Values in teacher education: developing professional knowledge through engaging with trainee teachers’ personal moral and political values in the context of standards-based teacher education

Between 1989 -1997 I was head of the Religious Education department in a comprehensive school and mentored trainee teachers throughout that period. This meant that I was involved in the initial implementation of the first set of Teaching Standards set out in Circular 9/92 (DFE, 1992). As I progressed in the mentoring role I became increasingly aware of the challenge of meeting trainee’s training needs through a standards-based approach. In particular, I was aware of the importance of the role of the mentor in helping trainees to realise their personal values and motivations through their developing classroom practice. In researching my role for a research paper (Mead 1996) I reached the conclusion that the mentor’s self-understanding and their dialogic skills seemed to me to be crucial in developing the relationship between trainees’ personal moral and political values within their classroom practice, thereby contributing to a fusion of the moral and the instrumental within a standards-based framework.
From 1997 until the present I have held a number of positions in the Department of Education at Oxford Brookes University, including Religious Education course leader, PGCE secondary course leader and head of the department of professional and leadership education. I am currently an associate School Direct university tutor. In these roles I have been fully immersed in the implementation of the 2002, 2007 and 2012 Teaching Standards for qualified teacher status, working closely with secondary and
primary trainee teachers. The 2002 set of standards (Teacher Training Agency 2002) represented a landmark in that they introduced explicit professional values and this provided me with the impetus to continue to address those concerns which had emerged in my school mentor experience. It was through accumulated detailed knowledge and first-hand experience that I was increasingly able to interpret and make judgements about the impact of successive sets of prescribed teaching standards on the
development of the relationship between trainees’ personal moral and political values.
What I found emerging, then, is a sense of something of worth being at stake which has historical, political and professional implications and which is felt strongly enough by trainees and teacher educators to constitute an issue worthy of exploration. For me, as for many others who responded to my findings, the relationship between trainees’ personal moral and political values lies at the heart of professional fulfilment and consequently, the development of effective professional knowledge and expertise. The strength of the cohesiveness of the overall argument developed across the papers lies in my lived experience as the researcher who is also a practising teacher educator throughout the research period. Of particular importance here is both the immediacy and evolving nature of the research, as I respond personally and professionally to successive external measures affecting trainee teacher development. My overall aim has been to make sense of these experiences over more than thirteen years of professional experience. The outcome of this project is a set of claims which challenge key instrumentalist and positivistic features within expanding school-based teacher education, particularly in relation to trainee autonomy and identity and which, as I argue, have implications for re-defining process, pedagogy and provision.