How does one SCITT use the Early Career Hub?
We spoke to colleagues at one School-Centred Initial Teacher TrainingAbbreviated to ITT, the period of academic study and time in programme to find out how they’ve been using the Early Career Hub to support their trainees. Thank you to Angela Murphy and Sharon Chester of Lincolnshire Teaching School Alliance SCITT for generously sharing your time and insight with us.
What are some of the key challenges you face
In our context, there are a few key perennial challenges we encounter in developing new teachers.
Ensuring all colleagues in a school are well-equipped to support new teachers; establishing a common language and a shared understanding of research evidence about effective classroom pedagogies is one of these challenges. Trainee teachers are likely to interact with a range of colleagues during their training year. It is therefore important that a culture of coaching and support exists between all colleagues.
Working with mentors to provide effective support even though they may work in a variety of different contexts, have differing skill sets and learning experiences in their own careers to date is a challenge. We want to provide forums of support and consistent communication and resources so they can get the very best from their trainees.
How does Chartered College of Teaching membership support the development of trainees?
The Chartered College of Teaching raises the aspirations for the profession and this ethos has been needed for a long time. Our hope is that with this early engagement with the College, our trainees can go on to become contributors to the College’s work as they progress in their career. The more trainees who have been exposed to this ethos, the more they will be able to influence the schools they work in and the profession as a whole.
We build in our trainees an ethos of ongoing development and sharing of practice from the start. Access to research evidence through the Chartered College of Teaching that continues in their early career teacher years is vital for maintaining the ethos we establish in their training years.
As a SCITT that works in partnership with schools across the county of Lincolnshire and close borders, our trainees will launch their teaching career in a variety of school contexts. Knowing that they all have access to the same high quality of materials through the Early Career Hub, Impact and MyCollege means that they can enter the teaching profession feeling well prepared wherever they are.
As the ITTInitial teacher training - the period of academic study and Core Content Framework was introduced, we had the challenge of integrating this into our continually evolving training provision. Access to the high quality content on the Early Career Hub has supported us in shaping our curriculum. The categorisation of the extensive content has enabled us to navigate and select the resources with ease.
What is the nature of your planned and current engagement with the Early Career Hub?
Colleagues who lead on training and developmental support have accessed content on the Early Career Hub and left comments to model the kind of enthusiasm for learning and engagement with our own development that we hope trainees will emulate during their year with us.
Gaining this familiarity with the content on the Hub has enabled us to plan a programme for trainees that has Chartered College of Teaching articles, videos and links embedded throughout. We started the year with a virtual session where trainees created their Chartered College of Teaching membership account and were tasked with reading, commenting on and producing written reflective pieces for three articles. We chose:
Reflecting on classroom routines
Engagement with these articles functioned as a catalyst for further training as well as conversation with their mentors. We are delighted with the level of interaction of our trainees and the high quality reflective pieces they have written in response to their learning. This demonstrates one example of how Initial Teacher Training providers can promote engagement with the Chartered College with a focus on the Early Career Hub.
As a result of this early online session, when we introduce Chartered College of Teaching content during later sessions, we can be sure that they’re all able to access this learning. Free membership for all of our trainees is a great help for enabling this way of working.
The points and badges are a nice touch! They encourage interaction, engagement and deep reflection. The videos have been a valuable resource for us to call upon and we look forward to seeing the expansion of this provision over time. We are currently in the process of collating videos to show practice from our partner schools but this source of high quality provision supports our programme delivery and we are grateful for this.
