Another really important post Mark. It begs the question about what we mean by principles and from where do they arise? Theory would be part of my answer, especially educational philosophy, but also from knowledge and psychology of learning. My other thought is that culture matters and supports scholarly values - openness, tolerance, truthfulness, honesty etc. which is where the profession may be struggling. With the CAR, many teachers advocated for more climate change and sustainability on the curriculum. Important as they are, especially in a heatwave! it is a mistake to lead a curriculum with issues as they do not provide the foundational knowledge pupils need to understand a multitude of issues that change over time.
I think this is right, and it matches something I keep running into in my own research. My PhD looks at how secondary ECTs build a professional identity across their first three years, and the ECF and ITTECF are probably the clearest current example of the practices-over-principles problem you're describing here. The framework is built almost entirely around specified practices and observable mentor activity, with the rationale behind any of it often missing from how it actually gets delivered in schools.
What I found in my participants' narratives matches Berliner's prediction pretty closely: ECTs who can tell you what they're supposed to do in a mentor meeting, but who haven't been given the tools to recognise when a practice doesn't fit, or to understand why it exists at all. There's a mentor workload problem underneath this too. Mentors are delivering the framework's content under real time pressure, and that pushes even mentors who understand the principles toward checklist delivery, because the time and space to do anything else isn't there.
If the ITTECF is meant to professionalise early career teaching, my own data is making me wonder whether it's doing the opposite, training people into compliance at the exact career stage when they should be developing judgement.
Another really important post Mark. It begs the question about what we mean by principles and from where do they arise? Theory would be part of my answer, especially educational philosophy, but also from knowledge and psychology of learning. My other thought is that culture matters and supports scholarly values - openness, tolerance, truthfulness, honesty etc. which is where the profession may be struggling. With the CAR, many teachers advocated for more climate change and sustainability on the curriculum. Important as they are, especially in a heatwave! it is a mistake to lead a curriculum with issues as they do not provide the foundational knowledge pupils need to understand a multitude of issues that change over time.
I think this is right, and it matches something I keep running into in my own research. My PhD looks at how secondary ECTs build a professional identity across their first three years, and the ECF and ITTECF are probably the clearest current example of the practices-over-principles problem you're describing here. The framework is built almost entirely around specified practices and observable mentor activity, with the rationale behind any of it often missing from how it actually gets delivered in schools.
What I found in my participants' narratives matches Berliner's prediction pretty closely: ECTs who can tell you what they're supposed to do in a mentor meeting, but who haven't been given the tools to recognise when a practice doesn't fit, or to understand why it exists at all. There's a mentor workload problem underneath this too. Mentors are delivering the framework's content under real time pressure, and that pushes even mentors who understand the principles toward checklist delivery, because the time and space to do anything else isn't there.
If the ITTECF is meant to professionalise early career teaching, my own data is making me wonder whether it's doing the opposite, training people into compliance at the exact career stage when they should be developing judgement.
Me - ‘Stops writing ‘playbook’ and considers life choices 😂