Getting the practical teaching element right
> Innovative partnership
arrangements
Where teacher education programmes are not based in organisations which are
themselves Skills for Life learning providers, partnerships are essential. Two
recent reports have demonstrated ways in which partnerships can deliver more
consistent high quality training and teaching practice while making better use of
limited resources; these are Recruitment and training opportunities for new
literacy, language and numeracy teachers (Derrick 2005) from the RETRO project1
and Change Direction, Teach Adults from the London Strategic Unit (LSU) for the
Learning and Skills Workforce (LSU 2006b).
Strong partnership working, in addition to securing a supply of teaching practice
placements, can support the organisational development of each partner. An
organisation which provides some adult literacy, numeracy or ESOL learning can
be attracted into a teacher education partnership. One benefit is access to a
potential supply of prospective new teachers, another is the impact on quality of
involving your staff in the process of training new teachers. In return, the teacher
education provider needs the opportunity to use some groups of learners as
training groups, or to find placements for some pairs of or individual trainees.
A learning provider offering teaching placement capacity to a teacher education
programme can benefit from the increase in reflective awareness of practice that
this involvement brings with it:
‘it sort of rubs off on all around, as reflection and discussion of practice
increases within a group of staff.'
Similarly, a teacher in a college, newly engaged in supporting trainees from an
externally-based teacher education programme, can also lead in-house staff
development sessions on formative feedback, for example, based on the new
experience of working with trainees and informed by the training received.
1 Recruitment and Training Opportunities for New Basic Skills Teachers - a project run by NIACE on behalf of the DfES from October
2003 to March 2005 with the aim of exploring ways to recruit new basic skills teachers.
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