I’ve often said this to trainees when they find the pace and content of the PGCE tricky in some way, and seeing my sister going the GTP makes me wonder whether the present alternatives are actually any healthier. Study where a fast pace is set by external forces generates stress, just as any working to deadlines does. What then are the possible alternatives?
The most radical would be to say that graduates should be able to teach without further qualificatory training; that they are intelligent enough to read and to pick up what they need form in-service training. The old charge at the Oxford degree ceremony Do vobis potestatem legendi “I confer on you the power to lecture” holds true, if this is the case. Instinctively I want to say it can’t mean “teach” in the sense we use it today. The transferable skills of “graduateness” may well equip people to tackle the demands of a new profession or to evaluate their professional practice differently, but do not, of themselves, constitute a sufficient understanding of child development, pedagogy, &c &c.
At the other extreme, I think, is the idea that only a rigorously regulated, top-down training prepares the untested for the requirements of being a government agent in education. Danger of death by a thousand folders and government initiatives follows, or at least might follow,with the trainee being seen as a recipient or information, being prepared to become a deliverer of policy.
And this is where the “If I were you” really starts to bite. A recent(ish) speech (cited in this article on outdoors education) suggsts that we need a pedagogy that is “interactive, dynamic, ethical, educational, and caring:” a tall order!
Key to the process has got be an understanding of notion of curriculum, including how we view that nebulous concept “the needs of the child,” and a definition of the role of the teacher, although the findings from recent research in New Jersey suggest that significant differences in content in training exist in US (as, perhaps, here in UK), and that issues of equity need to be addressed.
nicktomjoe 