Teacher Education Partnerships : Policy and Practice

This book supports all those involved in initial teacher education (ITE) and with an interest in partnership working. Such partnerships are at the heart of ITE practices, both in the UK and internationally, but more recently models of partnership have become ever more complex as a result of government reforms, the rapid diversification of routes into teaching and significant increase in the number of SCITTs. The nature of partnerships in ITE remains contested with partnership working often reduced to a series of prescriptions for effective practice, ignoring both its pedagogic potential and inherent tensions. This book surveys and critiques partnership developments in recent years and then analyses a single case study of a school that exemplifies the current complexity of ITE partnerships using both policy and practice perspectives. It concludes with a series of principles that might underpin effective partnership working.

Trevor Mutton is the current PGCE course director at the University of Oxford, where he also contributes to the Master's programme in Learning and Teaching. He taught Modern Foreign Languages before joining the university and has since been involved in a range of research into language teaching and into the nature of beginning teachers' learning (including the Developing Expertise of Beginning Teachers (DEBT) project).