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This article was downloaded by: [University of Glasgow]On: 03 October 2013, At: 21:25Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
European Journal of Teacher EducationPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cete20
Teacher educators modelling theirteachers?Greetje Timmerman aa Department of Education, University of Groningen, Groningen,The NetherlandsPublished online: 09 Jul 2009.
To cite this article: Greetje Timmerman (2009) Teacher educators modelling their teachers?,European Journal of Teacher Education, 32:3, 225-238, DOI: 10.1080/02619760902756020
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European Journal of Teacher EducationVol. 32, No. 3, August 2009, 225–238
ISSN 0261-9768 print/ISSN 1469-5928 online© 2009 Association for Teacher Education in EuropeDOI: 10.1080/02619760902756020http://www.informaworld.com
Teacher educators modelling their teachers?
Greetje Timmerman*
Department of Education, University of Groningen, Groningen, The NetherlandsTaylor and FrancisCETE_A_375772.sgm10.1080/02619760902756020European Journal of Teacher Education0261-9768 (print)/1469-5928 (online)Original Article2009Taylor & Francis323000000August 2009Dr [email protected]
The teacher educator is always also a teacher, and as a role model may have animportant impact on student teachers’ views on teaching. However, what is theimpact of these teacher educator’s own role models on their teaching views andpractices? Do teacher educators simply imitate the positive role models and rejectthe bad? It is already clear that teachers and teacher educators learn more than howto play a role from their role models. Becoming a teacher or a teacher educator isa long-term process of developing a professional identity, with role models beingjust one of the contributing factors. This study of 13 teacher educators addressesthe impact of schoolteacher role models as part of the socialisation process ofbecoming a teacher.
Keywords: language teachers; secondary school teachers; teacher educators
Introduction
To assess the impact of a profession’s induction process, researchers try to provideinsight into the sequence of experiences that entrants typically undergo (Lortie 1975).Student teachers’ participation in teacher training and their entry into the teachingprofession are generally considered the first steps in this induction process. Teachereducation research focuses on pedagogical approaches, methods and curricula,preparing student teachers for practice, preparing student teachers for working withchildren of different social and cultural backgrounds, for working with children withdisabilities, teacher characteristics, teacher education programmes and so on(Cochran-Smith and Zeichner 2005). Teacher education research also focuses onstudent teachers’ learning in practica (Hascher, Cocard and Moser 2004), on drop-outin teacher training and during the beginning of the career (Stokking et al. 2003), or onthe impact of innovations in the first professional years (Swennen, Volman and VanEssen 2008).
However, other studies question this focus on teacher education as the first andperhaps most important stage in the development of a teacher’s professional identity(Putnam and Borko 1997; Wideen, Mayer-Smith and Moon 1998). Firstly, there islittle empirical research that focuses on teacher educators themselves (Murray andMale 2005). Secondly, research into the effectiveness of teacher education suggeststhat the impact of teacher education in practice seems to be slight (Lunenberg,Korthagen and Swennen 2007). One of the reasons is that teacher educators do not payenough attention to the student teachers’ prior – explicit and implicit – beliefs(Bullough 1997). Starting teachers who did not have the opportunity to address priorfamily and school experiences which had a significant impact on their views duringteacher training were found to tend to ignore different, new models of teachingsuggested by their teacher educators once they started teaching in schools (Perry and
*Email: [email protected]
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Rog 1992). Teacher educators did not seem to be aware of their own conceptions ofteaching, nor reflect on how these might influence the ideas that student teachers haveabout teaching (Lunenberg et al. 2007). This means that it is not clear to student teach-ers or teacher educators which conceptions of teaching should be valued or modelledin teacher education.
Thirdly, other research, which does not focus primarily on student teacher trainingand student teachers’ entrance into the profession, indicates that teaching views andpractices are inextricably linked to teachers’ personal lives (Zemblyas 2001; Loughran2007). According to Alsup (2005), forming a professional teacher’s identity is acentral process in becoming a teacher. When she describes the opportunities teachereducators should provide to their pre-service teachers, she asserts that ‘they have totake care of themselves first, in order to better take care of others later’ and ‘teachereducators should bring issues of identity into the methods class’ (Alsup 2005, 7).Loughran (2007, 112) states that teacher educators should provide student teacherswith opportunities to learn and ‘un-learn in order to better know themselves so thatthey might better understand how and why they teach in the way they teach’. In hisreview of teachers’ interpretations of educational practice, Van den Berg (2002)concludes that a shift in focus is required in teacher research, from addressing knowl-edge, cognition and skills, to studies that focus more on personal (e.g., affective)aspects of professional identity.
