BELB Induction/EPD
Induction as a
Phase of Teacher
Development
BELB Induction/EPD Resources
BELB Induction/EPD
The following extracts are taken from papers prepared for the
General Teaching Council, England and Wales by James
Calderhead and John Lambert
“The quality of education in our schools has been repeatedly demonstrated to
depend heavily upon the quality of the teaching personnel, their knowledge and
skills and how these are managed and supported within the school.
What particularly characterises the induction phase is its concern with
developing a professional identity and acclimatising to the ethos of the school.
Steffy (1989) supports a similar model of career development in teaching, again
emphasising the importance of the induction phase in orienting the novice
towards further professional growth, and emphasising the importance of
induction and later in-service support in order to minimise career frustration and
burn-out. Steffy holds forth an ideal to which she suggests professional
development efforts should be directed, which is for teachers to experience a
constant but manageable challenge in their work, continually learning from their
own experience, contributing to the development of practice within their own
school and profession as well as their own classrooms, and being able to retire at
the end of their career with a sense of achievement and satisfaction. Whilst
clearly an idealistic goal, it highlights a challenge for professional development
efforts in education generally, and indicates the value of models of career
development which specify the key points in a teacher’s career, the
developmental processes of professional growth and the different types of
provision that are needed in both induction and in-service.
The Difficulties of Novice Teachers
One of the essential areas of knowledge to draw upon in designing induction
schemes is that concerning the difficulties that new teachers experience. The
transition of the new teacher from college to classroom has, in the past, been
described in stark terms of helplessness and trauma. Terms such as “transition
shock” and “culture shock” have been used to describe the new teacher’s
experience of the sudden shift from the idealistic, intellectual ethos of the college
to the harsh realities of the classroom. With changes in the nature of teachers’
pre-service education, in particular the increased level of school-based work and
the partnerships between Higher Education training institutions, Education
Authorities and schools, and with the general acceptance of the need to support
new teachers in school, such terms may be less warranted today. Nevertheless,
the first year or so of the professional life of the teacher is still characterised by a
number of common difficulties that have been repeatedly identified in studies of
new teachers in several countries. For convenience, these can be considered in
terms of four general categories: classroom skills, curriculum and planning,
school culture, and personal/professional.
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Classroom skills
Among the most commonly reported difficulties of new teachers in schools are a
number of classroom skills that are generally regarded as basic and essential.
These include discipline, classroom management, motivating pupils, and catering
for a wide range of different abilities. These are often also a source of great
anxiety.
Uninterested children and disrupted lessons are stressful and
demoralising. A typical response from the novice to such managerial difficulties
is to become more custodial and authoritarian. In fact, the first year of teaching
has often been found to be characterised by a shift in attitudes from being
concerned with helping children, to becoming more concerned with controlling
children’s behaviour. This change in attitudes has also been found to be
accompanied by a change in practices, sometimes to the extent that management
becomes an end in itself, where the teacher becomes more concerned with
constructing and maintaining activities that keep children occupied and ‘busy’
than with activities that intellectually challenge children and help them learn.
Classroom management difficulties can be symptomatic of a wide range of
problems, such as inadequate planning, a lack of curriculum knowledge,
unimaginative activities, work that is poorly matched to children’s abilities, etc.
In addition, the task new teachers face in managing the learning and behaviour
of thirty or so children is, an extremely complex and demanding one.
Consequently, the various components of classroom management, irrespective of
the coverage given in pre-service training, may continue to require essential
support.
Curriculum and Planning
Learning to teach inevitably involves familiarity with the subject matter and the
development of techniques for transforming this into learning activities in the
classroom. Designing learning activities also requires teachers to draw upon
their knowledge of children, their interests, their abilities, how long they take to
complete different types of task, their knowledge of teaching strategies,
curriculum materials and school conventions. For the novice teacher, much of
this knowledge is accumulated gradually as it is required, and consequently the
task of planning is one that they find difficult and extremely time consuming.
Shulman (1986) and Wilson, Shulman and Richert (1987), in a series of detailed
case studies of secondary teachers in their first experiences in the classroom,
suggest that learning to teach involves relearning one’s subject for the purposes
of teaching. They suggest that the understanding of a subject that one has
acquired as a learner is insufficient for teaching. The teacher requires a more
extensive knowledge base with many interconnections, representing both a deep
and broad understanding. They suggest that not only do teachers develop a more
thorough understanding of their subjects as a result of having to teach it, they
also develop a wide repertoire of knowledge that enables them to communicate an
understanding of the subject to others – knowledge of examples, anecdotes,
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experiments, analogies and demonstrations, for instance. Since children bring
their own understandings to the classroom and develop new concepts in different
ways, the teacher requires a wide range of such knowledge with which to
influence children’s learning.
