Becoming a Teacher: Connecting, Challenging and Changing EDUC51037

  • Academic Session: 2024-25
  • School: School of Education
  • Credits: 30
  • Level: Level 5 (SCQF level 11)
  • Typically Offered: Runs Throughout Semesters 1 and 2
  • Available to Visiting Students: No
  • Collaborative Online International Learning: No

Short Description

Within this course, students will be challenged to recognise the scale and complexity of the teachers' role and how to make connections to their practice and wider systems to enact change.

Timetable

Seminars on Tuesday and Thursday at 10-12.

Requirements of Entry

None

Excluded Courses

None

Assessment

Students will submit critical reflections based on issues they have explored in the course and on placements that present a synergy of practice, research and enable them to get closer to the heart of what it means to teach. These will be structured using models of reflection developed from academic literature in teacher education to ensure depth rather than merely description (Korthagen 2017). Students will explicitly foreground theory and links to literature and will evidence their progression against the ILOs and GTCS Standards in order to create connections between personal and professional learning (4000 words in total).

Course Aims

■ Develop as engaged, reflective, empowered and enquiring beginning teachers for children and young people aged 3-18 in accordance with the criteria articulated in The Standard for Provisional Registration (GTCS, August 2021).

■ Understand and create connections between professional and personal aspects of learning (Korthagen 2017).

■ Develop critical understandings of current curriculum, policy and practice.

■ Understand the link between effective teaching and learning, children's attainment, achievement, and wellbeing, and the extent and scope of their role as the teacher.

■ Explore their "way of being" as a teacher and how it influences their professional practice and values.

■ Develop ways to access and use academic and research literature to develop an enquiring stance.

Intended Learning Outcomes of Course

By the end of this course students will be able to:

■ Demonstrate a reflective, research-informed approach to their practice as a teacher.

■ Demonstrate and articulate an understanding of their own development as a teacher.

■ Engage critically with significant issues, current theory, research, policy and practice related to education.

■ Show the ability to use academic literature to develop ethical understandings about teaching and their 'way of being' as a teacher and to show how it has been formed through local and global, social, political and cultural influences.

■ Present work according to academic conventions.

Minimum Requirement for Award of Credits

Students must submit at least 75% by weight of the components (including examinations) of the course's summative assessment.