Studying teachers’ personal lives and histories, prior beliefs and teaching precon-ceptions may add significantly to our knowledge about the professional developmentof teachers and teacher educators (Goodson 1992; Rogers and Scott 2008). As Lortie(1975) has already stated in his classical study Schoolteacher, the development ofteachers’ professional identity is a long-term, ongoing socialisation process that doesnot start at the formal stage in environments such as teacher educational training.Socialisation as a teacher also includes informal processes occurring in the family,and in primary and secondary school (Pajares 1992). Teachers develop a professionalidentity which is grounded in different social, cultural and historical conditions.Lortie considers professional identity to be a psychological concept which is sociallyembedded: ‘identifications are psychological processes, but they rest in turn uponsociological conditions’ (Lortie 1975, 42). This is supported by Van den Bergh(2002), who noted that ‘professional identity can be conceptualized as the outcome ofa process of interaction between the personal experiences of teachers and the social,cultural and social environment in which they function on a daily basis’ (Van denBergh 2002, 579).
Empirical research that explicitly explores these long-term socialisation processesand tries to reconstruct the impact of social experiences is, however, scarce. In thispaper we will concentrate on the process of how former experiences in different socialcontexts influenced teacher educators’ conceptions of teaching in the field of modernlanguages. We will explore the life histories of 13 teachers, who taught in secondaryeducation for several years and who eventually became teacher educators. We will tryto find out at what point in their educational careers they chose to become a teacherand what attracted or motivated them to choose a teaching career. Secondly, this studywill explore the impact of teaching models, in secondary school as well as in highereducation. Which teachers impressed the 13 teachers/teacher educators, and why?After several years of teaching in secondary education, all 13 teachers in this studybecame teacher educators. Do former teaching models, for instance secondary school
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models, still have an impact on teacher educators’ teaching conceptions and teachingpractice? We will trace the impact of teacher models further by exploring the impactof teacher models on teacher educators’ modelling behaviour. Do teacher educatorsmodel their secondary or higher education role models to their students in teachertraining? If not, what other conceptions of teaching do they model? Our researchquestions are:
(1) What motivated teacher educators to become teachers in the first place?(2) Which teacher models impressed these teacher (educators) and why?(3) What was the impact of teacher role models on teacher educators’ modelling?
Method
In this study, the development of a professional teacher identity is perceived as asocialisation process. Several personal experiences in different socialising contexts areassumed to play an important part in the professional development of the teachereducators involved in this study. This theoretical perspective led us to our choice oflife history as a research criterion, as Goodson noted: ‘in understanding something sointensely personal as teaching, it is critical we know about the person the teacher is’(Goodson 1981, 69). To study the interplay of social context and personal stories, weused a qualitative analysis of life history accounts by 13 teacher educators, in order toreconstruct the socialisation processes. We should note that life stories and life histo-ries do not have the same meaning. Life stories are stories produced by the narrator(Huberman, Thompson and Weiland 1997), whereas the life histories of teachers areanalyses of life stories undertaken by a researcher who studies personal experiencesin their social and cultural context. Thus, although this study takes personal experienceas the starting point of scientific enquiry, its theoretical focus is the contextualisationof these personal experiences (Goodson 2003). The life history method links personalexperiences and views to the social relationships in important social contexts in whichpeople live.
The open interviews followed chronologically the development of respondents’educational careers, starting from the family situation, the family climate and thefamily’s interest in the respondent’s subject preferences at secondary school.Secondly, the students’ secondary school period was explored, including their inter-ests and achievements in school subjects and the choices made about their futures.Thirdly, the interview explored the period of formal socialisation – for example,higher education (studying modern languages and teacher education programme).Special attention was paid to role models for teaching and other significant influenceson respondents’ conceptions of teaching in each element of the teachers’ life stories.The interview traced the socialisation process of the teacher educators from the earlyfamily context to their most recent experiences as a teacher educator, with the inter-viewee being able to intervene by asking questions or adding information wheneverthey thought it was necessary.
The 13 teacher educators interviewed were all part of a larger study into theprofessional development of modern language teachers in the Netherlands (1950–2005). In the first research year, 45 teachers were interviewed. The 45 respondentswere selected on the grounds that they were also experienced school teachers ratherthan solely teacher educators. It emerged that 13 of these 45 teachers had become
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teacher educators after a teaching career in a secondary school. Of the 13 teachereducators, six were male and seven were female. The teacher educators varied in agebetween 32 and over 60, all having had several years of teaching experience insecondary school, while their experience as teacher educators varied from betweenthree and 15 years.
