Teachers Learning: Professional Development and Education (Cambridge Teacher Series)

Teachers LearningProfessional Development and EducationThe Cambridge Teacher series

Teachers L

earnin

g Professional D

evelopment and E

ducation Colleen

McL

augh

lin

Other titles available:Teacher Education and Pedagogy: Theory, Policy and PracticeISBN 978-1-107-62655-3

This book is part of The Cambridge Teacher series, edited by senior colleagues at the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education, which has a longstanding tradition of involvement in high-quality, innovative teacher education and continuing professional development.

Teachers Learning focuses on teachers’ professional learning through accounts of recent enquiries. They provide evidence and arguments for teachers’ professional learning, supported by school leadership and in collaboration with universities and others, as the key to improving what happens in classrooms for the benefi t of pupils and their learning. The messages are not simple because the goals, processes and contexts are complex. However, at a time when policy rushes to fi nd easy solutions, to satisfy political imperatives, this book is a timely reminder that we do have good evidence and experience to share about the crucial importance and effectiveness of teachers learning.

The book includes the following topics:

• teachers learning

• the relationship between teachers’ learning and pupil progress

• the role of professional learning in determining the profession’s future

• creating refl exive communities of enquiry through partnerships

• enquiry-based professional learning across the career course: developments in Scotland

• teacher change and changing teachers via professional development

• values–practice dissonance in teachers’ professional learning orientations.

Teachers LearningProfessional Development and EducationThe Cambridge Teacher seriesColleen McLaughlin

978

1110

7618

69

5 M

CL

AU

GH

LIN

TE

AC

HE

RS

LE

AR

NIN

G C

M Y

K

Edited by Colleen McLaughlin

WORKING

WITH

Teachers Learning Professional development and education The Cambridge Teacher series

Edited by Colleen McLaughlin

WORKINGWITH

!"#$%&' () *+&,)%-&. / 0%)-- Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, S ã o Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City

Cambridge University Press 1 e Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK

www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107618695

© Cambridge University Press 2013

1 is publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2013

Printed in the United Kingdom by Printondemand-worldwide, Peterborough

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-107-61869-5 Paperback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

iii

Contents

List of contributors v Foreword: Mary James (University of Cambridge) vi Acknowledgements viii Editor’s introduction: Colleen McLaughlin ix

Chapter 1 Learning and teaching: are they by any chance related? 1 John MacBeath (University of Cambridge)

Chapter 2 ! e role of professional learning in determining the profession’s future 21 Philippa Cordingley (Centre for the Use of Research and Evidence in Education)

Chapter 3 Creating re" exive communities of enquiry: experiences of professional development partnerships between schools, local authorities and a university 32 Richard Byers (University of Cambridge) Angela Scott (Eastern Leadership Centre) Vivien Rosier (Essex Local Authority)

Chapter 4 Developing teachers, schools and systems: partnership approaches 52 David Frost (University of Cambridge)

Chapter 5 Enquiry-based professional learning across the career course: developments in Scotland 70 Moira Hulme (University of Glasgow)

Chapter 6 Teacher change and changing teachers via professional development 93 V. Darleen Opfer (RAND Education)David Pedder (University of Leicester)

Contentsiv

Chapter 7 Values–practice dissonance in teachers’ professional learning orientations 119 David Pedder (University of Leicester) V. Darleen Opfer (RAND Education)

Index 143

v

List of contributors

Richard Byers Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, UK

Philippa Cordingley Chief Executive of the Centre for the Use of Research and Evidence in Education (CUREE), UK

David Frost Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, UK

Moira Hulme Lecturer in Education Research, University of Glasgow, UK

Mary James Professor of Education, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, UK

John MacBeath Professor of Education, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, UK

Colleen McLaughlin Professor of Education, University of Sussex, UK

V. Darleen Opfer Director RAND Education and Distinguished Chair in Education Policy, USA

David Pedder Professor of Education, University of Leicester, UK

Vivien Rosier Specialist Teacher Lead for Inservice Training, Special and Additional Educational Needs Provider Services, Essex Local Authority, UK

Angela Scott Service Leader for Special Educational Needs, Eastern Leadership Centre, UK

vi

Whatever else they may do, schools exist for the education of children and young people. In England, the aspirations for all schools are set out in Section 78 of the Education Act 2002, which states that schools should promote the ‘spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of pupils at the school and of society’ and prepare pupils at the school for ‘the opportun-ities, responsibilities and experiences of later life’. ! is grand ambition, " rst expressed in 1944, remains the legislative foundation of schooling to this day. Such goals, though well supported, are very challenging, especially for the teachers and school leaders who are expected to work for their fruition in increasing diverse contexts.

It is undeniable that background factors, such as those associated with the socio-economic status of pupils, continue to have a huge in# uence on pupil outcomes. However, the quality of teaching can make a di$ erence. Indeed studies in school e$ ectiveness indicate that, since within-school variation tends to be greater than between-school variation, it is important to focus e$ orts on improving the quality of teaching processes rather than constantly changing the structures of schooling. Unfortunately, this is a lesson that most politicians have failed to learn, probably because it is easier to imple-ment short-term measures with high visibility, such as creating new types of school, than it is to invest in longer-term and less visible provision for the professional development of teachers.

! e importance of investing in the professional development of teachers in order to promote better learning by pupils was a hallmark of the work of the Cambridge Institute of Education from the time when Joyce Skinner became its Director in 1974. She had contributed to the 1972 James Report that asserted the importance of close partnerships between practising teachers and teacher educators. In order to foster such partnerships, Joyce Skinner served on the county’s Education Committee and became academic secretary of the Universities’ Council for the Education of Teachers (UCET). ! is established a culture and tradition within the Institute that valued and

Foreword

Forewordvii

developed relationships with local authorities and schools in East Anglia and beyond. ! is in turn became the fertile soil in which a generation of researchers and teacher educators, working collaboratively with teachers, could innovate and grow the theory and practice of educational change. For many, within and beyond Cambridge, this is what the Cambridge Institute was notable for and became its principal and lasting legacy. When the Institute was incorporated into the University of Cambridge it formed part of the creative mix that now characterises the Faculty of Education.

! e chapters in this book, written by academics and researchers associated with this tradition, provide a testament to the enduring importance of the original vision. However, they are neither backward-looking nor " xed in a particular approach. ! rough accounts of recent enquiries, of various kinds, they provide evidence and argument for teachers’ professional learning, sup-ported by school leadership and in collaboration with universities and others, as the key to improving what happens in classrooms for the bene" t of pupils and their learning. ! e messages are not simple, because the goals, processes and contexts are complex. However, at a time when policy rushes to " nd easy solutions, to satisfy political imperatives, this book is a timely reminder that we do have good evidence and experience to share about the crucial import-ance and e# ectiveness of teachers learning. We need to pay great attention to this if we are genuinely concerned to promote the development of pupils at school and that of society.

Mary James Professor and Associate Director of Research, University of Cambridge

Faculty of Education President, British Educational Research Association

viii

Acknowledgements

I would like to give particular thanks to Mary Jane Drummond, who played a major part in reviewing and working as a co-editor with me. ! is collection would not have been possible without her.

ix

Editor’s introduction

Colleen McLaughlin

Teachers’ learning has never been so centre stage in educational policy and practice. Internationally and nationally, politicians, practitioners and researchers are emphasising the importance of teachers and their profes-sional development. An example from the UK is the Schools White Paper, ! e Importance of Teaching :

All the evidence from di! erent education systems around the world shows that the most important factor in determining how well children do is the quality of teachers and teaching. " e best education systems in the world draw their teachers from among the top graduates and train them rigorously and e! ectively, focus-ing on classroom practice. " ey then make sure that teachers receive e! ective professional development throughout their career, with opportunities to observe and work with other teachers, and appropriate training for leadership positions. (DfE 2010 : 9)

Another example comes from the report of the second international Teacher Summit, held in the USA in May 2012 , published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD):

" e kind of education needed today requires teachers to be high-level knowledge workers who constantly advance their own professional knowledge as well as that of their profession. Teachers need to be agents of innovation not least because innov-ation is critically important for generating new sources of growth through improved e# ciency and productivity. (Schleicher 2012 : 36)

" e language and emphasis are subtly di! erent in these quotations, which is interesting in itself, but there is a consensus that teachers’ learning is neces-sary for the development of educational practice. " is has not always been so. " e new – and welcome – policy focus on teachers’ professional develop-ment appears to be driven by international comparisons; much of the lan-guage used demonstrates a concern with e# ciency and performance. " ere are di! erent understandings of what is meant by professional development in the reports cited above, with an emphasis in the British policy document on

Colleen McLaughlinx

teaching rather than learning, and vice versa in the OECD document. ! ese di" erences re# ect continuing current debates about the nature and processes of teacher learning, and the contexts in which it is most worthwhile – debates that are the substantive themes of the chapters that follow.

