Why did you decide to study the MSc Teacher Education course at Oxford University?
I came into education through a vocational rather than traditional academic route, and by the time I applied I had spent many years teaching and designing programmes without ever having had much opportunity to step back and properly interrogate what good teaching actually is. I chose the MSc Teacher Education because I wanted to understand the theory behind practice I had largely developed through experience.
What was your full-time job during your MSc Teacher Education?
When I started the MSc, I was combining two roles: working as a Quality Lead for a national vocational fitness training provider, where much of my work involved developing educators, alongside teaching in higher education. During the course, I moved fully into higher education as a Senior Lecturer and Course Leader, with responsibility for developing staff and programmes across clinical and professional education.
What did you particularly like about the course?
I liked that it never treated teaching as something simple or purely technical. It made me question assumptions I had built up over years of practice, particularly around professional knowledge, teacher expertise and the way vocational educators learn to teach.
How has studying the course helped with your professional development?
It changed the way I think about myself as an educator. My dissertation grew directly out of questions I had about vocational fitness educators, and that work has since developed into a journal manuscript and now into the research I will continue through my DPhil at Oxford.
What do you most value about the teaching at the Department?
The teaching challenged me without ever making me feel that professional experience counted for less than academic knowledge. I valued being pushed to think more precisely, while still having the space to connect difficult theoretical ideas back to the realities of teaching and professional practice.
What is the community like at the Department?
What I valued most was the range of people and professional backgrounds. I was often learning as much from hearing how other students understood education in very different settings as I was from applying the ideas to my own field.
What advice would you give to new students who are about to start the course?
Don’t feel that you need to arrive already knowing the academic language of teacher education. Bring your own experience with you, be willing to question it, and use the course to understand more clearly why you teach the way you do and what you might want to change.
What is your favourite memory of studying at the Department?
Probably the point at which my dissertation stopped feeling like an assignment and started feeling like the beginning of something I genuinely wanted to keep researching. It ultimately became the route back to Oxford for my DPhil, so in hindsight that feels like quite an important moment.
The course never treated teaching as something simple or purely technical. It made me question assumptions I had built up over years of practice.