Part of the first few years of teaching will inevitably involve getting to grips with
the subject matter of the curriculum and developing the further pedagogical
knowledge that enables this to be most productively used in teaching.
School Culture
Becoming a teacher involves adapting to the workplace and possibly to a new
culture. Unlike most professions, the new teacher has served a lengthy
“apprenticeship of observation” through thousands of hours as a pupil at school.
Nevertheless, the transition to teaching involves forming a different perspective
on schools and education and becoming part of a professional community.
Teachers in their first year of employment in schools become acutely aware that
the school has certain traditions, values and ways of doing things. The taken-forgranted practices within the school are certainly influential in shaping the
professional skills of the new teacher.
More recent studies tend to suggest that the values and practices of the
individual and the school interact in a more complex way (Zeichner and Gore,
1990). New teachers themselves vary in their abilities to negotiate their way into
the culture of the school. Some of the values and practices of the school are
accepted unquestioningly, in the case of others the new teacher is prepared to go
along with them in order to fit in whilst actually holding alternative values or
favouring a differing practice, and in other cases still, the new teacher will
persist with their own values and practices which in some cases may even
influence those generally held within the school. Furthermore, some researchers
have suggested that a school is actually quite a complex social unit that is not
characterised by just one culture, but more often by multiple cultures that are
loosely held together through a common task and purpose (Tabachnick, Zeichner
and Densmore, 1987). Consequently, the new teacher who is seeking a
professional identity, and is attempting to function within a school that is
governed by certain traditions, expectations and norms, is faced with a complex
task of negotiating his or her way amongst the professional cultures of the school.
To the unprepared novice, gaining acceptance amongst one’s colleagues is an
important part of feeling like a teacher and gaining confidence in one’s abilities,
though it is frequently a process that is accompanied by considerable uncertainty
and some anxiety.
Personal/Professional
New teachers start out with their own image of teaching, and of themselves as
teachers (Bullough, 1989; Bullough, Knowles and Crow, 1991). They may have
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some idealised notions of what the task should be like, what they themselves will
be like as teachers, how this relates to their own personality and their own
particular strengths, and what they will expect to find satisfying or dissatisfying
about their work in the classroom (Steffy, 1989)
The personal element in becoming a teacher is widely recognised within the
profession. Teachers frequently rank personality as an important ingredient of
good teaching. Frequently, the reason given by teachers and senior staff for
leaving beginning teachers alone to learn through their own trial and error is
that there is something quite idiosyncratic and personal about a teacher’s style,
that their practice grows out of the kind of person they are and that the new
teacher can only find this on their own (Calderhead, 1988).
Possibly because of the high level of personal involvement in the task of teaching,
the initial failures of the new teacher in the classroom can be experienced as
quite traumatic. An inability to cope with the work, or difficulties in relating to
the children or gaining their co-operation can be perceived not just in terms of
the need to refine one’s pedagogic and managerial skills, but in terms of some
personal inadequacy. Failure in teaching can be perceived in terms of failure as
a person (Evans, 1976; Bullough, 1989).
This interconnection of the personal and professional dimensions of teaching can
clearly make the task of learning to teach demanding and stressful. It also raises
many questions about the nature of the support that is helpful to new teachers in
the period of induction and the specialist skills that are required of those who
provide that support.
Learning in Induction
Learning to teach is a complex, continuing process involving the mastery and use
of diverse types and areas of knowledge. Learning the subject matter involved in
the school curriculum is different from learning to establish a working
relationship with children, which in turn is different from learning to organise
and manage a class or to cope with one’s own levels of anxiety or feelings of
insecurity. One of the difficulties new teachers often experience is that learning
to teach is multifaceted and can be quite different from the academic learning
that they have become used to in higher education (Calderhead, 1991). Rather
than the learning of known facts and principles, it often involves the analysis of
practice, the evaluation of particular cases, and reflection upon one’s own ideas
and values (Boud, Keogh and Walker, 1985). A further complicating factor is
that for experienced teachers, much of their work has become intuitive and
neither the knowledge underlying their practice nor the processes by which it
was learned are easily accessed for them to share with the novice teacher
(Berliner, 1987). Consequently, the task of supporting new teachers in induction
is one which requires a substantial amount of specialist training.
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Support for New Teachers in School
As the difficulties of new teachers in school noted above indicate, the training
needs for new teachers vary substantially in nature. Some of the new teacher’s
needs are informational (how the school operates, conventions within the school,
access to resources, etc), some are concerned more with the development of
existing professional skills (improving class management), some are attitudinal
(developing appropriate attitudes towards teaching, colleagues, parents), some
are personal (coping with the stresses of the job, negotiating working
relationships), and some are concerned with support in professional learning
(help in analysing practice, appraising one’s own values). Since the training
needs of new teachers vary substantially in kind, the type of support required
also has to take account of this, taking a variety of different forms.
