ABSTRACT
A pre-teaching phase, an early teaching phase and a late teaching phase were posited by Fuller (1969) as a three-phase developmental conceptualization of teachers’ concerns. With the pre-teaching phase, trainees expressed concerns based mainly on hearsay, and many of them did not know what to be concerned about. In general, ‘they thought of teaching in terms of their own experiences as pupils and as college students’ (p. 219). The early teaching phase concerns focused on such areas as class control, content adequacy and supervisor evaluation, and it was suggested that ‘all are assessments of the teacher’s adequacy, by the class and by the supervisor’ (p. 221). Although Fuller was more tentative about the concerns of experienced teachers, it was noted that concerns seemed ‘to focus on pupil gain and self-evaluation as opposed to personal gain and evaluations by others’ (p. 221). Later, Fuller and Bown (1975) proposed a three-stage trainees’ developmental model suggesting that there was a progression from ‘survival concerns’ to ‘task concerns’ to ‘impact concerns’. However, Guillaume and Rudney (1993), in their identification of six broad areas of concerns reported by trainees, noted that these concerns were held simultaneously by the trainees throughout their school-based experiences although the nature of these concerns shifted as the trainees moved towards independence and took more responsibility as teachers. The six broad categories identified by the authors were lesson planning and evaluation, discipline, working with pupils, working with cooperating teachers and adjusting to their classrooms, working with others in the profession and ‘transitions from trainee to professional teacher’. Furlong and Maynard (1995), whilst adopting the notion of stages as characterizing trainees’ development, indicated that the progress of trainees is far from linear. They suggest that ‘development from “novice” to “professional educator” is dependent on the interaction between individual students, their teacher education programme, and the school context in which they undertake their practical experience’ (p. 70). Consequently, Furlong and Maynard regard
trainees’ learning to teach as ‘complex, erratic and in one sense unique to them as an individual’ (p. 70). From their research they identified five broad stages in trainees’ development while on their school experience, and these were characterized as early idealism, personal survival, dealing with difficulties, hitting a plateau and moving on. It is suggested that at the start of their teacher education, trainees are idealistic in how they feel towards the pupils and the image they hold of themselves as teachers. This idealism appears to fade in the light of school experience and trainees focus on personally surviving. According to the authors, this means ‘detecting and “fitting in” with the teacher’s routines and expectations, being “seen” as a teacher and, in particular, achieving some form of classroom control’ (p. 76).
