What Is a Teacher? — The Big Confusions
At his valedictory speech, the Director of the PGCE programme said that a PGCE is extremely difficult and that we should be proud to have accomplished it. According to him, the reason why a PGCE is hard lies in the fact that it is made of several parts, each of them being difficult on its own: teaching, carrying out a micro-research project, and writing academic essays. This may be true. PGCE students have indeed to distribute their work on completely different tasks: teaching (which is incredibly multitask in itself) and academic studies. Both are hard jobs, and they are also so different in nature that to conciliate both is a real challenge. Preparing and teaching lessons is extremely intense when you are a novice teacher. And I found it highly disturbing — and somehow distracting me from the core of my training , even if I actually enjoyed it, as I come from a scientific research background — to have to read research articles and carry out my own reflection on some aspects of schools’ policies in parallel to this. Some of us clearly chose to do the bare minimum for their essays just to pass, not seeing the point in all them. I believe that the very different nature of the tasks a PGCE student has to carry out is actually symptomatic of the confusion on the very purpose of the PGCE training, namely: Is it a professional training where the focus is primarily on developing PGCE students’ teaching skills through theory and practice? Or does it aim to train future education scientists? And this confusion reflects another, broader confusion on the teacher function. I would summarise it with the question, “Is a teacher an education scientist, engineer, or technician?”
In materials science, the field I come from, scientists carry out experimental and theoretical research to explore the properties of materials and develop innovative materials with new or improved properties; engineers use and adapt some of these innovative materials for a well-defined end product; and technicians use well-known practical methods to test the properties of the developed product or to fabricate parts of it. Applied to the education world, this would mean that education scientists observe and analyse teaching and learning to find innovative teaching techniques and make recommendations that lead to better learning; education engineers apply and adapt these techniques when teaching students, using their own observations in the field, and education technicians use well-defined techniques to teach students.
In my view, teachers are education engineers and the PGCE training should reflect that. However, PGCE students have to carry out academic work as if they were future education scientists and, at the same time, are regarded as future technicians when they are given rigid prescriptions on how to teach. For the first point, we were for instance required for our essay on a series of four lessons to review relevant literature that was supposed to inform the way we planned these lessons. I found this very surprising, bearing in mind how it works in technological research. There, some units are specialised in technology transfer from research labs to engineers in the private sector. Given their massive work overload, it cannot be expected from teachers to read educational research literature. It should be the role of education scientists to transfer their knowledge to teachers and schools, that is, to present their main results in a concise and accessible form. There are already initiatives in that direction, but I found it shocking that a PGCE provider suggested that we should read the literature to discover what research has to say about how to teach a certain topic. I thought it was the very purpose of the PGCE training to make a digest of the education research findings, especially in terms of pedagogy, for future teachers. Something along of these lines may have occurred to our teachers since I heard they were thinking of compiling all our literature reviews, as it could prove useful to future PGCE students. This confusion between the roles goes even further in some schools where teachers are expected to do some research while teaching. It is certainly interesting but we should rather find ways to reduce teachers’ workload, not add to it. A much valuable idea would be to expect from education scientists that they work part-time as a teacher. It would present a double advantage: they could keep up with school reality and have easy access to first-hand data.
This academic part of the PGCE training seems to be intended to future education scientists. And it’s true that some of the PGCE students will carry on their study to a MA in education science. So, maybe a simple solution would be to make the research part of the PGCE optional, while for a standard PGCE other, lighter tasks could be assigned to stimulate some readings and reflections on some central issues in the education world while leaving plenty of time and energy to the students to develop their teaching skills.
As I explained in a previous article, in parallel to this academic work where we are supposed to read research literature before planning our lessons, we are given instructions both from the university and school teachers in a very patronising way. In addition to their rigidity– as if there were no room for personal preferences when it comes to teaching -, the instructions are often confused if not contradictory. I have already dealt with constructivist theories here and here. I explained there that constructivism is not one single theory but encompasses many, sometimes incompatible theories. But this is not spelled out, and, as a result, we get contradictory directions from one session to the other. And here I am talking only about the part at university. In schools, we are supposed to be observed every single lesson by the regular teachers of our classes. The observing teacher then either writes an observation report or gives an oral feedback when the observation is ‘informal’. As the training progresses, observing teachers may reduce the frequency of feedbacks. But, at the start, teacher trainees are bombarded with feedbacks and targets. Our observers may genuinely want to help us, and they indeed give us a lot of their time. However, as there is no overarching framework for how we are expected to progress over the year, they may throw at us everything we should be doing at once.
And this brings me to another point: observing teachers seem to be eager to give plenty of advice, be it to really help us or to feel important. But the risk of making as many critics or suggestions for improvement as possible is then that the feedback is not consistent. For instance, an observing teacher once told me that my students could have read on their own the text I gave them, instead of me asking a few of them to read it aloud. During a lesson a few weeks later, the same class got again a text to read. So, this time, I asked them to read the text on their own. What did the same teacher tell me? That I should have asked a few of them to read the text aloud… Being observed during every lesson they deliver leads PGCE students to teach differently according to who observes them. Do their observers like when students write the learning objectives in their book or not? Do they like this type of stopwatch or do they prefer this other one? It may sound ludicrous — and indeed it is for any normal person — but one of my PGCE colleagues was told off by her mentor because she did use a stopwatch but not the right one: hers was too soft, and the sound at the end of the allotted time was not intimidating enough…
It should be recognised that there are many ways to teach a same lesson. This freedom of choice should be given to PGCE students (and teachers), which means that lesson observers should not expect to see only one particular teaching technique or only lessons following the same format. Teachers deserve to be trusted that they know what they are doing and, coming back to my question at the start of this article, be treated like education engineers. Maybe it is what a colleague in my school meant when he said to me that mass education implied mass training of teachers: that we ended up training education technicians, not education engineers.
