Supporting students on placement: developing observational skills using mobile technology

Trainee teachers spend only a fraction of their course time in university with the majority of the year (120 days) spent in placement schools. Therefore, there is always the need to maintain close links with trainees and to enable them to link the theory learned at university to their practice in the classroom. A key aspect of developing as a practitioner is learning from experts in the field, known as cognitive apprenticeship (Collins, 2006). Our trainees spend most of their time at the beginning of their placement observing and taking notes while observing experienced teachers delivering lessons. Training is needed to gain the maximum amount from observation (Borich, 2011) and mobile technology can help in providing some scaffolding to this training. Mobile technology has many uses in education and we describe a bespoke mobile application we have developed called Standards Tag to enable trainee teachers to tag key events observed in the classroom. The application has two major features: audio clips for key theoretical concepts behind aspects of teaching and learning, linked to the Teacher Standards (DfE, 2013); and a tag feature for noticed observations which are then sent by email to the student’s email address.