Developing School – University
Relationships through the
Oxford Education Deanery
Anne Edwards
OUDE
Overview
• The Oxford Education Deanery
• The theoretical underpinning: demand and
experience
• Increasing demands
• Implications for ITE, CPD and Research
Models of Teacher Education
1. Application of knowledge (transfer of
knowledge from university to their work in
school)
2. Participation in practices (apprenticeship
into local knowledge)
3. Cultural historical approaches (transition –
between practices; connecting everyday
concepts with more powerful ways of thinking )
Responding to the Cultural Historical
Challenge
‘Implementing a Vygotskian perspective on teacher
education will put demands on the environment in which
trainees will be training and teaching…..
and with a view to implementation, the theoretical
approach in this paper will need elaboration into a
research programme centred on the relation between a
pedagogy supporting the professional development
of trainee teachers and the institutional conditions
that have to be fulfilled for realizing such a
pedagogy.’ (Van Huizen et al., 2005: 285)
The Oxford
Education
Deanery
The Deanery is a framework within
which university–school partnerships
in research, CPD and ITE can be
formed and sustained.
These partnerships see teacher
development as a continuum.
Student teachers enter school
practices where what teachers do is
research-informed.
Informed by Vygotskian cultural
historical theory
Step 1: Setting up a Multi-level System of
Distributed Expertise (2010)
Research
CPD
ITE
• Student Hub; other Depts in the University;
OFFA implications; Teaching Schools etc. etc.
Distributed
Expertise
A resourceful use of
the expertise available
in a system
We are setting up a
system in which that
expertise can be made
visible and drawn on
by everyone
Principles
Bringing together practice and research in ways which are underpinned by
the following principles:
1.
investment in the future of the teaching profession;
2.
doing high quality research that is relevant to the future of the
profession;
3.
developing the best subject pedagogy;
4.
working with young people to sustain their engagement in learning;
5.
creating strong learning environments;
6.
adopting a constructive and critical approach to curriculum development
and assessment;
7.
drawing on and contributing to the pool of expertise across all
participants.
Step 2: Implications for the Student
Teachers’ Learning
How is their learning enhanced by the Deanery?
A Vygotskian – cultural historical argument – with a focus
on practices
Practitioners inhabit discrete practices, such as teaching
in a particular school. These practices are historicallyformed, imbued with knowledge freighted with emotion,
shaped by the purposes of the institution and oriented
towards what matters for the professionals within the
institutional setting
The Social Situation of
Development
Vygotsky worked on the idea of the social situation of development in order
to explain the developing child’s changing relationship with his or her
environment over time.
These changes are marked by new structures of ‘consciousness’ (Vygotsky,
1998, p. 199) which in turn alter the child’s relationships with their
experienced reality.
It is these relationships which make up the social situation of development;
therefore as new structures of consciousness emerge, defunct
relationships fade away and new ones are formed so that children
become repositioned as agents within the practices they inhabit.
There is a dialectical relationship between the agency and unmet needs of
the child and the demands of the practices.
Promoting learning
through increasing
demands
Hedegaard has argued that we should
shift our attention from a primary focus
on how development arises from a
child’s needs, and recognise more
fundamentally the importance of the
demands that practices make on
learners (Hedegaard, 2012).
From this perspective the demands and
affordances of practices, as recognised
by the learner, become central to
learning
The Challenge for ITE
The dynamic tension between the agency of the student
teacher and the demands and affordances of the practice
- is where learning occurs.
In order to increase the demands on student teachers
and provoke and promote their learning, we need to
attend to the demands that within-school practices make
on them as teachers who are also learners.
Increasing Demands in School
Practices
The Cherwell Science Project
Oxford City Learning Action Research Fellows
MFL and Physics initiatives through research
projects
Others in the pipeline
The Science Project
Six science students in one science department
Research project involving student teachers,
teachers and university tutors
Builds on work under-taken over the previous
five years by OUDE science team – identifying
the features of science departments which are
particularly conducive to student teacher
learning
Key Features of
Learning
Departments
Analysis of the (inter)actions in the
behind-the-scenes activities of lesson
planning revealed that a discursive
structure, where the expertise of others
was recognised as a resource to be
drawn on to help children learn science
(McNicholl and Childs,2010).
Everyone — technicians, pre-service
teachers, senior staff — was expected
to contribute to this distributed
expertise by asking questions and
giving answers.
Bridget Asks what order she should teach the concepts interference,
diffraction and standing waves.
Nick Says it doesn’t matter they all come under the heading of interference
and then outlines some experiments on interference.
