Nurturing Professional Judgement

Book excerpt: A new addition to our Critical Guides for Teacher Educators series, this text guides teacher educators and early carer teacher mentors in how to nurture professional judgement in the complex, dynamic and unpredictable environments of classrooms. In-the-moment dilemmas and situation awareness are central to teachers' work, but these concepts may not always find their way into teaching about teaching - as they often get pushed aside in favour of curriculum coverage and box ticking. This book challenges a technicist and mechanistic view of teaching and learning to examine how teacher educators might best prepare soon-to-be teachers for their classroom practice. It discusses evidence in the literature that teaching does not 'produce' learning and that nurturing learning is a complex business which relies on both 'art and science'. Current policies and compliancy agendas influencing the content of ITE programmes are analysed, and the text moves on to provide practical suggestions for how to nurture professional judgement in trainee teachers through HE provision and school-based mentoring. It describes the dynamism of those who teach in classrooms and reminds teacher educators of the value and necessity of skills such as structure and improvisation, protocol and intuition which are at the heart of what it means to be a professional.