A teaching and professional development pack from the 1990's has recently been given a new lease of life by being made available online. The Partnership Teaching Inservice pack was published in 1991 in response to the lack of specialist language staff and uneven school expertise to support pupils with EAL in mainstream classrooms. The pack of in-service training materials, reading and video was conceived as a form of professional development for mainstream teachers of EAL pupils in order to 'mediate the demands of the National Curriculum on pupils in multilingual schools' (Unit 10, Reading 6, page 357).
Partnership Teaching from Collaborative Learning on Vimeo.
Bourne, J. and McPake, J. (1991) Partnership Teaching: Co-operative teaching strategies for English language support in multilingual classrooms. London: HMSO/DES
In the Introduction (What Is Partnership Teaching?), the authors stated that the programme's 'fundamental aim' is mainstream curriculum development: 'developing a curriculum responsive to the language needs and abilities of all pupils, whether monolingual, bilingual or multilingual.', and that '...if 'mainstreaming' support for bilingual pupils is to be effective, it does mean carefully reorganising all mainstream classes to meet a wider range of linguistic backgrounds and needs than some teachers have been used to' (p 357). In Partnership Teaching, changes to planning, teaching and assessment would be a matter for individual schools. The authors emphasised that all teaching and assessment must be carried out within the mainstream curriculum framework.
Partnership Teaching was promoted as a way for teachers to engage in their own classroom 'action research' by experimenting with different strategies to support pupils with EAL. Partnership Teaching envisaged that mainstream and language specialist teachers would work together intensively to share and disseminate best practices.
Although the authors believed that 'It will become increasingly rare for the class or subject teacher to have sole responsibility for planning, teaching and evaluating all aspects of her/his classroom work', mainstream teachers continue to be responsible for all of these. Indeed ten years later, Bourne (2001) identified a trend towards the replacement of EAL specialists and bilingual support teachers by support assistants which resulted from 'a shift from a focus on languages and language development, insofar as this existed previously, to a focus on 'raising attainment'. And twenty years later, NALDIC has identified a further reduction in teacher and other professionals resources devoted to meeting the needs of bilingual pupils in our schools.
NALDIC is grateful to Stuart Scott of the Collaborative Learning Project for making this useful pack accessible to teachers of today.
Related resources:
Bourne, J. (1997) The Continuing Revolution: teaching as learning in the mainstream multilingual classroom. Chapter 7 in Leung. C. and Cable, C. (eds) English as an Additional Language, Changing Perspectives. Watford: NALDIC
Bourne, J. (2001) Multilingualism in English Primary Schools. Languages Policy in the Isles, a conference to launch the European Year of Languages in Scotland. Scottish CILT
Bourne, J. (2002) Home Languages in the Literacy Hour in The National Literacy Strategy, Supporting Pupils with English as an Additional Language, Appendix 5, pages 73-77
