1. Can partnership help to heal the fractured knowledge base in teacher education?
Professor Gordon Kirk
Universities’ Council for the Education of Teachers
APTE Conference 14 July 2010

2. Plan The centrality of partnership
The problem: the fractured knowledge base in ITE
How might we create an integrated knowledge base?
Partnership: a re-interpretation

3. The gradient of collaboration
CPD/research, staffing, etc ITE placement Reciprocal benefits of collaboration

4. The centrality of partnership
No partnership: no university involvement in ITE

5. The problem Surgery Teaching Engagement with patients Plus Teaching
Research
Integrated knowledge base
The world of the school
The world of teacher education
The world of research
Fragmented knowledge base

6. The fragmented knowledge base
Institutionalised
Theoretically justified
(eg “complementarity” )

7. Some damaging consequences
The dissociation of theory and practice
The gap between research and practice
Career development
Staff recruitment
Perennial criticism and the threat of exclusion

8. A strategy for an integrated knowledge base? Step 1
Adjust the definition of the teacher’s role to include engagement with learners, teaching new entrants, and researching professional practice.

9. A strategy for an integrated knowledge base? Step 2
Exploit the REF requirement on impact to strengthen the engagement of teachers in the planning, conduct and evaluation of practitioner research.

10. A strategy for an integrated knowledge base? Step 3
Expect teacher educators to have a continuing engagement with professional practice.

11. Re-interpretation of partnership
The distinctive role of universities in professional education
Professional competence underpinned by the values of rationality, evidence-based practice, criticality
Partnership as the maintenance of networks of schools and other agencies committed to these values in the education of teachers