Getting the practical teaching element right
those courses in which theory and practice are explicitly linked by the course
team; in these cases reflective logs provide a valuable opportunity for
consolidation. What’s more, this initially very private process can be expanded for
collaborative learning:
‘They have to write a weekly reflective journal and I expect them to write in
some detail about everything they've done and seen in the classroom and what
they feel they've learnt from it, what they feel was successful, why it was
successful, what went wrong, why it was wrong [...] I expect them to write in
detail about any time they've been in the classroom and they've found that very
useful particularly as they share these reflective journals; they swap them
around [.] they've found that very useful, sharing, because one person will
notice something that someone else hasn't thought of looking for.'
Teaching portfolios
Many courses require trainees to produce teaching portfolios with all, some, or a
small selection of documents from the lessons they have planned and taught
themselves. These might include:
• lesson plans
• materials
• self-evaluations
• tutor feedback
Besides forcing detailed attention to planning, evaluation and materials
production, this allows a paper trail of teaching development to be looked back
upon, by the trainee, teacher educator or ideally both in a tutorial. The NRDC
publication A literature review of research on teacher education in adult literacy,
numeracy and ESOL (Morton 2006) and Equipping our Teachers for the Future (DfES
2004) both identified teaching portfolios as a way to reflect on and emphasise the
continuous nature of teacher development. Potentially such portfolios could span
several courses or phases of training. While trainees, teacher educators and
external moderators all comment on the value of compiling such portfolios, they
stress that:
‘less is more. Keeping less documentation, but with more thoughtful reflection,
is preferable to stockpiling your own weight in lesson plans.'
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