Learning at the chalkface

Rethinking how we train the teachers of tomorrow. By Darragh O Keeffe.

For some time now, there has been concern about the quality of teacher education courses. Wave after wave of reviews on the subject all end up pointing the finger at university education departments – that they are out of touch with reality.

For the past seven years, education faculty staff at the University of Canberra have been developing a model called teaching clinics, whereby they deliver content and pedagogy to pre-service teachers in school classrooms.

The model is based on the principle that pre-service teachers must reflect upon and learn from their teaching experiences. They also believe it is crucial for teacher education lecturers to be embedded, to some extent, within the school experience.

It gives students the opportunity to apply their learning in a genuine and demanding environment, yet with proper support and supervision, says Associate Professor Louise Watson from UC.

The model is applied in many units of study across all year levels at the university, in the fields of health and movement; science; social and environmental education; literacy learning; and English as a second language.

Watson says the teaching clinics were conceived when a physical education lecturer came to the realisation that her courses would be better delivered if they were more school-based. The teacher didn’t see the point of doing roleplay with her students in the gym when they could all be in an actual school with real students.

The notion spread to other staff within the faculty. Now 30 per cent of students are engaged in clinics in their core subjects, complementing the practicum where they are sent out to schools. With the graduate diploma, for example, students are in a classroom within a week of starting the course.

Meanwhile, at the University of Melbourne, student teachers have been learning at the chalkface for the past 10 years, when staff began taking student science teachers to local schools. Bringing the theory to life in a classroom setting is a model they have found to be extremely successful, according to Dr Christine Redman, senior lecturer.

Redman says the students glean an insight and understanding into the children’s behaviour and learning processes. “They listen closely to what the students say and what they do. They take note of what the students learned and what they didn’t. Then they reflect about what happened in each other’s groups and the implications of that. It enables them to develop a clear pedagogical approach for responding to children’s learning needs. And they’re doing it in a collaborative way, with academics, classroom teachers and their peers.”

As well as the behavioural aspect, the teaching clinic also serves to bridge the theory-practice divide, says Watson.

“Before this, students would write their lesson plan and submit it to the lecturer to be marked. Therefore, the student gets assessed on the content of their lesson plan, but not the delivery. With the teaching clinic, the student is assessed on the content and the delivery of their lesson plan. It also means the student isn’t alone in the classroom should things go wrong. If the lesson plan is too short, and there’s 10 minutes to fill, the lecturer can step in,” she says.

The feedback from students has been overwhelmingly positive. The more real time experience they can get with support from a lecturer, the happier they are, says Watson.

“The most obvious outcome is a noticeable increase in the level of professional confidence and self-efficacy among pre-service teachers,” the paper states. “Working with their lecturers to apply knowledge immediately in a school setting reduces the theory-practice divide and increases student satisfaction with the course. Students within the graduate diploma in education, for example, commented widely on the benefits of the teaching methods unit in preparing them for their first professional experience placement and felt that they were ‘ahead’ of their fellow students from other discipline areas who had not had a similar experience.”

The teaching clinics, if widely adopted, would have implications for university education faculties in terms of policy and funding, Watson believes. “There is pressure within the university system, particularly for education lecturers, to publish in peer-reviewed journals. That’s how they get recognition. However, the teaching clinics require a lot of extra work and time for the lecturers involved and currently they don’t get recognition or reward for that. So there’s a resource issue in the long term. Also, it can be confronting for lecturers to do this; they need to be confident. It’s not the lecturers who have been out of the classroom for 20 years who are doing it,” she says.

Changes may be required in faculties of education for the model to be widely implemented, but as far as schools go, as the other major stakeholder, Watson says there is overwhelming interest and support. “They are clamouring to get involved. They love it. One school changed its timetable so it could be part of the clinics,” she says.

This article first appeared in Education Review.