All interviews were conducted by the author, with all tapes being transcribed. Thetranscriptions followed the interview, with questions and answers remaining in theiroriginal order. After completing the transcripts they were corrected by replaying thetapes, standardising the spelling and adding missing words. In two cases, (parts of) theinterviews were not on tape and respondents provided a correction of the writtensummary of the interview.
The interpretation and analysis concentrated on the information that was relevantto the context of our theoretical perspective – the impact of socialisation contexts,particularly role models in secondary education, on teacher educators’ modellingbehaviour. Therefore, the information was selected in relation to the three researchquestions, with the aim of looking for patterns and structures in teacher educators’personal life stories (Atkinson 1998). Content analysis was used to code the interviewdata into relevant themes (Strauss and Corbin 1990). Using Glaser’s (1992) guidelinesfor analysing qualitative data, a typology of secondary school role models wascomposed and different socialisation routes in teaching careers were constructed(Boeije 2005).
Findings
Choosing teaching as a career: early, late or non-deciders?
Most research on teacher motivation has focused on the views expressed by pre-service student teachers (Kyriacou and Coulthard 2000) or graduate teachers. Theseviews provide insight into what motivates people to pursue a teaching career.However, these views may differ from the image of teaching held by students whochoose not to enter teaching. The teaching literature distinguishes between earlydeciders (‘I always wanted to become a teacher’) and late deciders, those who decidedor developed the ambition to become a teacher at a later age. According to Lortie(1975), early decisions are more frequent in the teaching profession.
When, at what point in their career, did the respondents in this study decide tobecome teachers? All respondents had worked in secondary schools as a teacherfor several years and eventually became teacher educators. Was the decision tobecome a teacher an early one, as Lortie (1975) suggested? Looking back attheir teaching careers, the interviewees recalled that they did not decide tobecome teachers at all. On the contrary, only one knew he would be a teacherwhile in secondary school, while the other 12 did not explicitly choose to becomea teacher. Except one, none of the respondents had opted for a teaching careerwhen they had to choose a professional or educational career in their final year ofsecondary education. At that time, all respondents were motivated primarily tostudy the modern language and culture of their choice: Dutch, English, French orGerman. The interviewees recalled that they perceived their subject choice as theoutcome of a preference for the subject matter and good results, both strong inter-nal motivations:
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Interviewer: Do you remember when and how you decided to become a teacher?A: I didn’t decide to become a teacher. While I was in secondary school it
was my wish to become a psychologist. I read lots of psychologybooks, but my parents did not approve of my first choice to studypsychology. My next favourite subjects were languages, modernlanguages and classical languages too. I had been thinking about classi-cal languages, I was very good at Latin, but couldn’t stand Greek. Ididn’t like my Greek teacher. Then, when it came to choosing, I hesi-tated between French, English, German. I chose French, because mybrother was already studying English, stupid reason, but that’s the wayit goes. German was out of the question, because of the war, our familyhad bad memories of the war, so it became French … and, well, youknew, when one graduates from the study of a language, one wouldprobably become a teacher. You took it for granted. (Male teachereducator, aged 65)
Subject choice was also the primary reason for the other respondents:
No, I didn’t choose to become a teacher when I was in my last year of secondary educa-tion. I hesitated between studying a modern language, Dutch or English, and studyingeducation. It turned out to be English, for a very silly reason: my mother was German,my boyfriend was German, so I chose the language I liked most, the English language.(Female teacher educator, aged 54)
I chose to study a language, because I liked languages very much, and I was good atthem. Especially German. (Female teacher educator, aged 44)
A teaching career was not seriously considered, though most respondents ‘knew’ thatit was very likely that they would become a modern language teacher after graduation.Frequently used expressions in the interviews made this clear: ‘You knew that youwould have to make a living. Becoming a teacher was a realistic option when youstudied a modern language’. However, this was a kind of cognition located some-where ‘in the back of your head’, and once commencing the first year ‘you forgot allabout it’. Some respondents even managed to avoid considering a teaching careerdespite their college professors telling them in their first year that becoming a teacherwas a very realistic option for modern language graduates.
