Teachers / Literacy

It's been mentioned briefly on this blog before, but I've been asked to draw people's attention again to the ongoing Becoming A Teacher project. Full details are available on the website, but basically this ongoing research programme is being sponsored jointly by the DCSF, the GTCE and the TDA, and is looking in detail at the experiences of teachers during their initial training (ITT) and early professional development (EPD). There's a lot of acronyms in today's post...

To date Becoming A Teacher has generated five research reports, all of them available in full from the DCSF website. The links to the various reports are below:

• Why People Choose to Become Teachers and the Factors Influencing their Choice of ITT Route
• Student Teachers' Preconceptions and Early Experiences in School
• Becoming a Teacher: Student Teachers' Motives and Preconceptions, and Early School-based Experiences during Initial Teacher Training (ITT)
• Becoming a Teacher: Student teachers’ Experiences of Initial Teacher Training in England
• Newly Qualified Teachers’ Experiences of their First Year of Teaching

A number of journal articles which have already been / will be published soon have also come out of the project, and the data gathered has also been used to deliver presentations at several academic conferences. Not all of these conference papers are freely available online, but I have managed to track down two of them - click here and here to have a read.

All of which only leaves a little room for a news story from today which states that while children's literacy standards in the UK remain above the international average, they are falling in comparison to many other nations. The full text of Readers and Reading is available online.