A teacher training year is an incredibly intensive one and for our beginning teachers to organise themselves in such a way that they can really engage with theory and research is a major feat that should be celebrated. I am always so impressed with how far our students’ thinking develops over the year and how they use their engagement with research and theory to genuinely influence their classroom practice.

Our beginning teachers’ final outcomes on this assignment come in all shapes and sizes and show the genuine personalisation of their understanding and how different theories and ideas have resonated with different people.

Below is a great example of one PGCE student’s thinking where his ideas have been drawn together through the analogy of climbing!

‘To be honest I am quite a visual thinker, for example when it comes to driving and remembering routes I never remember road names, places, or specific directions. Instead I tend to remember, and think about, the visual cues I get while driving, like a certain shop on the corner or the way a street looks.

So for me an analogy or metaphor that summarises all the different learning theories was quite natural.  And during a University seminar when the ‘Learning Pit’ was mentioned and that learners had to climb a wall, I sort of took the idea and ran with it.

Some of the learning theories naturally fit into the analogy, like the Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky, 1978), while others I had to really think about to try and fit them into the analogy. Trying to make the theories work within the analogy actually meant that I had to really understand what they were, and so was extremely useful in my own development.

Eventually I had quite an elaborate analogy which touched on many different teaching and learning theories and combined them into a coherent whole that summarised my own thoughts and attitudes towards teaching.  Hopefully aspects of what I have come up with can be shared with my classes in the future so that they know that learning is a climb and can, maybe, appreciate what is going on within the class.’

Richard Keir 
PGCE 2016

View some sample slides from the presentation Richard gave which show his analogy coming to life.

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I qualified from the PGCE at The University of Nottingham two years ago and I was appointed at the school where I completed my teaching practice. Two years on and I am still here – I am in charge of KS3 Modern Foreign Languages. Alongside classroom duties, my role is to enthuse, encourage and promote languages from the moment our students arrive. The role is very demanding but is equally as rewarding! Every day brings new challenges which are reflected within my job.

The PGCE at the University of Nottingham allowed me to discover what sort of teacher I wanted to be. It gave me the skills needed to reflect, assess and deliver lessons accordingly. The support network is second to none – and ensures that all trainee teachers receive the advice and information they need. We aim to give our learners exactly this and to provide an authentic experience within the classroom and out of it. The school runs a yearly trip to France and we have just come back from the trip I organised to Moscow…seeing the students faces when they saw Red Square, or ordered their own blini was an unforgettable experience!  We aim to create lifelong memories and a lifelong passion for languages.

The University of Nottingham is an exceptional place to kick start your career – and harness a lifelong desire for learning and teaching.

Shane Higgins
PGCE Modern Foreign Languages 2013-14

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Having graduated from Hull University with a BA Hons in International Management in 2005, I worked in Recruitment for a few years but was always keen to look for a career that would offer me more; ideally a sense of satisfaction and achievement – enter teaching!

I interviewed for the Mathematics PGCE course at The University of Nottingham and received a conditional place on the basis that I complete a Mathematics Enhancement Course (given that my degree was not in Mathematics). One 6 month booster course, and two seasons of working as a ‘group leader’ later, I began my Initial Teacher Training course (ITT).

I am now in my sixth year of teaching Mathematics at a comprehensive school in Hertfordshire and enjoy going to work every day. At the end of my NQT year I accepted the role of ‘Head of House System’, an excellent opportunity to drive forward whole school projects and one which helped me to step into my current role as Head of Year. I have recently been elected as a Teacher Governor and continue to demonstrate a commitment to professional development by attending externally led courses and sharing best practice with fellow teachers. I marked as a GCSE Associate Examiner for Edexcel to further develop my subject knowledge and completed two further modules towards my Masters in Education via The University of Nottingham in my NQT year (the dissertation will be done when the time is right!).

It is undeniable that I have been able to use the PGCE course as the perfect spring board to jump start my career into teaching. The course structure, ethos of being committed to creating ‘well-rounded’ teachers, superb course facilitators, excellent facilities and strong connections with maths educators nationally and internationally all contribute to the PGCE course at Nottingham being a fantastic and well-respected route into teaching.