One female teacher educator who had been a very motivated teacher for 30 yearsand teacher educator for 15 years remembered how it came about that she ended up ina primary school teacher training programme:
At secondary school I was continuously in doubt about my future educational career.Every day I chose another professional career. Eventually my parents and I became verynervous, and I had to choose. And then, one day in spring, late in the afternoon, I camehome and my parents were standing there, in our living room. They had something veryimportant to say, they said … You will enter a primary school teacher trainingprogramme, they said, because we don’t know what else you can do. It is a very goodprogramme and after that we will see what else you can do.
I became very angry and I remember very well that I shouted: ‘No, you can’t do that tome, you will ruin my life for ever! As a female teacher I will be a spinster, I will nevermarry and have children!’ I was always a good girl, never shouted at my parents, but thenI had to … (Female educator, aged 57)
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Most respondents reported that, facing the everyday reality of the teacher’s workplace(the classroom situation), the teaching profession did not appeal to them:
I didn’t consider the teaching profession a serious profession for me. For years wewatched them, in secondary school, all alone in front of the class, while we were leaningback. In my heart I felt pity for them. (Female teacher educator, aged 32)
It appeared then, that the respondents in this study did not choose a teaching career.They chose to study a modern language in university or another form of higher educa-tion. They knew (and they were also told by their higher education teachers) that aprofessional career after studying a modern language often meant a teaching career.But they didn’t think about that option and concentrated on the modern language andculture they were interested in. It turned out that they became teachers and eventuallythey became teacher educators. So, contrary to Lortie’s findings, the respondents inthis study were not early deciders. In fact, they were non-deciders who all moved intoteaching and remained in the profession despite not actually having an ambition tobecome a teacher.
Teacher models
Impressive teacher models in secondary and higher education
Following their life stories in chronological order, the interviewees were asked tothink of teachers in secondary and higher education who were an example to them ofgood or bad teaching. Firstly, it is interesting to note that all respondents (except one)had very vivid memories of their teachers, particularly in secondary education. Theyrecalled their names spontaneously, related anecdotes and quoted their teachers, aswell as describing many positive as well as negative teacher models:
I went to two different schools, one traditional and the other progressive. In both schoolsteachers talked a lot in class, but in the traditional school they did that in an authoritarianstyle. I didn’t like that at all. In the progressive school I liked my German teacher verymuch. He also had a lot of subject matter knowledge and talked a lot in class, but he wasalso engaged with us, he was involved. Besides being a teacher, he was also a humanbeing, a personality, who was interested in his pupils. (Female teacher educator, aged 42)
My biology teacher, he displayed a negative attitude to us, did not respond adequately.He was predictable and taught by-the-book. On the other hand, my Dutch teacher, shewas too tolerant, too sweet and was overruled by our class. (Female teacher educator,aged 32)
Secondary schooling – as well as primary schooling – provides plenty of opportunitiesfor young people to become familiar with the teaching profession. Teachers areobserved in their work by young people more than is the case for any other occupationalgroup. In addition to observing their teachers at work, pupils also spend time in directcontact with teachers. Observing and engaging with a teacher are both aspects of whatLortie (1975) called the ‘apprenticeship-of-observation’. By observing and interactingwith their teachers, students learn to ‘“take the role” of the classroom teacher, to engagein at least enough empathy to anticipate the teacher’s probable reaction to his behav-iour’ (Lortie 1975, 62). Students project themselves into the teacher’s position inrelation to their perception of the teacher’s feelings, and some students – perhaps those
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who have an interest in the teaching profession – identify with the teacher. For thesestudents, the ‘apprenticeship-of-observation’ can be considered a more or less contin-uous induction phase, leading them to become a teacher. However, students are seldomactually in a position to identify with the teacher. They do not share the teacher’sposition in the school environment and merely observe the teacher at work from theirown student-oriented perspective.
Although the respondents recalled most impressive teacher models from second-ary education, a few interviewees told about the influence of some of their teachersin higher education. For instance, Lorna (aged 54) first referred to a secondaryschool teacher she liked because ‘you were allowed to tell something about your-self’. A personal interest in students was also what attracted her in her universityteacher in German literature at university: ‘on the surface he did nothing, he let usdo everything by ourselves. Reading and discussing German novelists like HermanHesse, it was fascinating to be involved that much as a student’. Lorna describedthis teaching concept as ‘free’ teaching, student-centred and a form of discoverylearning. The other respondent was also touched by a teacher in higher education.Incidentally this teacher, she was an English teacher, was also convinced of thedidactical value of discovery learning: ‘She let us find out ourselves, but at the sametime guided us’.
