Developing trainee teacher knowledge: the Cambridge History PGCE model
By Michael Fordham and Christine Counsell
The recent Carter Review has raised a number of questions about teacher training, and one of these is how to ensure that, on a teacher training course, a sufficiently large amount of time is given to developing a trainee teacher’s knowledge. As John Howson’s blog explains, it was Clarke’s review of teacher training in the 1990s that cut back on subject knowledge development and knowledge of child development in order to allow more time in schools. As Howson correctly points out, if the current balance between school practice and university tuition is maintained (currently around 2:1) then how can more knowledge be crammed into an already packed curriculum?
The answer is that we need to break this idea that teaching knowledge is done only in universities.
This is, in practice, how on the Cambridge History PGCE we have managed to cover so much in the time we have available. The role of building knowledge about the subject, about subject pedagogy and about child development is not left solely for the university to do. On our History PGCE, we see this as part of the responsibility of the mentors.
Let’s take some examples.
(1) Subject knowledge development
History mentors frequently set historical scholarship for trainees to read, and discuss this as part of their weekly hour of one-to-one mentoring. The following slide were presented by Rachel Foster last year as part of the bi-annual mentor training day, in which we looked at this precise issue. She was sharing with the other mentors the history she was getting her trainee to read in preparation for teaching a scheme of work on the First World War.
On top of this, since 2006 the Cambridge History PGCE has run the ‘trainee-mentor joint historical scholarship reading programme’ where both mentor and trainee exchange journal articles or book chapters to read, before discussing these in mentor meetings.
(2) Knowledge of subject pedagogy and child development
On the Cambridge History PGCE we expect all of our mentors to have read everything that our trainees will read. If we have a new mentor join the team, it can take a couple of years of training (and a lot of reading!) before a mentor is ready to take on his or her first trainee. During ‘serial’ placements (two days a week in school, two in university and one reading) the trainees are required to discuss with their mentor in school during their mentor meeting what they read for their university sessions. Keen to keep up this reading during the ‘block’ placements, when trainees are in school full time, the Mentor Panel (that is made up of university tutors and experienced mentors) developed ‘fortnightly reading themes’ on different aspects of the history curriculum and history pedagogy. An example of one of these from the handbook is copied below.
You’ll notice from the scan (apologies for the poor quality) that the history mentors are expected to read a variety of things with their trainees, ranging from blog posts, to literature from the field of history education, to works of historical scholarship. These fortnightly reading themes are an entitlement for all trainees and are reviewed regularly by the Mentor Panel, and all mentors at mentor training days.
The ‘child development’ area becomes more complex in secondary school, but as mentors we would be reading subject-specific articles on how children get better at history (we would always have fun critiquing the Project CHATA research tradition) and in the last few years we have included more of an emphasis on cognitive psychology. Last year the mentors voted to have an extract from ‘Make It Stick’ as one of the readings.
The key to all of this is training good mentors and, crucially, this means making sure that knowledge resides in our mentor community. Mentors are not just there to help trainees do the ‘practical’ things in school (managing behaviour, teaching a class, marking work, etc.), but are key individuals in developing a trainee’s knowledge. We could not do what we do at Cambridge without highly knowledgeable mentors who take on a significant part of the teaching workload while the trainees are in school.
By way of example of what we expect of mentors, you might find this document useful. It is a self-evaluation questionnaire that we give to new mentors, helping them work out whether or not they are ready to take on a Cambridge trainee. If a new mentor does not feel ready (and is not put off!) then the rest of the community (both university staff and experienced mentors) take time to help build up a new mentor’s knowledge to the necessary level.
This does not fully answer the problem: time is limited and we squeeze huge amounts of content into a very small period of time. It is unsurprising that so many of our trainees come back to the History MEd, and indeed a large number of our mentors have this qualification. Nevertheless, by building up the capacity of the mentor team, and ensuring that the knowledge we want trainees to have resides in that team, we have partly overcome the problem of having a limited amount of time on the course.
Clio et cetera 
Reblogged this on The Echo Chamber.
How do you get this level of buy-in from schools and mentors? It does make a difference that I am science and you are history – it is continually touch-and-go as to whether we will have enough schools offering a placement to cover all our science trainees whereas my history colleague doesn’t have the same issue – but even in the smaller subjects it is still a battle to persuade schools to release mentors for meetings and training, and attendance is a problem for other understandable reasons if we use twilight timings. I would be really interested to know if you are achieving the same thing across the other subjects at Cambridge or if it’s just history, and whether schools are supporting mentors during the period when they are training to be a mentor but not actually looking after a trainee teacher. Best wishes.
