Teachers' conceptions of their actions with students on placement
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Date
03/07/2020Author
Inglis, Andrina Louise
Metadata
Abstract
School-based teaching placements have a central place in Initial Teacher
Education [ITE]. The classroom teachers to whom student teachers are
assigned play a role in shaping students’ practice and may impact on these
students’ learning, confidence and competence. The questions then arise of:
• what expectations do classroom teachers have of students?;
• how do they represent their actions with students?;
• what do they see as key matters for students on placement?
This thesis has engaged with these issues with a focus on mathematics
teachers in secondary schools. It reports on a study which was guided by the
following research question: How do mathematics teachers in Scottish
schools conceptualise their actions with students on placement?
The Literature Review locates this study within policy frameworks for school
placement and a range of relevant literature. This review reveals
longstanding concerns about the quality of student placements and the
assessment of student practice, alongside evidence that professional
development for supervisors in their role of inducting students into the
profession remains inadequate. There is thus much work yet to be done in
this area. It is argued in the thesis that future developments in ITE will gain
from being informed by a clearer understanding of how classrooms teachers
themselves conceptualise their actions with students on placement, an area
which is currently insufficiently understood.
This study set out to contribute to bridging this gap by exploring the thinking
of a sample of teachers in relation to the actions they undertake with students
who are assigned to their classrooms. It was largely guided by a
Constructivist Guided Theory methodology (Charmaz, 2014). A pilot study
laid the groundwork for the main study in which semi-structured interviews
were conducted with a total of 22 teachers drawn from secondary school
mathematics departments across the East of Scotland known to have
recently hosted a student on placement. The data from these interviews were
analysed using the Constructivist Grounded Theories procedures of initial
and focused coding. In the final stage of analysis the main categories that
had emerged from these process of coding were then subsumed under
Wenger’s (1998) ‘Communities of Practice’ framework. Employing this
framework allowed a clear, synoptic picture of the findings to be presented
and brought into the foreground issues that have received little attention in
preceding work. From the substantive findings, five categories were selected for discussion.
This selection was based on their contribution to both addressing the
research question and to the framework used. In addition, Brookfield’s (2017)
critically reflective lenses were applied to these categories, exposing these
teachers’ assumptions concerning student placements and teacher
education.