! e book arises from the longstanding concern and tradition in what is now the Faculty of Education in the University of Cambridge for involvement in high-quality, innovative, initial teacher education and continuing profes-sional development. ! e focus on initial teacher education is the substance of a companion volume edited by Michael Evans (Evans 2013 ), whereas the present book focuses on the lifelong, professional learning of teachers. In this chapter some alternative models of teacher learning are examined, as is the history of professional development in the UK, with a particular emphasis on Cambridge and East Anglia.

Changing thinking about teachers’ learning

In the 1970s the need for teachers to continue learning beyond their ini-tial preparatory period was not widely accepted or highly valued. ! ere were opportunities for full-time secondments to institutions of higher edu-cation, where teachers went, usually for a year, to study for a diploma or master’s degree, chosen to meet their individual interests. When the teach-ers returned to their schools, they were rarely invited to disseminate their learning beyond their own classrooms, but were simply acknowledged to have bene$ tted as individuals . In the late 1970s the thinking behind this approach began to change (Morley 1994 ). In 1978 teacher development programmes began to be seen as meeting needs identi$ ed by schools and headteachers, as well as bene$ tting individual teachers. New forms and structures were established to meet these needs in a time of rapid change in educational policy. New acronyms and structures emerged, such as GRIST (Grant Related In-Service Training), INSET (In-Service Training) and LEATAGS (Local Education Authority Training Grant Schemes). ! is approach to professional development was o% en led by local authorities and based in local teachers’ centres.

At the same time Lawrence Stenhouse ( 1975 ) was developing and articu-lating a model of school-based curriculum development and ‘ extended pro-fessionalism’ that had lifelong teacher learning and research at its heart .

Editor’s introductionxi

Two people who were part of this tradition at the University of East Anglia , John Elliott and Nigel Norris, explain the thinking thus in their scholarly evaluation of Stenhouse’s important contribution to this ! eld:

[B]ecause it was the teacher who held the keys to the laboratory, it was the teacher who could mount educational experiments in the classroom, it was the teacher who would, maybe with the help of others, marshal and interpret the evidence and it was the teacher who had to learn from the experience of classroom action research if genuine and sustainable educational improvement were to be possible. (Elliott and Norris 2012 : 3)

In this then radical reconceptualisation, professional development was not an occasional event driven by an individual teacher’s enthusiasm but an essential element of all teachers’ practice, focused on understanding learn-ing and teaching in the classroom through a process of systematic, critical inquiry made public (Stenhouse 1981 ). Stenhouse argued that ‘we are con-cerned with the development of a sensitive and self-critical subjective per-spective and not with the aspiration to unattainable objectivity’ ( 1975 : 157). He saw teachers researching their practice as fundamental to educational change; he placed the locus of change in the classroom, not at the periph-ery of the educational system nor with policy-makers. " is is of course the antithesis of the top-down policy drives we have seen in education in the last decade. He argued that ‘the best means of development is not by clarifying ends but by analysing practice’ (Stenhouse 1975 : 72).

Stenhouse’s ideas travelled between the University of East Anglia and the Institute of Education (which later became incorporated into the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education ). John Elliott , who was responsible for developing the tools with which to implement Stenhouse’s ideas, and other key thinkers worked in both places. " e core principles of research as part of teacher learning, focusing on teachers’ own problems and concerns and discussing ideas in groups which would critically examine them became the cornerstones of provision for teachers both within the Faculty and in its out-posts. Richard Byers and David Frost weave these principles through their chapters in this book, although clearly the original ideas have since been developed.

In the 1980s there was another major shi# in policy: the 1988 Education Reform Act . As a result of this highly controversial and contested Act, school-based in-service training days for teachers became a legal require-ment for maintained schools; these days were known as ‘Baker days’ a# er

Colleen McLaughlinxii

Kenneth Baker, the then Secretary of State for Education. ! is new require-ment was the beginning of a statutory model of professional development for teachers, which has since become acceptable and institutionalised. It was a long way from the model proposed by Stenhouse, and the language o" en used to describe it very far from his intentions, but it did introduce a notion that teachers should continue to learn about learning and teaching. It chal-lenged the long-held notion that professional development was something for the young, the novice or the bo# n. ! is emphasis on teachers’ continu-ing professional development has continued, as can be seen in the quota-tions at the beginning of this chapter. Now the rhetoric of much educational policy is that teacher professional development is central to high-quality education. ! e debate about what is meant by that and what form it should take is central to this book. What views are there of teacher development in recent years?

In a review for the Scottish government, Menter et al. (2010) identi$ ed four ‘in% uential paradigms’ of teacher professionalism: ‘the e! ective teacher, the re" ective teacher, the enquiring teacher and the transformative teacher’. ! e e! ective teacher model $ ts well with a nationally prescribed curriculum and a national assessment system. In this model the teacher’s skills, knowledge and competences are tightly prescribed: ‘! e emphases are on technical accom-plishment and on measurement. It is the model for an age of accountability and performativity’ (p. 21). It can perhaps be seen as close to the current state of education in the UK, particularly in England, where, over the last 30 years, what should be taught to students and teachers, and how, have both been increasingly prescribed by central government.

! e re" ective teacher model exempli$ es a less restricted view of teacher professionalism. It emerged in the UK in the last part of the twentieth cen-tury and was based on the work of John Dewey ( 1897 ), with his view of teach-ers as active decision-makers, and more recently Donald Schon ( 1983 ). It has also been taken up by Andrew Pollard ( 2008 ) in his writing on the re% ective teacher. ! is model has a cycle of learning at its centre, ‘planning, making provision, acting, collecting data, analysing the data, evaluating and re% ect-ing and then planning the next step’ (Menter et al. 2010 : 22). A study by Furlong et al. ( 2000 ) found that 70 per cent of teacher education programmes based in or led by universities and colleges were informed by some version of this model. ! e third model, the enquiring teacher , is not dissimilar to the re% ective teacher but Menter et al. note that ‘Re% ective teaching does not in itself imply a research orientation on the part of the teacher, although the model may be strongly in% uenced by a set of ideas that do promote just that

Editor’s introductionxiii

conception’ (Menter et al. 2010 : 23). ! e ideas of Stenhouse ( 1975 ) underpin this model, which involves teachers in systematic enquiry into their class-room practice as a form of professional and curriculum development. Menter et al. ( 2010 ) describe how these ideas have been taken up by universities work-ing in partnerships with schools and colleges and by government initiatives. Teacher research features in initial teacher education programmes as well as in approaches to professional development.

! e " nal model is the transformative teacher , which builds on the previous two but has an ‘activist’ element most recently exempli" ed in the writings of Sachs ( 2003 ), who argues that teachers’ responsibilities go beyond peda-gogy; they should be contributing to social change and preparing their pupils to contribute to change in society. ! ose who see teaching as a transforma-tive activity, such as Zeichner ( 2009 ) and Cochran-Smith ( 2004 ) suggest that challenge to the status quo is not only to be expected but is a necessary part of bringing about a more equitable education system, where inequalities in society begin to be addressed and where progressive social change can be stimulated. It is worth noting that the work of those promoting the enquiring or re# ective or researching teacher also shares this emphasis on social justice. Elliott ( 1991 ), for example, has argued that research by teachers should be informed by concerns for increasing democracy and social justice. So there are di$ erent emphases and views of what is meant by the two terms ‘profes-sional’ and ‘development’. ! ese di$ erent conceptions are mirrored in the chapters that follow.

Important themes

! e chapters in this book focus on two main themes: " rst, those describing and interrogating developments in the Cambridge ‘tradition’, as David Frost labels it, in the Scottish context (Moira Hulme’s chapter) and in the global context (John MacBeath’s chapter). ! e second major theme in this book is research into teacher learning and development. ! is is a " eld that has grown a great deal in the last three decades, with a noticeable increase in empir-ical research. Philippa Cordingley, Darleen Opfer and Dave Pedder report on major reviews of the state of the " eld, showing how many of these studies have challenged conventional thinking about teachers’ learning; they illus-trate a growing sophistication in theorising about how teachers learn. ! ere is also some interesting evidence in these chapters on the most bene" cial locations for teachers’ learning and the forms it should take.

Colleen McLaughlinxiv

! e chapters raise questions about the relationship between teachers, their learning and the following:

the conception of the teacher’s role and profession; • knowledge and knowledge creation; • other organisations in the educational landscape; • colleagues and the school; • issues of power, status and development. •

The conception of the teacher’s role and profession

In her chapter outlining developments in Scotland, Moira Hulme focuses on what an emphasis on teachers’ learning has meant in that country. ! e developments and dilemmas found there echo similar ones in many other countries around the world. One of these is whether preparation for teaching is seen as a process of training or apprenticeship, or as the development of the ‘ extended professional’ that Hoyle ( 1975 ) and Stenhouse ( 1975 ) proposed. ! e authors of the studies in this book argue for the latter, a view of teacher devel-opment as a scholarly, lifelong study of both theory and practice. ! is view is only slowly gaining general acceptance, as global competition and inter-national comparisons reinforce the value of teachers undertaking in-depth professional study post-initial quali" cation. John MacBeath shows that this extended professionalism is also essential for e# ective pupil learning.

