This month we’re delighted to share two guest recommendations from Professor John Furlong OBE.

Professor Furlong is an Emeritus Fellow of Green Templeton College and Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Oxford.

He is the author of the 2015 report 'Teaching Tomorrow's Teachers', which helped shape the future vision of initial teacher education (ITE) in Wales. He was also the inaugural Chair of the EWC’s ITE Accreditation Board.

I am recommending two articles that I believe that all colleagues in Wales with an interest in initial teacher education (ITE) should read. They were initially published as part of the BERA-RSA Inquiry into Research and Teacher Education and became central to the thinking underpinning the new model of ITE now adopted in Wales.

The first paper, by Winch, Oancea and Orchard, examines different conceptions of what it means to be an effective teacher: the teacher as ‘craft worker’, an expert in situated knowledge; the teacher as ‘executive technician’, an expert in technical knowledge. They argue that while each of these dimensions is important, genuine professionalism demands something in addition; that is the ability to form critical judgements on existing knowledge and its relevance to particular situations.

The well-known paper by Burn and Mutton then goes on to explore the ways in which innovative ITE programmes around the world have attempted to provide opportunities for beginning teachers to do just that – to bring different forms of professional knowledge together in the development of their own practice. The paper also examines the evidence that what they call ‘research-based clinical practice’ does improve beginning teachers’ professional learning and pupil outcomes.

• Christopher Winch, Alis Oancea & Janet Orchard (2015) The contribution of educational research to teachers’ professional learning: philosophical understandings, Oxford Review of Education

• Katharine Burn & Trevor Mutton (2015) A review of ‘research-informed clinical practice’ in Initial Teacher Education, Oxford Review of Education