What about teacher role models in teacher training? All respondents in thisstudy went to university or (vocational) higher education to study a modernlanguage. At the end of the study or after graduation, all respondents took someform of teacher training, varying from a few courses to attendance at a teachertraining college, including in-service training. The interviewees, however, did notrecall any specific teacher models from teacher training that impressed them oneway or another. About half of the respondents were very critical about the teachingtraining (‘haven’t learned much’; ‘I learned a lot, about pedagogy and didactics, butI do not remember a special person, a role model or something like that’; ‘teachertraining was clearly a negative experience to me. A competency based curriculum isnot enough, I wanted to learn about how to teach a modern language, not just thetricks-of-the-trade’). We concluded that the secondary school teacher modelsimpressed these respondents very much and made a difference in their furtherteaching career.
Why did the respondents in this study remember these secondary school teachers?What specific teaching qualities, including personal and professional characteristics,were remembered? In short, which teacher models made a difference?
A typology of teacher models
The teachers at secondary school epitomised several models of teaching. All teacherinterviewees referred to various teaching and personal characteristics that impressedthem while in secondary school, but from all the qualities and characteristicsmentioned, a few types or models emerged. Firstly, several teacher educatorsdescribed examples of what could be called the ‘storyteller’ type. They admired teach-ers who were real modern language experts, who could tell stories about fascinatingbooks or writers. ‘I remember a story about a literary critic who put slices of baconbetween the pages of the books he read, you never forget such stories’, said a Dutchteacher educator before recounting another:
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My Latin teacher, she was rather dull, but she became another person when she told usabout the gods and about the Latin heroes. That was amazing. So, whenever we had achance, we asked her to tell us a story about the gods and very often she did, very excit-ing. Looking back, I think that is my image of an ideal teacher, telling fascinating storiesjust off the top of their head, I wish I was able to do that too, but unfortunately I’m nota storyteller. (Male teacher educator, aged 64)
The storyteller type prefers to impart a more general education, regarding modernlanguage teaching as more than grammar, spelling and translation. They also know alot about the foreign country’s history and culture. In some cases the storyteller typewas described as being very teacher-centred, expecting the students to listen and bequiet, but there were also examples of the storyteller type being more pupil-centredand encouraging discussion.
A second role model that very much impressed several teacher educators whenthey were secondary school students was the ‘personal teacher’ type – a teacher whodisplayed a serious human interest in their students, who enquired after their personalsituations, who talked in class about youth culture, who took them out to the theatreor invited them to his/her house. However, the respondents stressed the fact that thepopularity of this type was not primarily based on them being a nice teacher whosimply took the students out. From their experiences at secondary school, it was notenough to be a nice teacher in this sense, as popularity also depended on profession-alism. It was the combination of personal and professional qualities that impressed theteacher educators at the time. For example:
In the progressive school I liked my German teacher very much. He also had a lot ofsubject matter knowledge and talked a lot in class, but he also engaged with us, he wasinvolved. Besides being an excellent teacher, he was also a human being, a personality,who was interested in his pupils. (Female teacher educator, aged 42)
The ‘human’ or ‘personal’ teacher type was also regarded as being so because of theinterest taken in the individual lives of the students. In addition, this teacher type isfound to be ‘personal’ because they not only played the role of teacher, but alsoallowed the students to see them for who they were. As one of the respondents said:
My Dutch teacher, he was an expert in Dutch literature, but he also read the papers withus, we did My Fair Lady, and he was very engaged. He was a very well-educated teacherand besides that he was also an ‘open’ teacher, not afraid to show himself to his class.And he took a real interest in us; he also invited us to his house. (Male teacher educator,aged 62)
One of the interviewees pictured her favourite German secondary school teacher as an‘outstanding’ teacher. This personal-type teacher did not teach by the book, butthought for himself, made his own choices of subject knowledge, teaching strategiesand pedagogical style, as well as producing and writing his own material. This teachershowed his ‘self’, the teacher educator said, and from that time on she considered‘getting to know and show yourself’ to be a prerequisite for good teaching. This is notto say that teachers who teach from the ‘self’ should not also be subject-knowledgeexperts. On the contrary, ‘outstanding’ teachers need a lot of expert knowledge inorder to introduce their pupils to new worlds of knowledge and understanding.However, they use, order and categorise this subject knowledge in their own way.
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A third type of teaching that impressed the teacher educators while they were insecondary education were the teachers that were characterised as ‘playful’. The inter-viewees provided many examples of secondary school teachers who were literallyplayful in introducing games and toys as well as food and drinks, to motivate studentsto engage in the learning process, and who were also playful in the figurative sense ofmanaging the class lightly, in what seemed a natural way. Such teachers weredescribed in short as ‘didactical and pedagogical specialists’.