Knowledge and knowledge creation

Another theme running through several chapters is that teacher learning is most worthwhile when teachers are supported in generating knowledge about their own practice, which they share both locally and more widely. Research and inquiry are embedded in Moira Hulme’s account of Scottish standards and are central to John MacBeath’s and David Frost’s chapters. ! e Stenhousian notion of the teacher as researcher, generating knowledge through critical and public examination of classroom and school practice, seems to have become accepted. Donald McIntyre ( 2008 ), David Hargreaves ( 1999 ) and others argue, as does David Frost, that the generation of know-ledge by teachers is an important future goal in our educational systems. McIntyre and Hargreaves both challenged the nature and use of educational research and argued that instead of treating teachers as passive recipients of others’ research and knowledge, ‘one alternative is to treat practitioners themselves as the main (but not only) source for the creation of professional

Editor’s introductionxv

knowledge’ (Hargreaves 1999 : 125). ! e task of professional knowledge cre-ation is not a simple one; although it has been pursued in many contexts since Hargreaves " rst wrote about ‘the knowledge-creating school’, many problems remain. ! e conditions that support the task are examined and discussed by Darleen Opfer, Dave Pedder and Philippa Cordingley in their chapters. Indeed, the status of teacher-generated knowledge is still the sub-ject of a very necessary debate. Necessary because the integration of know-ledge about practice and theoretical knowledge is complex and the warrant for that research needs to be established. ! is debate will be very important in the future, especially in a context where rather simplistic notions of trans-ferring practice, and knowledge about practice, abound. It will require that we develop our thinking about the relationship between research and prac-tice and the status we give to it. What we see in Richard Byers’s, Philippa Cordingley’s, David Frost’s and John MacBeath’s accounts is the tremendous value for practice and theory of teacher involvement in creating knowledge about teaching and learning.

Other organisations in the educational landscape

! e relationship between teachers’ learning and other actors in the educa-tional system is another key factor discussed by several contributors. In the past the context for teacher learning was o# en outside the school, and driven by a variety of external agencies. Early professional development opportun-ities were o# en located in teachers’ centres or universities. Inquiry activities were o# en led by those based in universities or higher education institutes, although they were o# en ex-teachers. Philippa Cordingley concludes, as did Stenhouse ( 1975 ), that promoting professional learning within the school and leading that process are fundamental to e$ ective professional development. ! e school is the most suitable location for professional learning, and work on the agenda of teachers as well as on the agenda of schools and policy-makers is also important. ! e conclusion that Philippa Cordingley reaches about the need for both internal and external specialists is supported by Richard Byers. ! ey argue for teachers’ learning to be located in partnerships between those involved; in the cases described in their chapters these are universities and local authorities. ! e fast-changing landscape of the educational system and the demise of local authorities mean that schools and networks of schools are going to be the key actors. ! e valuable contributions of networks and com-munities of enquiry are discussed by Richard Byers, David Frost and John MacBeath. All characterise them as central to the development of teachers’

Colleen McLaughlinxvi

learning. ! e role of universities has been key to such work in the past and there are signs that universities are struggling to stay involved in teachers’ professional development, other than master’s courses in the UK. What uni-versities can bring in the best of partnerships is an expertise in research; a natural tendency to critically appraise and question; an ability to locate a question in a wider " eld of knowledge; and a position outside of the policy or school system. Having a model of teacher learning that consists mainly of a focus on what works and that is led only by government organisations would be an unfortunate reduction of professional development. ! e recent developments in the arena of professional development in England may be the unintended outcomes of a more ‘managerialist’ approach to both school and higher education planning, rather than a conscious decision to separate two partners who have lived well together for a good many years and whose union has been very productive.

! e current emphasis in English policy tends towards seeing all professional development as necessarily being school-based and school-led. E# ective pro-fessional learning needs to meet and address the needs of the school and its teachers – this is self-evident. However, this should not be a reductionist argument. It would be a mistake to ignore the outsider and not listen to the research evidence presented in this book about the necessity of having an external view which is wider than that of a single school. Dave Pedder and Darleen Opfer show how the orientations and value placed on partners and external conditions, as well as learning, are key factors in whether teachers engage in professional learning. ! ey also show the positive power of critic-ality and creating dissonance in helping teachers to see their classrooms and their practices di# erently.

Colleagues and the school

Collaboration between colleagues in schools is another arena for scrutiny and discussion identi" ed in the chapters that follow. Dave Pedder and Darleen Opfer identify this as a key orientation and argue that the values teachers hold in$ uence their learning greatly. ! e relationship between school-based inquiry or teachers’ learning and the rest of the school practice is a key theme, too. However, there is still a need to examine further and in more depth the optimum within-school conditions for teachers’ learning. Schools as presently constituted do not make collaboration or wide-ranging open-ended enquiry easy. Stenhouse argued that ‘the major barriers to teachers

Editor’s introductionxvii

assuming the role of researchers studying their own teaching in order to improve are psychological and social’ ( 1975 : 175). ! is is a fruitful area for further research .

Issues of power, status and development

David Frost argues in his chapter for teacher leadership of research and the agenda for research in schools. He makes this argument on the grounds of impact, democracy and the location of the locus of change with teachers. ! ese are essential, he writes, if teachers are to be treated as extended profes-sionals. ! e relationship between school improvement, teacher development work and control is not a simple one.

The challenges ahead

! ere are many challenges ahead if teachers’ learning is to continue to be rich, purposeful and e" ective, at classroom, school and network level, but the insights presented in this book suggest some # rm foundations for the future. One such challenge is to understand more about how conditions in schools and classrooms can best support teachers’ learning and communi-ties of critical enquiry. ! ere are obvious tensions between the discourses of ‘performativity’ and ‘managerialism’, which characterise current education policy, and the openness that is necessary for teachers to learn, but there are also opportunities in the new emphasis on teaching schools and increasing collaboration between schools. ! e tradition of democratic and emancipa-tory conceptualisations of professional development needs to be guarded and continued.

Another challenge is to remind ourselves of the psychological challenge that results from questioning one’s own practice, and, sometimes, # nding it wanting. In 1994 Mary Jane Drummond and I wrote about the fourth dimension of teachers’ learning: the emotional dimension. ‘What happens’, asked one of the teachers we worked with in the 1990s, ‘when you wish you’d never started learning?’ (Drummond and McLaughlin 1994 : 43). Her ques-tion is still relevant for teachers today. ! e dissonance and disturbance that accompany real learning can be especially painful in a climate of inspection, target-setting, performance management and high-stakes assessment. ! ere is an argument for taking this emotional dimension even more seriously than

Colleen McLaughlinxviii

in 1994. ! e tradition of supporting teachers’ learning at Cambridge was a stimulus for this book and I write in the hope that the tradition will develop and grow so that one day, as Stenhouse predicted: ‘It is teachers who in the end will change the world of the school by understanding it’ (Stenhouse 1981 ).

REFERENCES

Cochran-Smith , M. ( 2004 ) Walking the Road: Race, Diversity and Social Justice in Teacher Education. New York : Teachers College Press .

Department for Education (DfE) ( 2010 ) ! e Importance of Teaching: ! e Schools White Paper. London : ! e Stationery O" ce . Available at www.o" cial-documents.gov.uk.

Dewey , J. ( 1897 ) ‘ My Pedagogic Creed ’, School Journal 54 (January): 77–80. Drummond , M. J. and McLaughlin , C. ( 1994 ) ‘Teaching and Learning: ! e Fourth

Dimension’, in H. Bradley , C. Conner and G. Southworth (eds.), Developing Teachers, Developing Schools . London : David Fulton .

Elliott , J. ( 1991 ) Action Research for Educational Change . Buckingham : Open University Press .

Elliott , J. and Norris , N. ( 2012 ) Curriculum, Pedagogy and Educational Research: ! e Work of Lawrence Stenhouse. Abingdon : Routledge .

Evans , M. ( 2013 ) Teacher Education and Pedagogy: ! eory, Policy and Practice . Cambridge University Press .

Furlong , J. , Barton , L. , Miles , S. , Whiting , C. and Whitty , G. ( 2000 ) Teacher Education in Transition . Buckingham : Open University Press .

Hargreaves , D. ( 1999 ) ‘ ! e Knowledge-Creating School ’, British Journal of Educational Studies 47 (2): 122 – 44 .

Hoyle , E. ( 1975 ) ‘Professionality, Professionalism and Control in Teaching’, in V. Houghton et al. (eds.), Management in Education: ! e Management of Organizations and Individuals . London : Ward Lock Educational in association with Open University Press .

McIntyre , D. ( 2008 ) ‘Researching Schools’, in C. McLaughlin , K. Black-Hawkins and D. McIntyre , with A. Townsend , Networking Practitioner Research . Abingdon : Routledge .