William (head of physics) brings in a speaker.
Nick Explains how you can use an IT package with Excel to show the wave
equation (Audacity). He draws three graphs to show Bridget.
Bridget Says she finds the practical aspects of teaching Y12 more tricky.
Nick Talks about Y13 work and explains about practical work and four
experiments and explains what pupils have to do before the practical work.
Bridget Explains what she will do on Thursday – she will go over interference
and then do experiments.
Nick Shows Bridget the Audacity Excel programme.
William now has signal generator working and speakers and we (Nick,
Bridget, William and Ann) go into Bridget’s lab to actually try things out and to
show her how to set things up. In the lab the signal generator and the two
speakers are set up.
Nancy (chemistry specialist) and Julia (biology specialist) join us to view the
demonstration and we all walk across the classroom and lay down bits of
paper to indicate the loud and soft areas to show patterns of interference.
But
This is an exceptional school
How do we help other schools establish similar
discursive structures? (i.e asking for and giving
reasons so knowledge is made visible)
How do we ensure that all student teachers
have equal access to the high levels of
intellectual demand shown here?
How the Deanery Science Project Helps– a head
of dept perspective
“I want a more research-informed perspective on key
development challenges for the department and see
working in partnership with [the university department]
and drawing on their research expertise is a good way to
work. It means that their visits to schools, rather than
rushing in and out observing interns, can be for longer
and more sustained periods working with the department
and the interns on all of their key development priorities.”
What it means for Teacher Education
We build capacity in schools for making knowledge
visible and open to scrutiny
Teachers increase the ‘demands’ on the student teachers
we jointly prepare as teachers
Learning through experience in school is not a question
of being inducted into the local practices of the school
There is a sharing of the knowledge that matters in being
a teacher
We are researching topics that matter for the profession
OCL Action Research Fellows
Groups of teachers in four schools
Meet separately and as a large group funded
through OCL
Also meet with heads of T&L in the schools so they
can share their practice
Builds on work with individual schools in previous
years – but now more systematic through OCL
Topics: AfL; student engagement; metacognition;
self-regulation; the affective inhibitors to learning
Open Collective Cycle of Development
① Conceptual
inputs
Internal leads
Experience
sharing
Application/ab
andon
Technical
consultations
Observations
Developing
new methods
Analysis
① Data collection
Observations,
demonstrations
Experimentation
Experimentation
② Conceptual
inputs
② Data
Exchanges
collection
Help with analysis
(Source : Huberman, 1995)
Constructing Independence
A journey towards emancipated learning
Patrick Garton: The Cherwell School & Anne Edwards OUDE
anne.edwards@education.ox.ac.uk
Rewards
Genuine personalised learning and teaching
More aware and reflective learners
Teachers as learners, alongside learners
Improved results (GCSE Philosophy and Ethics
2012 – 90 candidates 68% A*-A)
On-going renewal, of curriculum and pedagogy
Building Common Understandings in the Space of
Reasons
Jan Derry has looked at how those who teach can elicit learners’ everyday
understandings and rachet up their conceptual strength
Her argument is that we need to create a space of reasons- so it is
legitimate to ask for and give reasons and make knowledge visible and
open to scrutiny
In that way we can help learners connect their ideas with strong conceptual
systems
In the Deanery we are attempting to enrich the system of inferences
experienced by student teachers by working with the teachers and
building a shared system of inferences
e.g. what AfL; self-regulation; motivation etc. mean
The Importance of a Label
Our work is not hidden - in the city or in the University
We have been doing a lot of these things for a while – but now can overtly
link them to OCL; ITE; school improvement etc. and build them into our
strategic planning
What is new is the clear focus on intervening at the level of the dept or group
of teachers to enrich the system of inferences and the demands in the
practices
Other things stick to it –student volunteers; other departments; widening
participation and access; stimulating thinking in continuing education;
working with teaching schools and school direct……
A danger – we are moving slowly by starting with a few schools – we need to
keep our other partner schools involved too
Developments within the University
The draft strategic plan
Para 62: “The University’s engagement with local schools is
wide-ranging, including Initial Teacher Training, collaborative
research projects, action learning sets, and a leadership
development programme. Tutoring of local school children is
among the large portfolio of community volunteering activities
coordinated by the student-run Oxford Hub. The creation of a
‘Deanery’ structure by the University’s Department of Education
aims to strengthen and coordinate links between Oxford
schools, the department and the wider University; this will in
turn facilitate the OSP’s aim, expressed in its Economic Growth
Strategy, to coordinate these activities with other volunteering
programmes and business initiatives.”