hud.ac.uk/research/education
Learning to teach - Learning to ‘look’ How trainee teachers learn to teach has long been dominated by the idea that “knowledge of teaching is acquired and developed by the personal experience of teaching” (Munby et al., 2001, p.897). Dr David Powell, Director of the Education and Training Consortium at the University of Huddersfield and HudCRES researcher, is interested in the contribution made by teacher educators’ use of modelling teaching strategies and behaviour. Influenced by the painter David Hockney’s (2014) claim that “teaching people to draw is teaching people to look”, David suggests that learning to teach starts with ‘learning to look’. In their book ‘Learning to Teach’ published in 2014, Dr Jonathan Glazzard, Dr Neil Denby and Jayne Price (colleagues from the School of Education and Professional Development at the time) also recognised the potential of learning by looking:
“One of the best ways [for trainee teachers] to learn effective teaching and skills is to see others apply such skills competently and professionally.” (p.10) However, implicit in this statement is the assumption that trainee teachers know how to observe their teacher educator, or another teacher, at the start of their course – an assumption largely fed by Dan C. Lortie’s claim that by watching almost 13,000 hours of teaching by the age of 18 all student teachers have undergone an “apprenticeship of observation” (1975, ‘Schoolteacher: a sociological study’, p.61). However, these ‘observations’ were as learners – they were not, at that time, ‘apprentice teachers’. David said: My doctoral research involved working with a team of further education-based teacher educators to explore their use of modelling within their practice. Early on it became clear that their trainees did not always notice the modelling of teaching strategies or behaviours and we discussed how we might address this.
One of the teacher educators suggested that trainees needed the visual equivalent of a writing frame, to scaffold their observation in a class. Based on this suggestion, I developed and piloted what is now the Viewing Frame in my own teaching and have shared it with others to gain feedback on its effectiveness as a pedagogical resource. When using the Viewing Frame, I also share my lesson plan with my trainees to help them see into my pedagogical planning and decision making before and during the class. The Viewing Frame comprises a grid of five columns. The first column lists, in chronological order, the activities of the class. The four remaining columns offer a series of guiding questions, based on four forms of modelling identified by Lunenberg et al. (2007, ‘The teacher educator as a role model’. Teaching and Teacher Education, 23, (5) pp.586601) for observers to consider. The Viewing Frame has proven particularly popular with teacher educators in the Netherlands. David has recently had a paper on the role of ‘learning to look’ within a pedagogy of teacher education, co-authored with HudCRES Visiting Scholar Anja Swennen from VU University, Amsterdam, published in Dutch in Kennisbasis (Knowledge Base) the journal of VELON – the professional association for teacher educators in the Netherlands. He has also been invited to contribute to the International Forum for Teacher Educator Development blog info-ted.eu/
Why not try it for yourself? The viewing frame, including supporting references and suggestions for its use are available to download from hud.ac/hudcres-viewing-frame