Menter , I. , Hulme , M. , Elliott , D. and Lewin , J. ( 2010 ) Literature Review on Teacher Education in the 21st Century . Edinburgh : ! e Scottish Government .

Morley , G. ( 1994 ) ‘Recent Developments in In-service Education and Training for Teachers: Where Have We Been and Where Are We Going?’, in H. Bradley , C. Conner and G. Southworth (eds.), Developing Teachers, Developing Schools . London : David Fulton .

Pollard , A. ( 2008 ) Re" ective Teaching: Evidence-Informed Professional Practice , 3rd edn. London : Continuum .

Sachs , J. ( 2003 ) ! e Activist Teaching Profession. Buckingham : Open University Press .

Editor’s introductionxix

Schleicher , A. (ed.) ( 2012 ) Preparing Teachers and Developing School Leaders for the 21st Century: Lessons from around the World . Paris: OECD Publishing .

Schon , D. ( 1983 ) ! e Re" ective Practitioner: How Professionals ! ink in Action . London : Temple Smith .

Stenhouse , L . ( 1975 ) Introduction to Curriculum Research and Development . London : Heinemann .

( 1981 ) ‘ What Counts as Research?’ , British Journal of Educational Studies 29 (2): 103 – 14 . Zeichner , K. ( 2009 ) Teacher Education and the Struggle for Social Justice . Abingdon :

Routledge .

1

1 Learning and teaching: are they by any chance related?

John MacBeath, University of Cambridge

Teachers teach and children learn. It is as simple as that. ! is statement from a previous Chief Inspector in England is undoubtedly true, as long as one does not infer a causal connection. A more interesting statement would be the corollary – teachers learn and children teach, which, although not neces-sarily a causal relationship either, is also true in many circumstances.

Children, particularly the very young, frequently engage in teaching their peers or younger siblings, o" en their teddy bears or dolls, and sometimes even their parents. Older children may teach their peers, in classrooms in which teachers encourage such collaboration, and senior students may also be enlisted in tutoring their junior colleagues, as teaching someone else proves to be one of the best ways of learning yourself.

As teachers learn more, they see increased opportunities for pupils to teach one another and for teachers to learn from the power of peer interactions. Teachers may also acquire skills and gain knowledge in areas where children or young people are more informed or expert than they are.

It requires a measure of self-con# dence, and a degree of humility, for teach-ers to be able to say that they learn from their pupils. Historically, before the information revolution, this was not an issue. Teachers were the repositories of knowledge, some of which they transmitted or ‘delivered’ to children who knew nothing or very little. School learning was a relatively simple process of those who know telling those who don’t know.

In this model, the knowledge which a teacher will one day impart to others starts with his or her initiation into a subject domain and over time, perhaps over ten years or more, the essential building blocks lead ‘ruthlessly cumula-tively’ (Pinker 2002 ) towards what is known as ‘higher’ education. ! is fur-ther induction into knowing may perhaps last for a further # ve to ten years of study of the discipline before the erstwhile student returns to ‘pass on’ his or her laboriously acquired knowledge to the next generation. ! is is known as the ‘ cannibalistic’ function of education, a system avariciously consuming

John MacBeath2

its own products . ! e most highly quali" ed expert teachers may have lived most of their lives in classrooms, in a world of ‘virtual’ reality.

One perennial problem is that these neophyte teachers are ‘insiders’ (Hoy and Murphy 2001 ), their views of teaching shaped by their own experience, so that they return to the places of their past, complete with memories and preconceptions o# en una$ ected by their higher education or training col-lege experience. ! ey may feel they have no need to ‘discover’ the classroom or to see it with new eyes, because they are already too familiar with the territory – having spent the last dozen or so years of their lives in similar places (Pajares 1993 ).

Nor, argues O’Connell Rust ( 1994 ), is pre-service education e$ ective in disturbing those inert ideas. He claims that neophyte teachers ‘most probably leave our programmes with their deeply held beliefs intact, ready to teach as they learned during their apprenticeships of observation’ (p. 215).

In an age in which there were few if any alternative sources of knowledge for children, teachers’ specialised knowledge was a rare and valued commod-ity, largely de" ning their professional status. Combined with a view of ‘what knowledge is of most worth’ (Spencer 1919 ), science, mathematics, language and literature, enshrined in a ‘curriculum’, have remained substantially unchallenged since the trivium and quadrivium of the Middle Ages .

! e main problem is that in the second decade of the third millennium not only is pride of place for the sacrosanct school ‘subjects’ less and less self-evident, but also in the interim we have found far more e$ ective ways of acquiring knowledge than the long-drawn-out transmission model – a painfully slow apprenticeship, costly and ine% cient. For example, studying French for four periods a week for " ve years leads, for many, to a low level of competence and facility with language, allowing someone to say ‘I “did” it for " ve years at school but I’m not very good at it.’ ! e commercial promise to teach a language within two weeks may be somewhat exaggerated, but it does point to the ine% ciency of protracted timetabled learning, each episodic 45 minutes disconnected not only from what happens next but from the psy-chological and emotional life of children and young people.

Does the same systemic longevity apply to mathematics or history? As some unschooled adults have found when applying to a higher education institu-tion, an intensive two or three weeks immersion in mathematics can ‘cover’ the curriculum more e$ ectively than the long-drawn-out, fragmented school experience, given the motivation to engage in study. If mathematics were not a compulsory subject in secondary school and a student ‘dropped’ maths

Learning and teaching: are they by any chance related?3

only to discover at age 17 that it was important or desirable, it could at that point be engaged with greater commitment, relevance and understanding.

‘Doing school’ is an apt description of what many children and young people experience in their classrooms. When there are opportunities to ‘escape from the classroom’, as Robert Mackenzie entitled his seminal book in 1965, travelling insightfully in di! erent natural and social milieux can extend not only children’s horizons but also those of their teachers. In less defended territory – away from the school – teachers are o" en able to listen to young people without the impatient curriculum continually tugging at their coat sleeves. Here too, teachers may learn more about themselves, as well as about their pupils: they may # nd these unfamiliar contexts both personally and pro-fessionally enhancing.

As children become more knowledgeable than their teachers, and discover alternative pathways to knowing, there is an inevitable shi" in the power balance in the relationship between those who know and those who don’t know. ‘Who dares to teach must never cease to learn’, wrote J. C. Dana over a century ago (quoted in Vanderbilt and Mumford 1957). Where children know more about some things (perhaps a lot of things) than their teachers, the latter require a measure of humility and willingness to learn from those younger, smaller and less powerful than themselves. As the information explosion accelerates and paths of entry to it become more and more access-ible, the role of the teacher shi" s from knowledge (or information) provider to mediator and learner. Mayer et al. ( 2012 ) write that in Australia:

Challenging curriculum expectations and more diverse learners mean that teach-ers have to be more sophisticated in their understanding of the e! ects of context and learner variability on teaching and learning. Instead of implementing set rou-tines, teachers need to become ever more skilful in their ability to evaluate teach-ing situations and develop teaching responses that can be e! ective under di! erent circumstances. (p. 115)

Teachers can learn a lot more from their students than simply things that children know. $ e classroom is a living laboratory of human behaviour. Classrooms have provided psychologists and sociologists with a # eld of study for decades. $ ese privileged observers are a! orded the luxury of detach-ment, allowed to watch, analyse and document the emotional life of class-rooms, the rivalries, collusion, power struggles, strategic task avoidance, subversive ploys as well as learning moments, % ashes of insight, congratula-tion and reward. Much of this is known intuitively to teachers, but it can also

John MacBeath4

pass teachers by, too ‘on task’ to see the microcosm of human life which they struggle to manage and keep herding in the same direction. Writing about leaders, Hesselbein ( 1996 ) argues that their distinguishing strength is the ability to ‘push themselves’ out of their comfort zone into risky territory:

! e most notable trait of great leaders, certainly of great change leaders, is their quest for learning. ! ey show an exceptional willingness to push themselves out of their own comfort zones, even a" er they have achieved a great deal. ! ey continue to take risks, even when there is no obvious reason for them to do so. And they are open to people and ideas even at a time in life when they might reasonably think – because of their success – that they know everything. (p. 78)

5 Ws plus H

! e 5Ws plus H – the why , what , when , where , who and how – may be applied both to teachers’ teaching and to teachers’ learning. ! e why of teaching would be generally regarded as unproblematic, but the why of learning less so. Why, a" er a long professional induction period and the acquisition of a licence to teach, should teachers not put away childish things, act as authoritative, informed adults and allow their own intellectual faculties a well-earned sab-batical? ! e answer ought to be self-evident, but historically teachers have been allowed to retire into their classrooms and to do, year a" er year, what they have always done, sometimes with sustained apparent success. ‘If it ain’t broke, why # x it?’ is one of the most well-rehearsed and most misleading of nostrums.