The emphasis placed on acknowledging and applying academic research theory to a classroom setting, coupled with the practical strategies for behaviour and assessment for learning, prioritising and organising that are taught ensures that the course is both credible and pertinent. The PGCE course, and the course leaders in particular, shaped the way that I teach today – I aim to foster a sense of community within the classroom, encourage collaborative learning and recognise that each learner has individual needs that require a personalised approach. This very much reflects the pedagogy that is adopted by The University of Nottingham.

The course leaders were adept at identifying potential in their students; the course was flexible enough to allow for some students to be developed via a supportive, coaching methodology and others were given the freedom to develop their skills more independently. Passing the course was far from a ‘tick box’ exercise and, instead of spending valuable time on building a portfolio of evidence that suggested we had ‘met the teaching standards’, we were able to focus on actually meeting the standards through our practice whilst being encouraged to become reflective practitioners.

I feel privileged to have studied at The University of Nottingham and can’t praise the course highly enough. Teaching is an exceptionally challenging profession (and increasingly so it seems) and is one which requires teachers to be academic, practical, flexible, confident, creative, intuitive, dedicated – in addition to having excellent communication skills and a genuine desire to want to make a difference (to name but a few). Being in the classroom faced with 30 or more students certainly forces you to ‘roll your sleeves up’ and ‘just get on with it’ and I can understand the theory behind solely school based ITT schemes but what cannot be underestimated, is the power of preparation – the PGCE course is dedicated to exactly that, it is vital that trainee teachers are given the time and space to become the professionals that they are required to be. It is often said that ‘failing to prepare is preparing to fail’; failing to prepare our future teachers effectively with the right ITT courses will undoubtedly fail our future students.

Gemma Flint
PGCE maths 2009-10

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I graduated from Loughborough University in 2004 with a 2:2 in Sports Science and Mathematics (Joint Honours) and began my PGCE with The University of Nottingham, in September of the same year. Since leaving the course I have become an AST, worked for the NCETM, been involved in authoring professional development programmes for Tribal and Pearson, lead Mathematics Departments and become involved in the leading of whole school issues too; all of which stem from having the best possible support and inspiration during my PGCE year.

The course instantly challenged my pre-conceptions regarding teaching in general, and particularly, the teaching of mathematics. Initially, I thought education was all about getting students “through” exams, as this is very much the way I was taught at school. But from the very first university session, my attitude changed, now believing that education is about ensuring all students are given opportunities to flourish academically by learning mathematics in engaging ways. I found the course was an ideal mix of preparing me for the practicalities of day-to-day teaching but also developing my personal study skills. The academic rigour of the course allowed me to learn from the literature about the theoretical side of pedagogy, whilst also giving me the opportunity to further my own studies by completing a masters degree in Education, after the course had finished.

I have benefitted from the close links that the course has with the research experts that are also based in the university. I distinctly remember sessions being led by Malcolm Swan and Peter Gates, both covering ideas that I still use in my classroom practice today. I now regularly work with Malcolm and his team at the university on a variety of professional development projects, and this relationship began as a result of my time as a PGCE student at the university.

Even though I am now working in my third school, I have always enjoyed the benefits from close working links with the university. I really enjoy having student teachers working within the department, as they often have a fresh approach to teaching that is not always apparent within the school itself. I have also benefited from the training offered as a mentor and this has developed not only my teaching but the wider aspects of my job, such as working with and developing other teachers. I am been very proud of the fact that over the years I have been asked back to complete sessions for students who are currently on the course. The sessions have included, engaging students with mathematics and developing AfL strategies. This is something, that I can remember being very beneficial when I was a PGCE student and allowed me to see possible progressions my career could take once I began teaching.

Schools in and around Derby hold the PGCE course in very high esteem; all of the departments I have worked within have employed numerous graduates from the courses they run and all have turned into excellent classroom practitioners, with many now taking on extra responsibilities within the education settings they work.