Very interesting questions. Answers are complex. Some of these features are definitely Cambridge-wide – i.e. history couldn’t achieve what it does without clear PGCE norms and contractual agreements that all our partnership schools buy into and indeed set up in the first place (e.g. our Standing Committee that oversees the whole PGCE has two headteachers on it and one of them always chairs it). So support from the very top in all our partnership schools is vital. On the other hand, some of the features that Michael and I describe are more history-specific, and are perhaps the result of distinctive features of the wider history education community, although many of these we directly and explicitly cultivate locally.
More specifically: attendance at subject mentor training is a whole-partnership, three-line whip. Just as it would be impossible to mark for a particular awarding body if you didn’t attend the examiners meeting for that year, so you cannot possibly teach a PGCE course (and a mentor is just that – a teacher of a particular, subject-specific course, in a professional setting) if you don’t come to the major sessions where the course is developed, reviewed, refined and where experienced mentors share mentoring practice and set its standards, norms and goals, how can you teach that course? When schools join the Cambridge partnership they sign a contract (and it’s a contract with the uni-school PARTNERSHIP, not just with the university) to commit to a range of things which include involvement of mentors in required training. All new mentors (all subjects) do two generic mentor training days led by a mixture of Faculty staff and senior school staff, and two subject days. Thereafter, subject mentors always do two subject days, in every year. We get pretty much 100% attendance. No attendance at subject training, no trainee.
I don’t think that that happens just because it is a partnership contractual requirement, however. That basic structure is necessary, but never sufficient. Mentors have to WANT to come. They have to be so excited about coming that it’s the highlight of their CPD year. They have to be miserable at the thought of not coming. The subject mentor training needs need to be the finest possible CPD (both for mentoring in that subject and, indirectly or directly for teaching that subject itself) so that you just couldn’t bear not to come. It may sound like I’m over-egging it, but I’m not. I and my ‘seconded mentor’ colleague, Kath, who co-leads the history PGCE with me, together with the history mentor panel, probably put in about five full days of planning and preparation time to get just one of those days up and running. This is time spent on the history-specific detail of the day and supporting those who will present. We involve at least six or seven mentors as presenters and workshop leaders in every history mentor training day. We present very little ourselves, and we certainly never treat the days as admin/info giving (as I’m shocked to discover some other ITT courses do). We support the history mentors who will present, we explore issues with them, we coach them, we give them readings, we strive to involve new blood every time, so that it isn’t just the old hands always presenting.
In short, we massively invest in making sure that those history mentors come to a day which makes them feel a million dollars as history teachers, which sets a standard frighteningly high but which inspires them nonetheless and which enables them with many practical techniques for supporting history trainees through thick and thin, and through very specific features of our course at various stages of their placements. This means that you just don’t get mentors saying – ‘oh dear, bit of a clash of priorities, think I’ll duck out of it this year; I’ll try to find some defensible reason to escape’.
There are also other things we do on the history mentor day to reinforce the sense of community, the sense of privilege in being a Cambridge history mentor and so on. Much of this comes from subject passion that history teachers already have and a sort of ‘Cinderella status’ of the subject. History is always under threat in curricula, especially for the low-attaining student. Our history teachers are all passionate about building the curricular case for ‘history for all’, and so to come on this day is more than training to be a mentor; it is a kind of intellectual re-fuelling and bi-annual academic MOT for checking our arguments are sufficiently battle-worthy to keep fighting the good fight to bring history to all, and create departmental cultures that will inspire history trainees to do likewise. We also have particular features we always repeat such as ‘scholarly tea’. In scholarly tea, we have to have a work of historical scholarship on our lap as we drink our tea and eat and cake. We share the latest scholarly work we’ve read (purely for pleasure!) with a group of three other history mentors as we take our refreshments. These rituals remind us why we wanted to teach history and why we all have to keep striving to define (never mind deliver) what is a responsible and disciplinary history education for all. It also helps us to inspire one another to keep building a departmental culture, back in our schools where we make time to read historical scholarship and talk about it together, as a central feature of professionalism. All this doesn’t just happen. It is planned for, fought for, carefully reviewed and discussed by the history mentor panel before each history mentor training day.