Yet there is a well-known curve of engagement that shows a rising enthusi-asm and commitment during the # rst three or four years of teaching, $ atten-ing out over the next three or four years, then going into a steep decline as the joy of teaching and learning gradually dissipates. It is clearly important for the well-being of all humans that they experience satisfaction and reward for their endeavours, that they experience an enhancement of their agency and relish the challenge of new opportunities to make a di% erence. Is this not particularly crucial for teachers? But where do they # nd the new stimulus, challenge or source of excitement ? Where and when do they encounter what Csikszentmihalyi ( 1990 ) terms the ‘$ ow’ experience, when new challenges and new skills meet?

Csikszentmihalyi’s conception of ‘$ ow’ is of a quite di% erent order from the more common-sense meaning of teachers ‘in full $ ow’, which describes an expository style that allows pupils to dri" o% mentally and emotionally


to another place. For Csikszentmihalyi , the ! ow experience is de" ned by the union, the happy combination, of the teacher’s experience and that of his or her pupils. To test this he invented a spot-check instrument, which, at any given moment, could be " lled out by pupils and the teacher. Its dozen or so items o# er a semantic di# erential between boredom and engagement, pas-sive versus active, time passing quickly versus time passing slowly, thinking about what is being taught versus thinking about other things.

When a teacher compares his or her judgements with those of his or her pupils, it can be a rude awakening to confront the disconnect between the teacher’s teaching and children’s learning. $ ere is a de" nition of classrooms – 30 children watching an adult at work – which may be too uncomfortably close to the mark. But data from a spot check can, more constructively, o# er a sig-ni" cant learning opportunity. A primary school teacher in a Cambridgeshire school takes time out at periodic intervals to re! ect on and discuss what and how children are learning and how it connects with her own judgements as to their ! ow experiences. She set aside a three-hour re! ective space, the whole of a school morning, for discussing the nature of learning and teaching and the meeting point between them. $ ese 10- and 11-year-old children discussed the high and low points of their classroom experiences, and fed back to the teacher what was helping and hindering their learning, with suggestions as to ways in which she could adapt her teaching strategies. $ ey discussed who they found it most helpful to learn with (not always their friends), o% en dif-ferent classmates depending on the subject. Despite 15 years of ‘doing school’, the opportunity to do teaching and learning at the same time, alongside her pupils, was, she said, a profoundly a# ecting experience.

$ ese occasions for re! ection led to a developmental sequence in her class-room, which progressed through the following stages:

the teacher delivering the curriculum; • the teacher and pupils discussing the purposes and objectives of learning; • pupils devising their own criteria for achievement; • pupils assessing their own and others’ work; • pupils determining the next steps in their learning; • pupils acting as learning partners. • Teachers have been described as ‘ambassadors from the world of knowledge

to the kingdom of the child’, but what are they ambassadors for, we may ask, in a situation where the nature of the skills they bring to that role is continuously being recast and will continue to be reshaped over the next decades. Applying the framework of the 5Ws plus H may take us nearer to understanding the need for a reappraisal of teaching, learning and teacher leadership.

John MacBeath6

The what

! e what of teaching has, in the past, been the de" ning characteristic of the teacher. Maths teachers do maths and French teachers do French. What the expert teacher might have been inclined to learn, if anything, would have been in terms of developing knowledge within his or her own subject. In some secluded havens teachers may happily continue year a# er year passing on their acquired knowledge to generation a# er generation of receptive chil-dren. In less privileged contexts, however, teachers have found themselves having to learn a great deal more about pedagogy, about child development, about the roots of behaviour, special and complex needs, sanctions and motivation, the nature of ‘family’ and neighbourhood life, social contexts, the world of other social agencies, the world of policy-making and politics.

Sharing and discussing students’ work within and across subjects is a powerful form of teacher learning. With a focus on quality, and criteria for judgements of quality, it brings to light unspoken assumptions about what makes a good piece of work, about the challenges inherent in assessment, raising deeper questions about the rationale for marks out of ten, percentages, grades, comment-only marking and the nature of teacher comments that demotivate or inspire .

As Shulman wrote in a review of research literature in 1999 , research knowledge of subject matter and even pedagogical knowledge are but parts of the knowledge base needed by teachers in the schools of today and the future. Work with a range of stakeholders, including parents, families and other social agencies, presupposes a more than nodding acquaintance with the broader social and moral purposes of education and the scope and limi-tations of information and technology.

The where and the when

As the where and the when of children’s learning extend beyond the class-room walls to a range of ‘construction sites’ (Weiss and Fine 2001 ), it is time to pay attention to the where and when of teachers’ learning, providing and organising the environments most conducive to the growth of professional understanding and expertise.

In his 1987 critique of pre-service education for teachers, Schon pointed to the de" ciencies in the prevalent model of knowledge acquisition, focus-ing his objections on the traditional forms of professional preparatory pro-grammes. He argued that this emphasis on building academic knowledge,


in the academy, for later application in the workplace, does not re! ect the processes he observed in the learning of skilled, re! ective practitioners.

In Scotland the introduction of the Chartered Teacher programme was designed to create a pedagogic career pathway which did not take teachers out of the classroom and into more administrative or managerial activities (for which they were o" en ill-suited), while at the same time depriving chil-dren of some of the most gi" ed of teachers. Continuing professional learning was at the epicentre of the rationale for this policy:

In every sphere of his or her work the Chartered Teacher will be reviewing practice, searching for improvements, turning to reading and research for fresh insights and relating these to the classroom and the school. He or she will bring to his or her work more sophisticated forms of critical scrutiny, demonstrate a heightened capacity for self-evaluation and a marked disposition to be innovative and to improvise (Scottish Executive 2002 : 5).

‘More sophisticated forms of critical scrutiny’ here de# ne the Chartered Teacher, but in an occupation that strives to be regarded as ‘professional’ it should arguably be the de# ning characteristic of all who aspire to be ambassadors to the changing world of childhood. What is inherent in such a scenario is belief in one’s own e$ cacy. A teacher with strong beliefs in his or her own e$ cacy will be resili-ent, able to solve problems and, most importantly, able and willing to learn from experience and to review that experience within a broader research-informed frame. % e concept of self-e$ cacy is linked to the concept of agency, a funda-mental human capacity which can either be enhanced or diminished by experi-ence, depending on how one frames and reframes it (Frost 2006 ).

In England, the Conservative Secretary of State Kenneth Baker is cred-ited with the invention of days set aside during the school year for teachers to engage with their colleagues in reviewing and rethinking their practice. % ese ‘ Baker days ’ can be professionally ful# lling or deeply frustrating . What has become increasingly apparent in evaluations of teacher education pro-grammes is that teachers develop competences in di& erent ways and in dif-ferent settings. Teacher learning is a process of participation in sociocultural practices, of which formal teacher education is but one, and not always the best, example (Huizen et al. 2005 ). In a two-year study in Singapore it was found that ongoing and sustained professional development in designing and implementing authentic assessment practices was more e& ective than ad hoc, one- or two-day workshops (Tan 2011 ). % is study showed that building teachers’ capacity to improve the quality of classroom assessment, through engaging in assessment tasks in English, science and mathematics classrooms, brought about enhanced appreciation and fresh insights. Furthermore, there

John MacBeath8

were also signi! cant improvements in the quality of student work, in response to the higher intellectual demands of the assessment tasks .

Teachers also learn informally and change their thinking through sharing with other people in contexts in which they are confronted with diversities of culture, beliefs and experiences. Research suggests that teacher education needs to provide structured opportunities for such encounters, for example through discussion and interactions with families and through critical re" ec-tion on, and challenges to, traditional conceptions of teacher and learner roles, subject matter and pedagogy (Kidd et al. 2008 ; OECD 2010 ; Tatto 1999 ). Moreover, the professional development of teachers needs to extend to the community they serve. Novice teachers, given opportunities for some forms of community ! eld experience, develop the kinds of knowledge, skills and dis-positions they need to be successful in contexts of diversity (Zeichner 2006 ).

Extra-curricular activities, ! eld trips, exchanges with other countries and escapes from the classroom provide opportunities for children and their teachers to discuss learning in a new light and to recognise that it is not something that simply occurs in classrooms or as a consequence of being taught. # e Children’s University in England and Wales (CU) exempli! es this principle, as children and teachers together gain new insights into the nature and compass of learning. Many of the CU activities take place in ‘learning destinations’ outside of schools, in museums, art galleries, exhi-bitions, stately homes, theatres, airports, docks or commercial enterprises. For teachers it has proved energising to witness children’s engagement with learning in informal sites when o$ ered the freedom to explore without the constraints of tests and targets. For teachers there have been opportunities to re" ect on children’s learning and their own teaching, expanding the bound-aries of their understanding and pedagogy .

In Hong Kong, where 15 per cent of the curriculum must now be devoted to ‘Other Learning Experience’ (OLE), teachers attest to a profound impact on their knowledge and professional expertise when they work with young people in unfamiliar or less tightly structured and prescriptive contexts than the classroom, such as in trips to Macau or Singapore or mainland China. It is, as in other examples, a liberating experience not to be cast in the teacher/teller role but to be free not to know, not to be the expert or the ultimate authority.