The Purposes of Induction
Induction schemes can be seen as fulfilling multiple functions – easing the
college-school transition, promoting the initial professional development of the
teacher, ensuring that appropriate skills and ‘habits’ are acquired at a crucial,
formative stage in a teacher’s career, developing professional attitudes towards
teaching, or reducing the drop-out rate through providing appropriate support at
a potential troubling time for teachers and thereby increasing job satisfaction.
The priority that is given to the different purposes of induction may vary from
one induction scheme to another. Such schemes operate for the benefit of the
school, the profession and the individual teacher and some degree of balance
amongst these interests would seem to be essential to obtain optimal benefits. It
would be easy, for instance, to devise an induction scheme aimed at helping the
teacher to fit the school, but this would be a very normative conception of
induction, leaving our of account the need for schools to change and the potential
of new staff to contribute to change. New teachers bring with them their own
areas of interest and expertise, which an induction scheme might help to develop
and employ within the school to the satisfaction of both the teacher and the
school.
One might also argue that induction into a profession should have an
empowering effect, enabling the new professionals to take charge of their own
development and to see their own work within the context of the wider role and
responsibilities of the profession.
In the following discussion of means of supporting new teachers in school,
consideration is given to how the individual teacher’s interests might be served
by induction as well as those of the school and the profession.
Mentoring
The role of the mentor has been identified as a crucial one in the professional
development of the new teacher. The idea that the new teacher will learn simply
from experience and the occasional opportunity to talk over their practice with
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someone else is no longer tenable. In order to make experience in school a
productive learning opportunity, a more proactive stance is required and the role
of the mentor has been developed to fulfil this need.
The mentor is frequently expected to fulfill several distinctive roles at different
times – counsellor, guide, expert, friend, for example – and some of the roles
require additional training for the experienced teacher. Helping new teachers to
talk about their practice, developing a shared language to describe practice,
acquiring skills in classroom observation, providing diagnostic and constructive
feedback on teaching, helping the new teachers, set their own targets, and
developing an understanding of professional growth that enables them to identify
new teachers’ capabilities and the support that might be most useful are areas
that many mentor training courses focus upon.
While the new role of mentor is still in its formative stages in many schools,
Shaw (1992) points out that the skills of mentoring (eg counselling, target
setting) are valuable in many other contexts within the school. Others have also
pointed to the importance of the learning gains of the mentor, who is introduced
to a new and potentially satisfying role at a time when their career may well
have reached a plateau (Steffy, 1988; Thies-Sprinthall and Sprinthall, 1987).”
REFERENCES
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Berliner, D C (1987)
Ways of Thinking about Students and Classrooms by More
and Less Experienced Teachers. In Calderhead, J (Ed.),
Exploring Teachers’ Thinking. (p. 60-83). London:
Cassell Education Limited.
Boud, D, Keogh R, Walker D
Reflection: Turning Experience into Learning (1985)
London: Kogan
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=xBs
hIryFdr0C&oi=fnd&pg=PA7&dq=%22Boud%22+%
22Reflection:+turning+experience+into+learning%2
2+&ots=mwPEbBR8LA&sig=xdZqpVIrEkHjmqz2E
IDeph_AnXI#PPA5,M1
Bullough, R V Jr, Knowles,
J G, & Crow, N A (1991)
Emerging as a Teacher. London: Routledge.
Calderhead, J (1988)
Teachers’ Professional Learning. London: Falmer
Calderhead, J (1991)
The Nature and Growth of Knowledge in Student
Teaching. Teaching and Teacher Education Journal 7
Wilson, S, Shulman, L,
& Richert, A (1987)
150 Different Ways of Knowing: Representations
of Knowledge in Teaching. In J. Calderhead
(Ed.), Exploring Teachers’ Thinking (pp. 104–
123). London: Cassell.
Shaw, R (1992)
School-based Training: the View from the
Schools. Cambridge Journal of Education, 22,
pp. 363 - 375.
Thies-Sprinthall, L (1987)
Experienced Teachers: Agents for Revitalization
and Renewal as Mentors and Teacher Educators.
http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recor
dDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_S
earchValue_0=ED284340&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_
0=eric_accno&accno=ED284340
Steffy, B (1989)
Life Cycle of the Career Teacher. London: Chapman
Publishing
www.paulchapmanpublishing.co.uk/booksProdDesc.
nav?contribId=527772&prodId=Book10213
Zeichner, K, Tabachnick, B R
& Densmore, K(1987).
Individual, Institutional and Cultural Influences
on the Development of Teachers' Craft Knowledge. In J.
Calderhead (Ed.) Exploring Teachers' Thinking
London: Cassell..
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Zeichner, K, & Gore, J
(1990)
Teacher Socialization. In W. Robert Houston
(Ed.), Handbook of Research on Teacher Education, 329348. New York: Macmillan.
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