Finally, we looked for gender-specific preferences. Did female educators prima-rily admire their female secondary school teachers and did male respondentsmention their male favourites? This was not the case. Of the six male respondents,two recalled a female secondary school teacher who was very special to them(‘Mrs. Strang, my English teacher, she was a natural born teacher’; ‘My Latinteacher, the amazing storyteller’). These male teacher educators were impressed bythe female teachers’ professionalism. Two other male teacher educators bothmentioned their male secondary school teachers as being models, and had also stud-ied the same language as their teachers. The other two male teacher educators werein secondary schools with exclusively or overwhelmingly male teachers but did notmention any special teachers. The seven female teacher educators showed a similarnon-gender-specific pattern, although two of them found their female teachers to bemodels of independence – showing that it was possible for women to become goodteachers and earn a living. Nonetheless, it was not just being female that exempli-fied this teacher model. The two female model teachers were also models of goodteaching: ‘my French teacher, I liked her very much, and she was the only modernlanguage teacher who used to speak French in class’. In sum, three female teachereducators admired male secondary school teachers, while three female respondentsmentioned female secondary school teachers as being good teaching models. Theremaining female teacher educators reported two important role models, one femaleand one male.
The impact of role models on teacher educators’ modelling
The respondents in this study provided many vivid descriptions of their secondaryschool teacher models. The next interesting question is, how these secondary schoolteacher models influenced the respondents in this study. All respondents started teach-ing in secondary schools after graduation. Did they copy or imitate their secondaryschool models? And did these secondary school models still influence their teachingconceptions after becoming teacher educators?
Firstly, a small group of respondents more or less imitated their teaching models,as a teacher and as a teacher educator afterwards. For instance, a French teachereducator pictured her teaching style – and even her appearance – as a direct imitationof her French teacher in secondary school:
My French teacher, I learned a lot from her about the French language and culture,poems, she let us write poetry, she loved French and she taught us to love French too. Avery quiet person, a lady, and – how nice – every day she looked different! Sometimes Iwondered: ‘What will she wear today?’ I learned that from her too.
Interviewer: What was she like?
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She sat on a chair, just like me, because she couldn’t walk. There she was, everymorning, a very charming, gentle person. No teacher in our school could keep order –lots of tough boys – but her … everybody respected her. (Female teacher educator,aged 58)
This female teacher educator successfully imitated her role model and modelled thesame behaviour to her students in secondary school and to her student teachers inteacher training: ‘and that’s how I do it now! I expect this attitude and behaviour frommy student teachers too’. Two other teacher educators also imitated their secondaryschool teachers’ models of ‘free teaching’ and ‘playful teaching’ – as they describedit – but these teaching concepts did not work in practice: ‘I was too kind, the classplayed with me instead of the other way around’. In another secondary school thisteacher educator tried not to teach playfully, acted in a more authoritarian way andwas nicknamed ‘Pinochet’. Based on their first experiences as teachers, these respon-dents concluded that they could not realise their teaching ideals in the secondaryeducation system and applied instead for a teacher educator job. In their view, work-ing with older student teachers created more possibilities for modelling their idealteaching behaviour. In both cases, the respondents modelled their former secondaryteachers to their teacher students, but only after several years of trial and error assecondary schoolteachers.
A second group of respondents imitated their secondary school role models aftersome years of teaching practice and experimenting with different teaching concep-tions. Although they were impressed by the good examples they had observed insecondary school, they realised that their teacher ideals would not fit any classroomsituation or school culture. A particular case is Emma. Her secondary school modelwas – as mentioned above – the ‘outstanding’ teacher, the German male teacher whowas an example to her because he did not teach by the book but thought for himself,developed his own curriculum, produced his own material and showed a personalinterest in his pupils. At university Emma studied English, but she also took as manydidactic and pedagogical courses as she could and was very motivated to become theteacher model she admired. Because of her motivation and professionalism, herteacher educators trusted Emma to commence her in-service teacher training in a‘difficult’ black school, but she could not manage the students. Anticipating difficulttimes at this school, she chose a ‘safe’ (traditional, teacher-centred) position in classand put a lot of content knowledge (English language) into her lessons, but the classwas not at all interested. After a couple of months the situation got out of hand. Shetalked the situation over with a supportive colleague, who advised Emma to adoptanother strategy, perhaps not ‘safe’ but worth a try: ‘stop hiding behind the subjectcontent and let them know who you are. Tell them an interesting story about yourself,to begin with’. Emma decided to tell the story of her youth as a white, immigrant girlin South Africa, showing the students pictures of her school and her friends, andtelling them about how she felt as a foreigner unable to speak English very well. Theclass was interested – they were able to identify – and Emma made a new start, teach-ing, as she called it, from-the-inside, showing her teacher’s self. After several years ofteaching in secondary schools she decided to become a teacher educator, modellingher ‘self’ to student teachers.
