Customer Reviews

Advising and Supporting Teachers (Cambridge Teacher Training and Development)

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Advising and supporting teachers by Mick Randall and Barbara Thornton (CUP) is a fine addition to the literature on teacher support. It guides teacher educators on how they can give support to teachers in training especially during their teaching practice. This book challenges teacher supervisors to examine their own philosophy of teaching and supervision by having them reflect on various tasks (part 2 of the book) that consist of case studies, observation tasks, role plays, feedback techniques and various other activities. The book begins by setting the scene for teacher supervision and offers a humanistic approach to helping trainee teachers through their teaching practice.
This book is really a must read for any teacher trainer/educator that is involved with teachers on the practicum. It offers many provocative tasks and approaches to teacher supervision and can be utilized pretty much in any context (although it is very much British influenced). Regardless of how much a teacher educator can implement from this book, just one reading of it will remind teacher supervisors just how much they may take for granted when supervising trainee teachers on teaching practice. However, given the workload that many supervisors are burdened with, I wonder how, and when they will get enough time to reflect on the tasks! So the book would be most suitable for trainee supervisors that have more time to discuss these tasks. That said, I recommend this book to all supervisors of teachers as well, so that they can reflect on the complexities of supporting new teachers. This book offers support for these teacher supervisor

This worthy handbook explores ways in which language teachers can best be advised and supported in their teaching situations. The authors provide a comprehensive review of literature to support their contention that the goal of training should be to develop independent, autonomous and professionally-minded teachers. Additionally, they demonstrate the central role feedback plays in helping teachers to become self-critical reflectors on their teaching experiences. Throughout, advisors are prompted to think about how they can move teachers on to higher level concerns and there are many good points to emerge especially in the area of talking to teachers (Chapters 6-9). Based on this excellent discussion, I also see a need for advisors themselves to reflect on their own practices especially in contexts where collaborative relationships with teachers and colleagues are not high on 'personal' agendas.