Part of this may be to do with how Kath and I see our role as history coordinators and leaders. We don’t see ourselves, chiefly, as trainers of trainees, but rather as coordinators of a team of mentors who must be enabled to do that training. I conceptualise my role as a trainer, enabler and inspirer *of mentors*. The mentors’ academic development as history teachers and as mentors of history teachers is my primary responsibility. Here it gets very complicated because since 2005, when we introduced an MEd in Researching Practice for which the PGCE is 50% credit, it has been possible to recruit mentors not only from former trainees but from full MEd RP graduates. So when Kath and I are supervising a Year 2 Masters student or planning a history elective for the Masters course, we are, simultaneously, training history mentors. We are simultaneously doing the relationship maintenance, community building and collective knowledge building that goes with sustaining and developing a subject-specific mentor team.
In addition a group of (self-appointed; anyone can opt in) senior mentors form the Subject Mentor Panel which meets three times a year (in twilight meetings). The Subject Mentor Panel does in-depth review and development of the course.
Many of these features (the subject mentor panel; the overlap between MEds and mentors) are features of all subjects in the Cambridge PGCE and form the structures that make the more detailed work at the subject level possible and make it possible (though not inevitable) that the courses will be ‘school-owned at the subject-level’.
Final thought. I actually don’t think it has to be university personnel who do this nurturing/leadership/coordination role. For a start, I don’t do it on my own – my colleague Kath is a seconded mentor who works three days in school and two days for the Cambridge Faculty of Education (a key feature of all our subject courses). Michael is another example. He joined us in this coordination role as an experienced member of the History Mentor Panel while still mentoring and as an MEd student and now a PhD student at the Faculty. A history ITT leader could be an SLE or a strong head of history with plenty of research knowledge in history education perhaps from producing and consuming research through a PhD or extensive involvement in history education projects or history education policy making (which is how I began this, myself, as a young head of history in a comp, subsequently drawn into leading a SCITT in the 1990s). What matters is that that whoever has this role has the time to do the intensive, time-consuming work of nurturing the community of subject mentors academically and professionally until they can take more and more responsibility themselves, and that they have the resources (i.e. library access and thorough, subject-specific research training and knowledge to allow for navigation of the subject community’s collective professional knowledge extant in publications). An SLE with rich knowledge and diverse experience in history education could also do that, provided they were given time and resources to do so. Indeed that should be the goal of courses such as ours – the nurture of more and more subject mentors who can take on the role of ITT course leaders as SLEs. We believe that this knowledge should, ideally, reside in all history teachers, or at the very least in all heads of history. There is a profound sense in which any good ITT subject leader should be someone consciously working themselves out of a job.
Where, by contrast, the job of coordination of subject mentors is (a) tacked on as some side-responsibility of the subject coordinator, with (say) barely 4 days a year given to the ‘behind the scenes’ relationship maintenance and mentor team-building and collective knowledge building i.e. they are given time to do some training with the trainees, but no one factors in the even more important and more time-consuming work with the mentors; and/or (b) seen merely as an admin role rather than as subject-specific knowledge building and making the history mentor team bigger than the sum of its parts; (c) construed as generic, both in terms of gate-keeping and quality assurance (e.g. using only useless measures such as trainee progress in the Teacher Standards, which we largely ignore as facile and low-level irrelevances; too obvious even to state; (d) unrelated to gate-keeping of mentors, so that they have to place trainees with any head of history who has not been fully informed of or actively chosen the subject-specific demands of the course and carefully inducted into them, let alone enabled to start to take ownership of them, then I would say that a coherent ITT course offering consistent, mentor-owned, subject-specific standards doesn’t have a hope.
This may make it all sound impossible. But it isn’t. I am describing a reality, not a dream or a theory. But if there are elements here that others may like to replicate or develop, then my tip would be this. Don’t look at structures; there are many, many roads to heaven on this. Look, instead, at knowledge.
What knowledge should a history (/other subject) mentor have? What knowledge should a history (/other subject) ITT leader/coordinator have if they are to build knowledge in the wider history mentor team and make it more than the sum of its parts? And above all, to what ends should that knowledge be put? What is the knowledge and capacity for new knowledge production that we expect to see in teachers of a particular subject? What is the most efficient means for ensuring that the subject mentor team set their own bar and set it high (personally, I would like to see subject ITT courses competing for height, we need competition at the SUBJECT level) so that history (/other subject) teachers are not only developing high standards but defining and declaring them in the first place?
In the end ITT isn’t about ITT; it is about definitions of quality of subject teaching and ensuring that subject teachers own those definitions and take scholarly responsibility for constantly renewing them.
Sorry Michael – typed that super-fast and didn’t check it. Full of yukky typos and dodgy grammar! Hope it’s still comprehensible.