A third way of responding to ideal secondary school role models is ‘choosing notto imitate’ but to find the teaching model that suits your own teaching personality best.Two respondents said that their secondary teaching models did not match their own
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personalities: ‘As for myself, I am too shy, so I knew I would never be the storytellerI admired so much in my Latin teacher’. In his professional development this teachereducator focused on other, more learning-centred models of teaching, and on didacti-cal developments such as IT. Two other respondents even explicitly drew attention tothe dangers of modelling. Although they recognised the impact of secondary schoolrole models in their own modelling behaviour, they emphasised the importance offinding your own teaching concept. This is what they admired most of all: their favou-rite teachers were great teachers because they had found their own way of teaching.One of these respondents, who admired his Dutch teacher because it was so obviousthat he did not copy a model, also applied this attitude to his own idea of modelling:
A role model should not be imitated. I tell my students not to copy me, they have to findtheir own way of teaching. My student teachers always try to build a bastion. Once, I putaside my desk and I sat on my chair, alone, in the middle, no desk to hide myself behind.Then I told my students, stop hiding yourself, teaching is not a matter of using tricks. Tofind your own way of teaching, you need to find the way of teaching that suits you. Thisis not to say that you may not sit behind a table, but you should not be afraid to showyourself in broad daylight. (Male teacher educator, aged 62)
Summarising, secondary school teacher models function as a continuous frame ofreference during a teacher’s or a teacher educator’s career. The former models areimitated, dreamt of, transformed or adapted to suit the teacher’s (educator’s) ownpersonalities, front or back stage, but always there. As such, the role models areformative in the socialisation process of becoming a teacher and a teacher educator.
Concluding remarks
From this study of 13 teacher educators, it appeared that the secondary school teachersof the sample had been significant role models. The teaching conceptions of theteacher educators were found to be grounded in secondary school and as such thisstudy underlines the importance of secondary school teacher models for a teacher’sfuture teaching career and the development of their own way of teaching. The impactof secondary school role models has already been indicated (Lortie 1975), but thisstudy contributes to teacher educator research by providing more insight into thesocialisation process and the impact of early school experiences in the developmentof teachers’ identity and professionalism.
All respondents were impressed by teachers who were language experts, indicat-ing that favourite teachers knew a lot about their subject – in this case, modernlanguages. Teachers who spoke the languages fluently, knew the grammar thoroughly,as well as the literature, vocabulary, culture and history of the country concerned wereremembered clearly even after 30 years. However, the best teachers were consideredto be those who combined this knowledge of content with a human interest in thestudents. It was considered that teachers should also engage with the class, individu-ally and as a group. The transmission of subject knowledge should be combined witha personal touch. The most vivid and positive memories were of those teachers whomade contact with their students. In retrospect, the respondents in this study were mostpositive about teachers who were involved, personal and pupil-directed. It is thiscombination of the knowledge of subject matter and pedagogical orientation thatrespondents evaluated as being very motivating and thus stimulating the learning
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process. Didactical competence was also valued, but not as highly as the other twocomponents, with the teacher educators involved in this study valuing the didacticalcompetence of their teachers only in combination with subject knowledge and peda-gogical competence. Otherwise, they suggest, teaching becomes a mere opening up ofa box of tricks. They wanted to avoid, as Waller (1932) noted in his work on thesocialisation of teachers, ‘becoming a machine for carrying out a prescribed curricu-lum’. Interestingly, in the research literature most researchers claim that for teachersin primary education, teaching is a personal activity (Nias 1984). This study of teachereducators who started teaching in secondary education shows that this claim alsoholds true for secondary school teachers. However, it should also be noted that to themodern language teacher or teacher educator in this study, subject knowledge is themost important aspect of a teacher’s knowledge base.