I suddenly felt I wasn’t the teacher any more. Here we were travelling and learning together, sharing our thinking and constantly surprising each other with what we knew and didn’t know. It was embarrassing at ! rst not to know the answers and for children to explain to me when I didn’t understand but I soon became comfortable with it because I got so much from how much it empowered them to know more than their teacher. (Unpublished evaluation of Other Learning Experiences)


! is testimony from a Chinese teacher has close parallels with an anecdote from a Scottish headteacher, invited into a " rst-year secondary class which had been studying French for only a month or so. Dick Lynas, the head, was a towering " gure, six and a half feet of awe-inspiring authority, casting a long shadow wherever he ventured around the school. In reply to the French teacher’s invitation for Dick to visit the class and talk to the pupils in their new-found language, his response was, ‘But I know no French. Can’t speak a word of it.’ ‘! at’s why I want you to come’, the teacher replied, ‘so these kids can see that they are more able than their big powerful headteacher.’ To his credit Dick Lynas accepted the invitation and was, in his own words, ‘shown up’ and ‘embarrassed’. It not only gained him new respect, but proved to be a powerful learning experience for that group of 12-year-olds.

One of the key factors in the power di# erential between students and their teachers is in respect of the teacher’s subject expertise. As David Frost writes, drawing on experience in the International Teacher Leadership study , ‘! ere is a change in the dynamic when the di# erential in subject-related expertise is taken out of the equation’ ( 2011 ). Relationships between teachers and stu-dents become more respectful and collaborative when the subject dimension is removed, or in contexts other than the classroom.

The who

! e who question is a vital determinant of teachers’ motivation and engage-ment. ! ere is, again, common ground with pupils, whose engagement and achievement rely heavily on who they go to school (Gray et al. 1996 ). Professional learning is also a social activity, a principle observed in the prac-tice of peer collaboration.

When teachers are asked to prioritise among potential sources of learning, studies in Scotland and Hong Kong show remarkable similarities (MacBeath et al. 2009 ). In both contexts teachers were most likely to cite colleagues, middle managers, senior managers, pupils and external providers or advis-ers, in that order. Teachers learn most from other teachers. ! is is because they can identify with others who share the reality of classroom life and who do not embody any authority threat. ! is is most likely to occur when there are no hidden agendas, no di# erential power bases, and when the premise is improvement, rather than accountability (Swa$ eld 2007 ).

‘One becomes human only in the midst of others’ (Asante 1998: 200) or, as a teacher once remarked during an international workshop, ‘the shortest route towards our own selves takes the long way round – through others’.

John MacBeath10

! is teacher was implicitly referring not only to the self-re" ecting images she had captured in her encounter with colleagues from other countries but also to ways in which her self-e# cacy had been enhanced by perceiving dormant qualities of knowing and being. International partnerships, writes Bhabha (2006) ‘dwell in’ spaces of mutual inter-est , reminding us of the etymological roots of that word – ‘betweenness’.

From an intercultural perspective, $ nding self through others occurs when teachers enter into a dialogic encounter with new partners on their grounds and they on teachers’ home ground. Nowhere was this better exempli$ ed than in the three-year, seven-country Carpe Vitam study, in which teachers and senior school leaders travelled, physically, intellectually and emotionally, to Cambridge, Copenhagen, Innsbruck and Athens, at each stage of the jour-ney seeing things anew, challenging long-held preconceptions, reframing their world-view. ! ese border crossings took teachers not only beyond the border-lands of their own subject, but beyond their own classrooms and their own schools . At each stage in their international journey teachers were confronted with di% erent ways of seeing and talking about learning. At a recent conference in Poland, the conference organiser, Grzegorz Ma, described a journey from Krakow to Ohio, which he said ‘changed my life’. He could not return to what he had done before because he was now seeing himself, his practice, his school and his students with new eyes. In Iceland there is a saying which translates as the ‘visitor’s-eye view’. In your own home you may not see what the visitor sees, but when you return from a long absence you are able to enjoy that external perspective, seeing things, as it were, for the $ rst time.

‘Our sight is so su% used with knowing’, writes Abraham Heschel , ‘we do not know what we see. We have to learn to know what we see rather than seeing what we already know’ ( 1962 : 19). How to make the familiar unfamil-iar requires some form of intellectual travel, but it also implies an ability to confront and supersede some of the psychological, cultural and structural barriers which stand in the way of these kinds of seeing and learning.

Inhibitions in seeing and learning

What are the barriers that inhibit this intellectual awakening of thinking and feeling? Geert Hofstede ( 1991 ) identi$ es $ ve potential constraints that may also serve as stimuli for changing minds and institutional practices. ! e $ rst of these, power distance , is perhaps the most debilitating, and yet potentially liberating, of in" uences on teacher learning. Comparing di% erent cultures,


Hofstede contrasts the openness and ‘! atarchy’ of Nordic countries with some Eastern countries, for example Japan, where a senior member would lose face if questioned or corrected by a junior member of the organisation. " e unequal distribution of power may be simply accepted as endemic in some cultures and religious traditions, but its inevitability may also be open to challenge as it becomes understood as inhibiting children’s and teachers’ learning. In Peter Senge’s ( 1990 ) treatise on organisational learning disabil-ities, pre-eminent place is given to the inhibiting posture: ‘I am my position.’ As people de# ne themselves by their status, they deny themselves and others opportunities for boundary crossing: ‘I am the director’, ‘I am the principal’, ‘I am a basic-rank teacher’ (as they are called in Hong Kong), ‘I am [only] a pupil’.

" e second of Hofstede’s dimensions is individualism versus collectiv-ism . To what extent does the emphasis on the individual constrain learn-ing, growth and in! uence? In this respect, greater constraints on pupil and teacher learning are found in countries of the West, where the cult of the individual increases competitiveness and exclusivity rather than collegiality and collaboration. " ere is a Chinese saying, ‘all of us is better than one of us’ – a principle so o$ en breached in organisational structures, conventions, assumptions, assessment and evaluation.

" is touches on Hofstede’s third dimension, masculinity versus femininity , as collegiality and collaboration are more equated with a feminine view of the world while competition and aggressive success are more characteristic of the masculine, or even ‘macho’, personality trait. While we are all com-binations of masculine and feminine traits in di% ering degrees, Hofstede’s reference is to national or institutional cultures that endorse or promote the values of one gender archetype or the other.

Hofstede’s fourth dimension – avoidance versus embracing uncertainty – is particularly pertinent in relation to teaching and learning. Authority and dogmatism leave no space for learning. What is worth learning if there is no inquiry, debate or problem-solving? How do you engage with learning when the answer is already known and your intellectual task is simply to remem-ber and reproduce it – what Paolo Freire ( 1968 ) termed the banking concept of education ?

" e # nal dimension – long-term versus short-term orientation – o% ers its own challenge to school education and to teacher learning. Targets, coverage, ‘# nal’ exams, performance (or ‘league’) tables, all work together to underline the short-term orientation of much of school learning.

John MacBeath12

Learning in learning communities

All ! ve of Hofstede’s dimensions can be seen at work in what have come to be described as ‘learning communities’ – groups of people who share common aims and some beliefs, who explore, share and contest their values through active engagement in learning together, with and from one another, reducing professional and social isolation (Stoll and Louis 2007). As Bridges writes, it cannot be assumed that any group of school sta" will easily come to a com-mon understanding and untroubled consensus.

‘ Understanding’ needs always to be replaced by ‘understandings’. Members of the same community will, notwithstanding this identity, have di" erent understandings of the community’s experience. Not only that, but any one individual will, at di" er-ent times and places and for di" erent purposes construct di" erent understandings of the same experience or social situation. Any attempt to understand the other, therefore, has to be interpreted in terms of a collection of understandings engaging with another collection of understandings. (Bridges 2008 : 1)

Further, Bridges argues, there is another encounter, that which occurs between insider and outsider understandings. He warns against the assumption that insider understanding is necessarily superior, arguing rather that under-standings become richer and fuller by virtue of the extent of the insider’s engagement with an outsider perspective . # e catalyst of the outsider view is described by Ann Lieberman in her work with teachers in US schools. She found that, in addition to (or as a concomitant of) pressure from above, strong teacher norms of egalitarianism in the teacher culture inhibited teachers from ‘sticking their neck out too far’, unwilling to exercise agency without formal invitation or sanction – caught between their own agency and the bureau-cratic norms of their schools. With the support of an external critical friend the dormant qualities of leadership suddenly found expression.

Lieberman and Friedrich ( 2009 ) give an account of teachers who discov-ered a long-buried passion. # ey describe two teachers, Austen and Liz, who reignited their desire to do something to address issues of gender and race respectively, their ‘burning passion’ for the cause leading them to devise a number of strategies in their own classrooms and to build alliances that became the impetus for change within their schools. Austen ! rst established a girls’ a$ er-school writing club and then worked behind the scenes to estab-lish single-gender classrooms inside her school. Liz engaged her students in studying the history of their own school; this led to broader political activ-ism, using writing to improve the physical condition of their own school as well as that of other schools in the region.