Looking back over my career so far, I cannot speak highly enough of the perfect grounding the course has given me. It gave me the confidence to take risks during my PGCE year and then continue to do so throughout my career thus far. It allowed me to realise that no teacher is ever a finished article and that so much can be learnt through collaboration and the assistance of people who are related to education but do not necessarily work within your school.

Dom Hudson

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If I consider my route into teaching, my starting point was to have a love of, and be good at, my subject. This did not, however, make me a good teacher. A year of training helped me to begin to understand how to teach my subject, and all the other aspects of being a teacher, but it was several years down the line before I think I was a decent teacher. Many things happened in these years:

• I taught a wide range of pupils of different ages, abilities and backgrounds
• I taught all the topics in the curriculum several times, each time gaining a deeper understanding of my subject and how pupils learnt it
• I discussed teaching, and teaching my subject, with different colleagues, seeing different perspectives, trying out ideas and inquiring into teaching and learning

Crucially, I understood that being good at my subject wasn’t enough and that teacher knowledge was something different to my subject knowledge.

Several years into my teaching career I became a head of department. The same process happened again, I wasn’t good to begin with and I had to learn a whole new set of skills:

• how to lead other teachers and develop a shared vision
• how to support staff who were struggling with an aspect of their teaching
• how to mediate relationships between senior management and my department

Through these experiences I continued to learn more about my subject and how children learn it but also began to learn about how teachers develop professionally and how they can be supported. Perhaps this could be termed teacher educator knowledge?

When I undertook my Masters in Education I added another layer to my understanding. I revisited theoretical ideas I had explored as a trainee teacher and delved deeper into them, making sense of my experiences as a teacher and a head of department. I identified aspects of my practice I wanted to inquire into and, yet again, my knowledge and understanding of teaching and learning deepened.

One could argue that, by this stage, I would have made a good teacher educator and maybe this is true. I am not convinced though and I believe the same stages I went through in my early years of teaching, and again as a new head of department, needed to be travelled once more to make me a good teacher educator:

• I  have now worked with many cohorts of beginning teacher. Each student is different, with different strengths and different needs. In the same way as I discovered this about pupils, I have learnt this about beginning teachers. This means, whilst we can have structures and processes built in to a teacher training year, we have to understand the journey a beginning teacher is taking and continually adapt and mould that journey for the individual.
• I have taught classes of beginning teachers over many years and, again just like when learning to teach my subject, I have gained a deeper understanding of my new subject – learning to teach. I know what beginning teachers need to learn, what they are likely to struggle with, what questions I need to ask, how I need to differentiate and so on.
• I have become part of a community of teacher educators. I constantly discuss teaching beginning teachers, try out ideas and inquire into teaching and learning in the context of teacher education.

To me the key here is to see learning to teach through the same lens as one would see learning any curriculum subject. For the learner to do well, the teacher needs to know their subject inside out, but they also need to know how to teach it.

It is obviously of paramount importance that beginning teachers work alongside good practitioners in school. Mentors and coordinators are fantastic role models for beginning teachers; they are great teachers of their subjects and they are essential in introducing beginning teachers to their new career. Through working with mentors and coordinators, beginning teachers learn how to teach in a practical context, they experience teaching and develop their skills under this expert guidance.

It is easy to question whether anything more is needed. Surely working with expert teachers is what I need to develop as a teacher? Yes, but isn’t there something missing?

An experienced teacher knows their subject well, and how to teach it to pupils, but do they (and should they be expected to) know the subject of teacher education in the same depth?

• It is unlikely that mentors and coordinators will have spent many years analysing how someone learns to teach, what topics they should cover, where the stumbling blocks might be, etc. Why should they have? Their main priority is the teaching of their subject!
• When a beginning teacher is working with a mentor or coordinator they are gaining one perspective and this perspective is routed in the context of the school they are working in.
• A mentor or coordinator’s prime concern, quite rightly, is the progress of the pupils. However supportive of a beginning teacher they are, the pupils must come first.

