A guide for literacy, numeracy and ESOL teacher educators
> How to organise group teaching
practice or ‘training groups’
First you need a couple of groups of learners...
The starting point is to secure agreement to work with at least two groups of
learners at different Skills for Life levels, to form an integral part of the
programme, on whom the trainee teachers can practise.
Ideally these are an existing and stable group of learners for whom certain
sessions can be allocated for the trainee teachers. This can be by adding extra
teaching time to an existing group with learners being given additional hours on
their timetable entitlement. In this way the groups can be recruited according to
the normal organisational procedures and work fully within the administrative
and quality systems of the organisation. It also means that there is no
undercutting of the quantity of qualified teacher time the learners are entitled to,
as the teaching practice session is additional. The relationship between the
teacher trainer and the learner group’s regular teacher is very important to
ensure that the trainees contribute coherently to the learning programme. There
is a need to liaise about what areas of the curriculum the trainees should teach
and any evidence that needs to be collected for learner assessments.
Where it is not possible to add hours on to existing courses, groups of learners
can be specifically recruited on free courses; this is very common in English as a
foreign language (EFL) settings, but can have negative consequences in terms of
erratic attendance, mixed ability groups and a lack of systematic needs analysis
which all makes for a very challenging experience for the novice trainee
teachers. Training teams should ensure that the learner groups are recruited
and administered in as similar way as possible to other groups in the
organisation. This adds to the authenticity of the trainees’ experience as well as
enables more effective quality assurance.
Setting up the learner basis for training groups needs careful planning and often
requires a partnership at an organisational level. For higher education
institutions (HEIs) this may mean a partnership with a college or an adult
education provider to arrange access to learners of adult literacy, language and
numeracy. As one trainer points out:
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