2021 Official Conference Proceedings

“…The liaisons attributed activities such as co-creating, coordinating, and communicating to their role and functioned as boundary-spanners between the PDS schools and the TE (Whitenack & Swanson, 2013). Liaison teams explored their work relationships to serve the teacher candidates and mentor teachers in innovative ways (Douglas, 2017). But the role as a liaison was always added to the work of the coordinator, vice-principal, or resource teacher.…”