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Canterbury Christ Church University - Case Study for the STE Project

 

Key idea
"We wanted to test ways of extending supervised teaching experience (STE) visits with trainee teachers through the development of specific criteria for determining a pass or fail, together with an enhanced process that included pre-visits for supporting session planning and a post-visit evaluation"

 

Aims and Objectives

 

We wanted to make three main changes to the usual practice of STE (supervised teaching experience) visits.  The changes related to the purpose of the visits, the importance of the experience with the overall programme and a chance to enhance the trainee’s professional practice.

Our aim was to test the application of a more specific and detailed assessment of trainees’ areas of strengths and weaknesses during their STE visits.  Our view of the STE process has always been that it is ‘developmental’, wanting to allow trainees’ skills and confidence in their practical teaching to advance without the pressure of PASS/FAIL criteria.  Yet at the same time we realised that some trainees might actually feel more confident if they felt that they were being assessed against specific criteria; this might be the case particularly with in-service trainees who come to the programme with some experience in the classroom.  For some, it might also encourage them against taking a ‘threshold’ view of their own development in which they felt no real imperative to extend their performance beyond meeting the FENTO standards which relate to practical teaching skills.

 

Our present process for the STE visit consists of a classroom visit by a tutor for which the trainee has prepared a lesson plan.  After the lesson a debriefing session takes place and the trainee is sometimes given a copy of the report on their teaching immediately following the debriefing and sometimes a short while later (if the tutor wishes to write up his/her work after the debriefing).

 

In the project we wished to enhance this process quite considerably by introducing three distinct phases to the STE ‘event’.  This involved firstly the tutor and trainee meeting prior to the lesson to discuss its content, with the idea of offering the trainee the opportunity to seek advice where necessary.  The pre-meeting would also give the trainee a chance to establish with the tutor an understanding of the aforementioned PASS criteria.

 

The second phase was the lesson itself and this was then followed by an evaluation session with tutor and trainee together.  This culminated in a feedback report to the trainee which was considerably more detailed than would normally be the case (Phase 3). 

 

The project was rolled out with two of the seven colleges in the consortium and also with a sample of trainees from the full-time Post Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) programme.  For the in-service part-time Certificate in Education (Cert Ed)/PGCE first and second year trainees were selected.  This was important, as the criteria for ‘passing’ the STE experience were differentiated between Terms 1 and 2 in Year 1 and between Year 1 and Year 2.