Celebrating its second birthday this autumn, the GTC’s Engage network offers sustained and personal support to new teachers. Penny Cottee discovers the latest developments.
With everything else on your ‘to do’ list as a new teacher, making the most of your automatic membership of Engage – the GTC’s network for newly qualified and early career teachers and those who support them – can easily fall by the wayside.
But don’t miss out, urges the Networks facilitator for Engage, Chris Green. 'Engage links new teachers across the country, giving them an invaluable opportunity to share good practice and support each other as they set out on their teaching careers,' she says.
True to its ethos of supporting early careers teachers by offering them access to pertinent research, an exciting Engage development involves a cohort of new teachers, who are investigating a variety of learning techniques in their own classrooms.
The project began in March 2007, when early careers teachers were invited to special events in York and Coventry, where they were encouraged to take part in the two-term long ‘Behaviour for Learning’ project.
Working with the Centre for the Use of Research and Evidence in Education (Curee), the teachers began by examining an anthology of research compiled from the GTC’s popular website feature, Research of the Month (RoM).
Inspired by RoM topics – including group work, thinking skills, assessment and pupil talk – teachers created their own research projects, spending a term working with their
students back in the classroom testing theories in their own practice.
The teachers’ projects experimented in a wide range of areas, including:
- comparing assessment techniques
- examining reward systems for encouraging better behaviour
- studying the extent to which pupils pass skills between themselves; and
- encouraging children to focus on their own thinking skills.
Teachers’ learning and development has been focused by working with the GTC’s Teacher Learning Academy (TLA), the first national system that both recognises and celebrates the learning that takes place everyday in the professional lives of teachers. Chris says: 'Using the TLA and providing high quality, accessible research, the Engage network is seeking to embed evidence-based practices for teachers early in their career.'
Now the teachers’ projects are to be collated into an online resource. 'That’s just one of the benefits,' says Christine. “These teachers have been learning about techniques to improve behaviour and learning, they have improved their own teaching by focusing directly on their practice, and they are widening the pool of ideas for teachers as a whole.”
Find out more about the GTC’s Teacher Learning Academy at: www.gtce.org.uk/tla and see Chapter 4 to discover how other teachers are benefiting from it.
Penny Cottee is a freelance journalist.
