Early Professional Development in the Scottish Context: Pre-service High School Teachers and the Management of Behaviour in Classrooms

Source: Teacher Development, Vol. 19, No. 3, 328–343, 2015
(Reviewed by the Portal Team)

This article examines the challenges and issues faced by pre-service teachers in relation to classroom behavior management.

Methods
The participants were seven pre-service secondary teachers, who enrolled to a one-year intensive postgraduate diploma course (PGDE Secondary Education) at a Scottish university.
The participants represented a number of different subject areas including French, Geography, Maths, Computing, Physical Education, Science, English, and Religious, Moral and Philosophical Studies.

The author collected data through individual and focus group interviews as well as journaling of significant behaviour management moments experienced by student teachers on school placements.

Conclusion
The author found that the journeys of these participants undertaken in relation to professional identity formation. It was also found that the narration were unique to each and to the diverse school contexts they worked within.

However, the author also found common themes in relation to these experiences. These participants found themselves being encouraged to assume the position of power and enforcement over the source of the challenging behaviour, the child.

It was also found that the reduced survivalist pre-service teacher narratives encouraged a narrow or limited narrative web, resulting in adherence to the authoritative narratives of experience produced by experienced colleagues.

The author argues that there seems to be a real need to understand the process by which student teachers then interact, resist or comply with the institutional and teacher-dominated discourses of punishment and reward.
The authors argues that education policy and legislation increasingly chart a course which encourages a different view of children and therefore of classrooms. Pupils are to be empowered and engaged in active participation in the decisions around schooling.