School Experience:


- Learning to be a teacher is about developing your own ‘teaching personality’.
- Learning to be a teacher involves drawing on your previous experiences, and the opportunities that you have as a student teacher, in order to develop that personality.
- And it will change as your career progresses and you gather more experience.

- However, as with any learners, it is how individuals take control of their own learning that will influence the type of teacher they become.

What students say about learning to teach?
Five dimensions of effective learning:

Dimension
Orientation
Intentionality
Deliberative
Frame of Reference
Drawing on a range of sources to shape and makes sense of the experience.
Response to feedback
Effective use of feedback to further learning
Attitude to context
Acceptance of the context and the ability to capitalize on it.
Aspiration
Aspirational both as learners and teachers
1.    Intentionality:
a.     Taylor (2008) found evidence of effective learning when students deliberately set their own schedule of learning and influenced the implementation of these.
b.    She found that students achieve this through reflection on self in terms of their own individual development and of their development as teachers, and through reflection on wider educational theory.
2.    Frame of Reference:
a.     Effective student teacher drew on a range of sources of information, not just relying on classroom experience.
3.    Response of Feedback:
a.     Student teachers value the feedback they receive, if it supports effective learning.
b.    Effective feedback is ‘the sharing of experiences with their supervisors and other student teacher, the joint exploration of beliefs, perceptions and affects involved in teaching practice and/or the joint construction of meanings.’
c.     They argue these can support effective learning as they lead to self-exploration, exploration of the teaching profession, mutual knowledge and the strengthening of complicity relationships amongst student teachers, their supervisors and colleagues.
4.    Attitude to context:
a.     Opening up to the different ideas, rather than seeing as them as constraints.
5.    Aspiration:
a.    Students that make connections between principle and practice, thought and action to make sense of teaching and its impact on education in general, schools and particularly children and their learning.

Next page Student Teacher’s opinion about teaching

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