! ese opportunities for shared discussion brought with them a heightened awareness of mutual accountability. When Elmore ( 2005 ) refers to ‘internal accountability’, he refers to the conditions in a school that precede and shape its response to pressures originating in policies outside the organisation. Rather than making a compliant or defensive response to external demands, teachers are able to account for their work to peers, communities of author-ities, because they have the strength and resilience to tell their own stories. As a strong sense of internal accountability is forged, it brings with it a con-" dence to revisit the demands of external accountability and to view these through a more informed and critical lens.

Writing about accountability in a Canadian context, Ben Jaafar ( 2006 ) describes a hybrid model of economic bureaucratic accountability and eth-ical professional accountability living side by side. ! e apparent disjunction, she argues, could be resolved by teachers engaging in ‘inquiry-based account-ability’ which treats all forms of external mandate, evaluation or inspection as entry points for professional discussions about learning experiences, not only of children but of teachers.

The how

When teachers shut their classroom doors and deny entry to their colleagues they close themselves o# from their own learning, from their fellow learn-ers and from their professional enrichment. ! ey close themselves o# from sources and opportunities that have been found to be powerful in contexts as diverse as Japan, New Zealand, England and Singapore. Teachers’ learning occurs through opportunities to ‘frame’ and ‘reframe’ their practice. When teachers frame their practice they provide a descriptive account of what they currently do, requiring them to adopt a critical distance on their own habit-ual behaviour. ! is may lead to a process of reframing, seeing oneself from a new perspective, drawing a di# erent set of parameters around the nature of teaching and learning.

An example of the reframing process is the practice-focused workshop, a protocol used to considerable e# ect in a seven-country international project (MacBeath and Dempster 2009). It follows a procedure in which a teacher volunteers to occupy the ‘hot seat’ with colleagues seated in a circle around her. She describes an issue she is currently struggling with. Her colleagues listen with intent to understand. ! ey are not allowed to o# er advice but have to try to grasp the nature of the problem within that teacher’s frame

John MacBeath14

of reference, raising questions that lead them progressively towards deeper understanding . ! rough this process the teacher comes to reframe the issue and begins herself to invent ways of dealing with it.

It is, however, a tall order for teachers to reinvent themselves without some form of external stimulus and support. From country to country it is possible to identify a growing range of ways in which teachers may be helped to chal-lenge their thinking and practice:

peer observation; • lesson study; • co-teaching; • mentoring, coaching and critical friendship; • learning from and with students; • collaborative lesson planning; • learning conversations; • sharing and discussing students’ work; • structured, practice-focused meetings. •

Peer observation and lesson study

Peer observation is a form of reciprocal learning that o" ers both support and challenge but only when there is a conducive climate, quality time, a clear sense of purpose and clarity of focus. It is most likely to be productive when there is peer discussion before and a# er the event, with the promise of change to follow. Peer observation is closely related to lesson study ( kenkyu jugyo ), a technique that originated in Japan and involves a highly focused observation of a singular lesson sequence following a strict protocol. In this case observation is not by a colleague but by a group of people, o# en includ-ing parents and other interested parties.

Mentoring, coaching and critical friendship

It is increasingly common for teachers in a number of countries to bene$ t from a mentor who helps them to re% ect on their practice, normally in a face-to-face situation removed from the immediate pressures of the class-room or school. De$ nitions of what constitutes mentoring as compared to other forms of collegial support emphasise the asymmetry of the relation-ship – between a person who is perceived to have greater relevant knowledge, wisdom or experience (the mentor) and a person who is perceived to have less – o# en described as a mentee or prot é g é . Mentors may be people internal


to the school or external consultants from other schools, local authorities or universities. In a Scottish study (Davidson et al. 2008 ) headteachers empha-sised the value of the neutral space outside a school or in parts of a school that were o! limits to others.

" e terms ‘mentoring’ and ‘coaching’ are o# en used synonymously. " eir focus is characteristically on work, career and professional development. With a common element being a service to the client, they are a vehicle for analysis, re$ ection and action that ultimately enable the client to become more e! ective in one or more areas of their life or work. If there is a dis-tinction to be made it would be in respect of the directive nature of the rela-tionship. In the wider sense of coaching as applied in sporting contexts the coach is more likely to have a speci% c set of skills in mind than in a more person-centred approach. Key to the relationship, whether coaching or men-toring, is the precondition of trust.

" e Scottish study found that while at home headteachers could ‘let o! steam’ and talk without inhibition to their partners; the distinctive contri-bution of the coaching relationship was in o! ering a context and a form of interaction essentially di! erent from talking things through with a partner or letting o! steam. It was an interchange marked by empathic listening and a& rming but also probing and challenging. While the domestic conversation was expressed more as an emotional release and a need for unconditional acceptance, the coach was valued because of the challenge that accompanied the emotional support:

[" e coach was] brutally honest and I really appreciate that looking back now. It’s what I needed. It’s not somebody to tell me I’m great. It’s somebody to tell me and advise me and to make me re$ ect on where I am.

Trust in the coaching relationship was consistently emphasised as the key ingredient because it permitted a deeper form of sharing without risk or judgement. " e neutrality of the coach, with little or no knowledge of the headteacher’s school, was described as bringing unfettered insights to accounts of events free from prior history. In interviews and focus groups there were many comments about the coach ‘being there for you’. Such was the quality and intensity of the interaction with their coaches that many headteachers spoke of being able to forget the demands and pressures of the job for two hours to focus on the here and now.

Similar themes emerge from a study of distributed leadership, conducted for the National College for School Leadership in England (MacBeath et al. 2004 ). Here the complex process of engendering trust was portrayed as a

John MacBeath16

‘force ! eld’, a push–pull of factors, volatile and shi" ing, pushing leaders back to more coercive styles when trust was betrayed or when risk-taking proved too dangerous. Conversations in interviews and workshops depicted a con-tinually shi" ing balance in relationships, in which con! dence and trust were in constant and precarious balance, with policy pressures an ever constant and corrosive threat.

Teachers need friends more than they need critics. However, when these two elements are conjoined, as in critical friendship, teachers can be open to chal-lenge as well as support. While colleagues from universities or other agencies can play this role, teachers within the same school, or from other partnership schools, can also o# er such a service. Critical friendship brings to the relation-ship between two colleagues a sensitive balance of ‘support’ and ‘challenge’, support that is not simply cosy reassurance, and challenge that is constructive, realistic and non-judgmental. $ e role of critical friend is not, however, one that is simply slipped into. Its subtle and complex nature assumes a process through which the apparently contradictory processes of con! rmation and disequilibrium become articulated and integral (Swa% eld 2011 ).

Other forms of collaboration

Collaborative lesson planning is described by the Education Bureau in Hong Kong as a process in which teachers cooperate, share and re& ect on teaching and learning. During their regular meetings, teachers examine student performance and feedback, discuss students’ learning di% culties, identify learning objectives in di# erent key learning areas, talk about learning experiences and, based on their re& ections, plan and design lessons and activities together.

Taking teachers beyond the conventions and assumptions of their own subject and classroom occurs through the protocol of inter-departmental pairing, an activity which takes teachers out of their immediate frame of reference, both exposing their own practice to their colleagues in di# erent disciplines and at the same time learning from them. So, for example, the English department may be paired with the mathematics department, music with PE, science with history. $ is may take the form of a weak–strong pair-ing, an asymmetrical relationship in which one department has more to learn from another, or it may be construed as a more equal relationship in which the learning exchange takes place on a reciprocal basis.

Continuing mutual exchange among teachers, as for example in lesson study, collaborative lesson planning and peer review, lays a foundation for self-evaluation and is a precondition for sustained improvement. Where this


is accompanied by analysing and commenting on examples of pupils’ work, it can o! er a sharp focus on how teachers perceive and assess quality. It can be exceptionally powerful in confronting deeply held assumptions about what constitutes ‘good’ work in di! erent subject areas, how it is measured and how it may be made more formative.

Putting professional learning to work: moving into self-evaluation

‘How many evaluation decisions do teachers make in the course of a day?’, asked Ted Wragg . By sitting in classrooms and painstakingly counting evalu-ation episodes, he found that typically a teacher made over 1,000 on-the-spot evaluations and evaluative decisions in the course of a day. In those minute-by-minute evaluations a collegial critical friend observing classroom interaction might ask, ‘What is the teacher doing? What is s/he learning?’ For the teacher, questions such as ‘What do I need to do di! erently?’ or ‘What will I do next?’ tend to be implicit forms of self-evaluation, neither written down nor codi" ed. Teachers are o# en unable to explain what they do or why they do it but they can, by their own admission, do it better and are profes-sionally inclined to do it better. When what they do is discussed, raised to consciousness and shared collegially, they lay the groundwork for systematic self-evaluation and improvement.