And this is where a teacher educator, outside of the specific school’s context, comes in. They bring:

• expert knowledge of teacher education
• a broader perspective that is not context specific
• a additional layer of support that protects the beginning teacher, the mentor and coordinator and the pupils

I recognise, and want to celebrate, our excellent mentors and coordinators. As a parent, and someone who cares about education, however, I want the main passion of these teachers to be teaching pupils, with supporting beginning teachers to be a secondary priority. For me, my main passion now is teaching beginning teachers, with teaching my subject running a close second. This is the role I am proud of and wish to celebrate!

Stef Sullivan
PGCE Course Leader

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We are the fourth cohort of PGCE I students to gather in Shanghai to do a four day face to face course to kick off out PCGEI- a masters-level qualification. There are 61 of us and we all work in International Schools across Asia- from Shanghai itself to Taiwan, Beijing and Korea. Some of us have been teaching for years and are looking to develop our skills and reflect. Some of us are beginner teachers seeking to establish and consolidate our skills.

The PGCEi face to face session was a wonderfully vivid learning experience. The opportunity to meet with peers was priceless, people from all around, and beyond, China who have similar backgrounds and goals but a vast range of different experiences. Getting to know some of these people really helped me to realise that I’m on the right track doing this course. I also gained valuable knowledge from the fantastic course tutors, who guided us through a really wide range of new ideas with care and support. It made me realise this is the right route to take my teaching career to the next level. So now we have done four days as a real team we know our tutors and the programme we will be doing in the next eight months.

Before going to Shanghai for the four  days face to face I felt nervous and slightly apprehensive about the PGCEi course. It was our school holiday and one nice thing about this four days was that we did the course in an international school. Just looking at the walls was calming and inspiring. The 4 day induction has made a huge difference in how I feeling about the course starting. The tutors made us instantly feel welcome and came with a plethora of knowledge. The group work meant meeting the people I would be working with online for the next few months, which was extremely valuable.

This is the start of our journey and the consensus is – it feels great!

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As we go to Shanghai schools, we only have to look around us to see how different the education here is from at home. The everyday things tell us about different priorities- culturally and educationally.

We can’t help noticing the cultural paradox of a more collective society in which education is fiercely, individually competitive. We see children taking turns to clean their classrooms, electing their class monitors and representatives and organising themselves for certain activities in ways our children do not. The monitors are proud of their roles and play a part in maintaining order in class and school and they are “elected”, but also chosen on the basis of their grades. This is one of those strange contradictions between the collective and competitive aspects of life in Shanghai.

Then we have the contradiction of education for all in Shanghai. There is education for all but with a clear hierarchy of what is the best education. Shanghai has a very liberal policy for immigrant children. “Immigrant” being children from the countryside who do not have official residence permits for Shanghai. In much of China these children do not get a free education. However, in Shanghai, they get state primary and mostly secondary education. However, we have been told that most of them, will end up in the vocational stream, which takes the children who do not score well enough on exams to go into the academic stream. There is no suggestion that vocational education is suitable for the high achievers in Shanghai. One of the issues might be the schools that immigrant children can attend and the amount of additional tuition their families can afford. We have been told that around 20% of schools here are private- a far higher proportion than in England- and are used by the richer parents. The PISA results showed Shanghai pupils do more homework and more out-of-school tutoring than any other nation.

Educational priorities are also clear from a glimpse at the walls of the schools we have been in. In the exhibition schools we saw a sophisticated five-stream integrated curriculum. Each stream (intellectual, social, creative etc) has a colour and there is a display in the school for each colour- just the one! Wall display here is not a priority and does not take up much teacher or pupil time, unlike the double mounted, multicolour extravaganzas produced by English teachers. In the classrooms we see simple displays of writing in English, Chinese and maths- the real priorities.

We have also seen displays of traditional display of calligraphy and paper cutting. This has given us something to think about, because recent research in America has shown that children achieve better in classes where the display is “skimpy”, rather than in the busy, bright classes we are used to. Think of what teachers and TAs could do with the time they would save on not doing so many displays?

Perhaps it is time to stop judging primary education by what we see on the walls!

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Three new things from Shanghai schools-and they aren’t what you think!