What is the impact of these secondary school models on teacher educators’ model-ling behaviour? Firstly, most teacher educators’ modelling behaviour is grounded insubject-based knowledge – for example, modern languages and culture. This is notsurprising as almost all teacher educators in this study recalled role models who weremodern language specialists. Content knowledge appears to be a prerequisite for goodteaching. Student teachers should be subject experts in the first place; in teachertraining, student teachers should thoroughly learn grammar, literature, vocabulary,spelling, literature, history and culture. It is important to note that the teacher educa-tors in this study did not have the ambition to take up a teaching career, but principallyhad the desire to study a modern language.
Secondly, it should be noted that the impact of secondary school teaching modelson future teacher educators is considerable, but is not uniform. From the comparisonbetween the description of former teacher models and their current modelling behav-iour as a teacher educator, it appeared that all 13 teacher educators modelled theirteaching behaviour more or less on impressive secondary school teachers. Someteacher educators imitated their favourite teachers, while others could not copy theirexamples because of personality differences. Other teacher educators were impressedby their role models but could not realise their ideals in the particular school contextin which they commenced their career. After several years of trying, some adaptedtheir ideal role models to their own personalities, while others decided to leave thesecondary school system for teacher education in which they found they could modelthe teaching behaviour they admired. One way or another, secondary school teachersfunctioned as a continuous frame of reference and ultimately played a significant rolein teacher educators’ modelling behaviour.
This study has shown that the process of becoming a teacher and a teacher educatoris a long-term socialisation process and that there are different socialisation routes forcareers in teaching and teacher education. Teacher educators used their role models asreference points to discover their own teaching styles. From another theoretical pointof view, the impressive teacher models could also be viewed from the perspective ofmotivation theory, specifically Ryan and Deci’s (2000) theory of self-determination.For instance, the second ‘personal’ or ‘human’ teacher model – specifically the teacherwho tries to tries to find his or her own way of teaching – could be interpreted to exem-plify the basis psychological needs of relatedness and autonomy, while the playful,didactical expert teacher model could exemplify the need of competency.
Although the teacher educators in this study realised that the impact of secondaryschool models is considerable, many stressed the importance of finding ‘your own
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way’ of teaching. They did not expect their student teachers to imitate them andconsidered this to be a bad way of teaching. Secondary school role models remaineda significant point of reference, but they suggested that teachers should not be ‘deter-mined’ by these models. Several teacher educators emphasised that ‘you have to findthe way of teaching that suits you well’. Role models are guides on the road to profes-sionalism, but the ultimate goal is to find the teacher’s self. Therefore, teacher educa-tors should use model that are ‘mediated’ by personal teaching experiences andpersonality. As such, modelling contains a paradox of imitation.
Finally, most teacher educators in this study, while developing their own way ofteaching, maintained an open mind to didactic innovations. From the examples ofpreferred role models it is clear that most teacher educators positively evaluated teacherswho were interested in the learning processes of their students, who developed new mate-rials, tried to motivate students with games and who did not necessarily follow the book.This attitude was one of their motivations for becoming a teacher educator. Teachereducators who aim to use this student-centred teacher model use their own secondaryschool role models as examples. Thus, contrary to other research findings, the choiceto become a teacher was not a pragmatic one. The innovative attitude of the teachereducators in this study was grounded in their teacher role models. These findings alsocontrast with Lorties’ study which found that the teacher educators’ former teacher expe-riences were conservative. Underlined by recent teacher education research, a consistentfinding is that starting teachers ‘forget’ all about pedagogy once they start teaching. Theyrevert to earlier ideas about teaching; for instance, conceptions of teaching observedwhile at secondary school. As such, informal socialisation is assumed to be more persis-tent than formal teacher socialisation in terms of teacher training programmes.
In our study, the ‘apprenticeship-of-education’ also seems to have had a socialisa-tion impact. However, this impact was not conservative. The teacher educators in thisstudy frequently criticised traditional, authoritarian teaching styles as not motivatingthe students at all, while progressive pedagogy was evaluated positively. Terms suchas ‘pupil-centred’, ‘friendly’, ‘involved’, ‘enthusiastic’, ‘doing things differently’,‘creative’, ‘interactive’ and ‘the person behind the teacher’ were all mentionedfrequently. All respondents in this study eventually became teacher educators, with akeen eye for educational reform and modern pedagogy. It seems then that – in retrospect– the teacher educators in this study were already critical of traditional models of teach-ing when they were secondary school students.
Notes on contributors
Greetje Timmerman is an educational sociologist and youth researcher. She is associate profes-sor of Gender and Education at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Her mainresearch themes are the feminisation of the teaching profession, professionalisation of teaching,youth and social change.
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