Among David Perkins ’s repertoire of re$ ective, self-evaluative protocols is the economic but powerful MYST principle (Perkins 2008):

Me: How do I model thinking? How do I make my own thinking visible? You: How do I make my students’ thinking visible? Space: How is the environment of the classroom organised to help facilitate

thinking? Time: How can I give thinking more time in my classroom? How does

thinking change over time?

Making one’s own thinking visible, re$ ecting openly with students on how it evolves and reshapes, o! ers every teacher a valuable tool for thinking, and for thinking about this thinking.

At the core of all these strategies is the deprivatising of practice: opening it up to colleagues and to children, watching and thinking about classroom practice in real time, problem-solving together about how the practice would look in a real lesson sequence. It has been consistently found (for example, Joyce and Showers 2002 ) that it is easy for teachers to know what they should

John MacBeath18

do, harder for them to be able to do it and most di! cult of all for them to embed it into their daily practice. Embedding e" ective practice into daily routines is a desired result of all professional learning, but this kind of suc-cessful result is not always sustained.

Beyond the use of these strategies lies a deeper purpose, the need to put one’s professional learning to good use. In the process, teachers reconsider what is worth learning and teaching, rethinking and reframing their goals; monitoring their progress towards these goals may suggest a di" erent course of action and stimulate a readiness for surprise and unexpected outcomes. Without surprise, learning and teaching can become predictable, as teachers simply follow well-trodden paths. # e moments when teachers are ‘surprised into learning’, as Tim Brighouse puts it, are when teachers become revitalised and gain a new sense of purpose and professionalism.

REFERENCES

Asante , M. K. (1998) ! e Afrocentric Idea , rev. edn. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Ben Jaafar , S. ( 2006 ) ‘ From Performance-Based to Inquiry-Based Accountability’ , Brock

Education 16 (2): 62 – 77 . Bhabha , H. K. (2006) Without Boundary. Seventeen Ways of Looking . New York: Museum

of Modern Art. Bridges , D. ( 2008 ) ‘Education and the Possibility of Outsider Understanding’. # e Terry

McLaughlin Memorial Lecture, International Network of Philosophers of Education biennial conference , University of Kyoto .

Csikszentmihalyi , M. ( 1990 ) Flow: ! e Psychology of Optimal Experience . New York : Harper and Row .

Davidson , J. , Forde , C. , Gronn , P. , MacBeath , J. , Martin , M. and McMahon , M. ( 2008 ) ‘ Towards a “Mixed Economy” of Head Teacher Development: Evaluation Report to the Scottish Government on the Flexible Routes to Headship Pilot’ . Edinburgh : # e Scottish Government . Available at www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2008/09/30142043/0 .

Elmore , R. ( 2005 ) Agency, Reciprocity, and Accountability in Democratic Education . Boston, M A: Consortium for Policy Research in Education .

Freire , P. ( 1968 ) Pedagogy of the Oppressed . Harmondsworth : Penguin . Frost , D. ( 2006 ) ‘ # e Concept of “Agency” in Leadership for Learning’ , Leading and Managing ,

special issue on the Carpe Vitam Leadership for Learning project, 12 (2): 19 – 28 . ( 2011 ) Supporting Teacher Leadership in 15 Countries: ! e International Teacher Leadership

Project. Phase 1: A Report . Leadership for Learning, University of Cambridge Faculty of Education .

Gray , J. , Reynolds , D. , Fitz-Gibbon , C. and Jesson , D. (eds.) ( 1996 ) Merging Traditions: ! e Future of Research on School E" ectiveness and School Improvement . London : Cassell .

Heschel , A. J. ( 1962 ) ! e Prophets , New York : HarperCollins .


Hesselbein , F. ( 1996 ) ‘ Managing in a World ! at Is Round’ , Leader to Leader 2 : 6 – 8 . Hofstede , G. ( 1991 ) Culture and Organizations . London : McGraw Hill . Hoy , A. and Murphy , P. ( 2001 ) ‘Teaching Educational Psychology to the Implicit Mind’, in

B. Tor" and R. Sternberg (eds.), Understanding and Teaching the Intuitive Mind: Student and Teacher Learning . Mahwah, NJ : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates .

Huizen , P. , Oers , B. and Wubbels , T. ( 2005 ) ‘ A Vygotskian Perspective on Teacher Education’ , Journal of Curriculum Studies 37 (3): 267 – 90 .

Joyce , B. and Showers , B. ( 2002 ) Student Achievement through Sta! Development , 3rd edn. Alexandria, VA : Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development .

Kidd , J. K. , Sanchez , S. Y. and ! orp , E. K. ( 2008 ) ‘ De# ning Moments: Developing Culturally Responsive Dispositions and Teaching Practices in Early Childhood Pre-service Teachers’ , Teaching and Teacher Education 24 : 316 – 29 .

Lieberman , A. and Friedrich , L. ( 2009 ) ‘Changing Teachers from Within: Teachers as Leaders’, in J. MacBeath and Y. C. Cheng (eds.), Leadership for Learning: International Perspectives . Rotterdam : Sense Publishers .

MacBeath , J. and Dempster , N. ( 2009 ) Connecting Leadership and Learning. Abingdon : Routledge .

MacBeath , J. , Oduro , G. and Waterhouse , J. ( 2004 ) Leadership as Distributed. Nottingham : National College of School Leadership .

MacBeath , J. , Gronn , P. , Opfer , D. , Lowden , K. , Forde , C. , Cowie , M. and O’Brien , J. ( 2009 ) " e Recruitment and Retention of Headteachers in Scotland: Report to the Scottish Government. Edinburgh : Scottish Government Social Research .

Mackenzie , R. F. ( 1965 ) Escape from the Classroom . London : Collins . Mayer , D. , Pecheone , R. and Merino , N. ( 2012 ) ‘Rethinking Teacher Education in Australia:

! e Teacher Quality Reforms’, in L. Darling Hammond and A. Lieberman ( eds .), Teacher Education around the World: Changing Policies and Practices. Teacher Quality and School Development . Abingdon : Routledge .

O’Connell Rust , F. ( 1994 ) ‘ ! e First Year of Teaching: It’s Not What ! ey Expected’ , Teaching and Teacher Education 10 (2): 205 – 17 .

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development ( 2010 ) Educating Teachers for Diversity: Meeting the Challenge . Paris: OECD .

Pajares , F. ( 1993 ) ‘ Pre-service Teachers’ Beliefs: A Focus for Teacher Education’ , Action in Education 25 (2): 45 – 54 .

Perkins , D. (2008) Making Learning Whole: How Seven Principles of Teaching Can Transform Education . San Francisco: Jossey Bass.

Pinker , S. ( 2002 ) " e Blank Slate: " e Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York : Penguin Books .

Schon , D. A. ( 1987 ) Educating the Re# ective Practitioner: Toward a New Design for Teaching and Learning in the Professions . San Francisco : Jossey-Bass .

Scottish Executive ( 2002 ) Standard for the Chartered Teacher . Edinburgh : Scottish Executive

Senge , P. M. ( 1990 / 2006 ) " e Fi$ h Discipline . London : Random House . Shulman , L. S. ( 1999 ) ‘ Taking Learning Seriously’ , Change 31 (4): 10 – 17 . Spencer , H. ( 1919 ) Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects . White# sh, MT: Kessinger .

John MacBeath20

Stoll , L. and Louis , K. S. (2007) ‘Professional Learning Communities: Elaborating New Approaches’, in L. Stoll and K. S. Louis (eds.), Professional Learning Communities: Divergence, Depth, and Dilemmas . Maidenhead: Open University Press.

Swa! eld , S. ( 2007 ) ‘What is Distinctive about Critical Friendship?’, paper presented at the 20th International Congress for School E! ectiveness and Improvement , Portoroz, Slovenia , 3–6 January.

( 2011 ) ‘School Improvement and the Role of the Critical Friend’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge.

Tan , C. ( 2011 ) ‘ Creating ! inking Schools through Authentic Assessment: ! e Case in Singapore’ , Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability 24 (2): 135 – 49 .

Tatto , M. T. ( 1999 ) ‘ ! e Socializing In" uence of Normative Cohesive Teacher Education on Teachers’ Beliefs about Instructional Choice’ , Teachers and Teaching: " eory and Practice 5 (1): 95 – 118.

Vanderbilt , A. T. and Mumford , L. Q. ( 1957 ) John Cotton Dana: " e Centennial Convocation . New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press .

Weiss , L. and Fine , M. ( 2001 ) Construction Sites: Excavating Race, Class and Gender among Urban Youth . New York : Teachers College Press .

Zeichner , K. M. ( 2006 ) ‘ Re" ections of a University-Based Teacher Educator on the Future of College- and University-Based Teacher Education’ , Journal of Teacher Education 57 (3): 326 – 40 .

Documents

Teachers Learning: Professional Development and Education (Cambridge Teacher Series)