1. Eye exercises.

Twice a day, in Shanghai schools, all the children do eye exercises. Suddenly, music comes out of a loudspeaker in the wall, a voice starts to count to the music and all the children hunch over and start massaging their eyes, cheeks and necks in unison. They know the routine and follow the voice from the wall silently. The teacher paces the rows checking they are doing it right. It is a little disconcerting the first few times you witness it! When we asked, the teachers explained that it is to relieve tension and improve blood circulation and eyesight. “Does it work? “ we asked. “Well, we have always done it so we can’t stop now, in case it does!” said the teacher.

But we notice that there are more spectacle wearers in China than anywhere else we have ever been.

2. Left handers- there aren’t any.

In the schools we have been to, the teachers and children either eat together in the classroom or in a canteen. This is not turkey twizzler sort of country and the children and teachers get a real meal prepared in the kitchen. So far we have been into schools with 1500, 1033, 678 and 2000 children and seen a lot of children expertly eating their school dinners with chopsticks. We have also seen the children writing and, so far, we have seen only one left-hander- me! The children think it is funny and it draws stares in the canteen. “Are there any left handed children?” we asked. “No, not really. Their mothers train them out of it before school” we were told.

And when you have been the only left-hander on a circular table of people using chopsticks, you know why.

3. Teacher’s offices- and time to use them

“But where are the teachers’ offices?” asked our Shanghai student visitors. “Where do teachers do their planning, do marking and teach children who need extra help?” Well, we explained, English primary teachers don’t need offices -they are in the class almost all the time. Not so our Shanghai colleagues, who teach two or three 35 minute lessons a day, though they can take on more and get paid more.

It really is a different world.

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As we go round early years, primary and secondary schools, we are meeting teachers old and young and it is clear that teaching is a respected and valued profession here in Shanghai. Confucius seems to have started it, but everyone maintains that respect for teachers. It is a profession youngsters want to join and the competition for the best normal (education focused) universities is strong. We think the approach to teacher professional development is fascinating.

Initial teacher training (ITT) in Shanghai is totally unlike England’s school based training. Teachers train for three or four years at a Normal University and the content of that training is very different from ITT in the UK. The students do two observation placements of two weeks each and a teaching placement of 8 weeks, before becoming teachers- less practical work than out PGCE students do in a year. However, the rest of their three or four year course ensures a sound grounding in subject knowledge and pedagogical theory. Where do our teachers get that? The contrast with England’s policy that only schools can lead high quality training is quite a surprise.

The structures to support teacher development after the training year are also rather different from in England and we were lucky to have a talk about this from the head of one of Shanghai’s biggest and most successful primary schools. Xu Yonghong. She told us about the stages in a teacher’s career progression.

New teachers (Junior teachers) in their first five years have a mentor and have to get 360 hours professional development to progress to Middle Teacher status. These middle teachers (in their 6^th-10^th year of teaching have to get 540 hours of professional development to progress to Senior Teacher and they, eventually, can become Master Teachers or Associate Professors. This seems to be supported by regular performance review, as in England, but also by a range of measures to offer support for individuals.

In Shanghai, teachers in a school, whether primary or secondary, belong to a Teacher Research Group. This is partly a planning group but members also do observations of each other’s teaching and undertake action research projects. They do these with the Universities to improve their teaching, and to focus on elements of their work they have identified for scrutiny. Of course, the system is more complicated than this, with various levels of objectives and outcomes but it seems to be very co-operative and less “top-down” than the “inspect and grade” experience of teachers in England.

We have been interested in the importance of observations of teaching. Two of the schools we have seen have special observation rooms with one way glass so that rows of observes can watch unseen. Another school, and the University, have rooms with an array of cameras to capture the teacher and children so that observers can watch in real time then look closely at episodes. We have seen teachers observing other teachers in several of the classes we have watched. What is unusual for us is that observation is supposed to be for the benefit of the observers – to help them become better teachers – not just to grade the teacher’s lesson. The teachers we have observed have been interested in feedback- not in terms of grades, but in our opinions. We are seeing a very different culture of observation and reflection here in Shanghai. Of course, this is underpinned by differences in what a teacher’s role involves. Teachers in Shanghai teach less classes and have more time to plan, mark and observe. They are part of respected, valued profession with high levels of accountability and professionalism.

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