2. Course processes

• Taught
• Workshops and experiential processes
• Open learning
• Reflective practice-oriented
• Portfolio based
• Support-oriented
• Development-oriented
• Oriented to providing and tracking learning experiences
• Research based

Taught

Taught processes are those primarily dependent on conventional teaching and class contact: lectures, seminars, reading and writing. Some programmes are 'about' teaching rather than actually involving teaching behaviour or skills or the current teaching experience of course participants. Taught components may be appropriate as conceptual support for action research processes but they are unlikely on their own to prepare teachers adequately.

Some provision for new teachers emphasises conceptions of teaching and learning - the phenomenology of teaching - rather than methods. Here, however, the process is likely to involve workshop methods aiming to derive conceptions from accounts of practice or transcriptions of others accounts, rather than solely from theory.

Workshops and experiential processes

The most common process is the experiential workshop: sessions in which teachers practice skills or videotape the use of skills. Where principles are involved teachers are expected to design classroom sessions and courses rather than simply discuss ideas about design. The starting point may be teachers' experience before the session, exercises which generate new experience or accounts or videos of others' experiences, but the emphasis is on starting, and ending, with experience and practice rather than with theory.

Open learning

Some programmes emphasise flexibility of timing, pace and access to material through the use of open learning materials and related open learning components such as individual tutorials and tutorial feedback on assignments. One open learning programme, designed for new teachers isolated in institutions with inadequate support, involved a complete distance learning package leading to a Certificate in Teaching in Higher Education by Open Learning. It was developed by the Oxford Centre for Staff Development. A set of 12 Open Learning packages written for this programme, each designed to support 15 hours of independent learning, are still used under licence in Spain, Australia and New Zealand on flexible and distance learning courses.

The University of Glamorgan developed a flexible programme for new lecturers supported by a range of specially prepared open learning materials.

Oxford Brookes University used open learning materials to enable sub-groups of new lecturers to pursue specialist interests independently or to allow them to pick up modules out of phase with other lecturers.

Open learning programmes characteristically have some difficulty in fostering reflection on practice and innovation due to the lack of discussion and support involved.

Reflective practice-oriented

Some programmes are primarily concerned to develop teachers as reflective practitioners and here the process of the course is more important than the content. It may not matter which aspects of teaching are emphasised or which skills are developed as long as the teacher leaves the programme able to notice what is going on in teaching and with a self-critical approach to developing practice. The programme is likely to involve elements such as reflective diaries, detailed de-briefing on experience, peer or tutor feedback on practice (perhaps after observation of teaching) as an input to reflection, and action research involving personal experimentation.

Portfolio based

The central feature of some programmes is the development of a portfolio recording teaching accomplishments. This may be the first step towards presenting evidence for a tenure or probation decision or for presentation to a prospective employer. It may prepare teachers for subsequent annual appraisal of their teaching which involves a similar portfolio. Or it may simply be a tool used as a way of tracking learning experience or generating material to encourage reflective practice.

The SEDA Accreditation Scheme requires evidence of accomplishment of started aims and this is most commonly achieved through the collation of a portfolio of evidence (see Oxford Brookes University Course Guide).

Teaching portfolios are becoming very widely used for experienced faculty in North America and the use of portfolios is inevitably filtering back into teacher preparation practices.

Some programmes offer the development of a teaching portfolio as an option amongst other free standing components (e.g. the University of Hull

Support-oriented

Some programmes concentrate on providing support to new lecturers as they cope with a very stressful and difficult phase in their career. Much teaching practice in higher education is developed as a way of coping with the socially difficult and intellectually challenging situations teaching throws up - for example lecturers learn how to avoid student questions or interruptions, how to keep the agenda narrowly to the one they prepared, and generally to keep classroom control, at the expense of engagement or relevance or involvement of students. Providing social and emotional support during the early phases of learning how to teach can avoid some of this educationally dysfunctional learning.

Support is commonly provided through:

• the provision of mentors within departments;
• the use of social cohesion and safety within programmes through, for example, the use of 'base groups' at Oxford Brookes University;
• provision of opportunities to discuss personal matters (such as how lecturers cope with groups of students of the opposite sex, how teachers cope with issues of control and professional distance with students of a very similar age, how to dress appropriately) rather than only technical or intellectual matters.

Development-oriented

Development oriented provision takes several forms. First, provision which acknowledges the varied starting points and varied goals of teachers often uses learning contracts as a way of establishing individually relevant ways of planning development, rather than specifying goals or offering a fixed training programme.

Second, some provision is designed around developmental models of teaching based on research into the changing foci of attention of new teachers (see Richlin, 1995, in ch10, Literature). Provision is designed to match stages in development and to move teachers through these stages.

Third, some provision has a long-term perspective on teachers' professional development and is designed primarily to prepare them for this career-long process rather than to achieve any specific teaching competencies. For example the most important goal may be that teachers are engaged in thinking about and improving their teaching and find this rewarding and important. This may have less short term impact on classroom performance but is likely to have more developmental impact over time.

Oriented to providing and tracking learning experiences

Many new teachers are deliberately given a 'protected' teaching load in their first year, involving a narrow sub-set of the types of teaching situation they would eventually find themselves in during their career. While this may reduces stress and workload it means that while their preparation course is going on they have a narrow range of experience to reflect on and a narrow range of opportunities to learn about teaching. On the assumption that much learning is acquired by doing an alternative approach is to deliberately seek to extend the range of experiences in a progressive way.

Some programmes are designed so as to ensure as far as possible that by the end everyone will have had a full range of teaching experiences. For example a special programme was designed for new teachers who were hired to teach on a Legal Practice course. They were all lawyers rather than academics and had a much narrower range of teaching experience than is common. They were provided with a profile to help them to identify learning needs and prioritise development opportunities. For each type of teaching situation (such as small group seminar) they were asked to identify whether they had:

• observed one
• jointly run one
• run one alone, being observed
• run one alone
• run a variety alone
• felt fully professionally confident.

They then had opportunities planned for them to match their experience - for example negotiating with an experienced lecturer for a seminar they could jointly run, finding a very large lecture they could observe and allocating a legal skill training session of a different kind to those they had tackled before. While some teaching skill training sessions were arranged and opportunities were provided to reflect on their teaching experiences, the primary focus of attention during preparation was on extending the range of experience of each of the new teachers and tracking their progress.

Providing teaching experiences may be a crucial feature of programmes designed to prepare PhD students as teachers. Conventional GTA programes are severely constrained by the very narrow range of teaching and related teaching tasks GTAs normally undertake. It is hard to imagine how a GTA could be adequately prepared for the course design tasks she would be faced with in her first faculty role, for example, if preparation was focussed on normal GTA duties.

Research based

One of the main changes in the process of programmes for new teachers, in the UK, has been the increased use of action research or even more formal research projects into teaching. Action research is a cyclical process of experimenting on one's teaching: forming hypotheses about what is going on, trying out a new method, collecting and interpreting evidence, formulating new hypotheses and so on. Undertaken informally it is how good teachers become better. On programmes for new teachers action research is often used as a more formal process, often associated with written reports and even assessment of these reports.

Some programmes (such as Chester College) include sessions or even whole units on research methods to prepare teachers for the research they will undertake. Other programmes have substantial taught elements about the research literature and research methods.

In North America 'Classroom Research' operates at a more micro level, with teachers being encouraged to find out more about what their students understand as a result of being taught (see Angelo and Cross, 1993, in ch8 Resource materials).

Some institutions, such as Oxford Brookes University, are committed to the use of research to improve student learning as a normal part of quality enhancement and of every lecturer's job, and so the programme for new teachers prepares them for this institutional approach.