Reimagining Professional Development in Schools

Eleanore Hargreaves, Luke Rolls, Eleanore Hargreaves, Luke Rolls

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367264505
• eBook ISBN: 9781000172195
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This fascinating and vital book seeks to challenge the effectiveness of current practices in professional development by urging educators to rethink professional learning for teachers and teaching assistants. It importantly brings together ideas about teacher professionalism and how to build creative and trusting cultures in which high expectations are not compromised.

Throughout, teachers describe significant professional learning and growth, often through dynamic partnerships with others, that allows them to inspire imaginative possibilities; different and creative ways to ignite hope and opportunity for children. Four key themes guide the reader through the collection of chapters: professional capital, learning communities, teachers as researchers and subject-specific professional development. They explore:

• The types of professional development approaches that support teachers to make meaningful changes within their practices.

• The conditions and school cultures that are needed for teachers to meaningfully prosper from professional development.

• The impact that unintended consequences of system accountability drivers and funding have on teachers' experiences of professional development.

• The ways in which the development of curriculum and pedagogy can be integrated with models of professional development, particular in the creative arts.

Packed with innovative ideas and practical suggestions and co-written by researchers and practitioners, this book highlights the importance of using research evidence to develop teachers' practice within the realities of their own classrooms and schools. This will be a key read for teachers, school leaders, teaching assistants and student teachers.

1

Professional teacher communities as creative, inspiring sites of learning

Luke Rolls and Eleanore Hargreaves

In the early hours of a Sunday morning in September 2019, Sarah Thomas set off to swim the English Channel wearing only her costume, goggles and cap. She returned to land 54 hours later having crossed between Dover and Calais four times, covering a distance of 130 miles and breaking the previous record by a complete crossing. During her swim, Sarah was stung in the face by a jellyfish, vomited repeatedly from a stomach infection, battled against the currents and suffered ongoing pain from salt water aggravating her throat. A year before, Sarah had recovered from successfully overcoming breast cancer via 20 rounds of chemotherapy, surgery to remove tumours and 25 sessions of radiation therapy. She trained for swimming the channel while holding down a full-time job. The reservoirs of human endurance and dedication are quite staggering. What might the conditions be for such achievements?

After completing her second crossing and hitting an all-time low, her words demonstrate the power that community gives in times of great demand (Calvert, 2019):

When we did the turn in Dover I tried to eat some baby food and I threw that up … I was really demoralised and was close to quitting. I thought, ‘Two laps is plenty, who cares?’ But my crew re-motivated me. They didn’t let me dwell on any negatives. If I said, ‘I feel sick’, they said, ‘You’ll be all right, it’s not a big deal, just keep swimming.’ I threw up all over my friend Karl, and he was like, ‘It’s OK, just let it out, you’ll feel better once you’re done.’ I am a strong, independent, intelligent, capable woman. I have an iron will and dogged determination. I’ve always prided myself on being tough and being able to take care of myself. If I’ve learned anything from marathon swimming and cancer, I’ve learned I will always need people who love me to keep me moving forward when I can’t quite get there on my own.

How does this story of courage relate to the purpose of this book? Albeit a different form of extreme, her journey is perhaps not so dissimilar to those that teachers and teaching assistants take in crossing the wavy seas of teaching and learning. People who work in these roles have the challenging feat of inspiring a multifaceted group of individual children. They embark on professional journeys that, as well as being joyful and of great reward, often include stamina, patience and personal sacrifice. Their true stories are usually invisible, untold and unmeasured. Like swimmers, they do not have much control of the climate – of their institution or political context – and yet like Sarah, with certain conditions manage to achieve superhuman accomplishments, finding productive ways through for children.

There are several indicators within the profession to suggest that collectively we have not found the right conditions for teachers to do this important work. Teachers in the UK are leaving at an unprecedented rate, many having decided to move to other career paths within the first few years of training (see Chapter 2). Many professionals who entered teaching as a career of service to help children flourish seem to find the current working conditions unfit for purpose. What is extinguishing their enthusiasm from such an important and potentially rewarding career?

With a relatively young teacher workforce by international standards (OECD, 2018), poor levels of teacher retention is highly problematic for implementing educational reform, significantly undermining efforts to build knowledge, expertise and networks in the system. While some research has previously queried why teachers’ rate of improvements appear to flatline after a few years, findings by Kraft and Papay (2014) show that in ‘supportive’ schools, the trajectories of teachers can be ones of sustained professional growth. These schools appear to balance external pressures and whole-school priorities with opportunities for teachers to construct and assimilate new learning within their practice.

There is consensus among researchers and policy makers that teachers have a significant and lasting impact on children’s lives (Hattie, 2008). And yet much less attention is focused on how we should support structuring their own professional learning. If we know that teachers have a formative impact on children, it would follow that our investment in their development should be central to any drive for improving the education system. It is puzzling then why teacher learning opportunities for the profession as a whole appear to be so lacking in coherence and investment. These coexist within a system characterised by hyper-accountability and ‘standards-based policy reform’, where the experience of being a professional can become diminished by perceived external pressures. We find teachers in the UK as having lower levels of job satisfaction and lower ratings of the value of the professional development they receive in comparison to many other countries (Sims, 2017). By not attending to the central role of teacher learning, the sustainability of teaching becomes weakened. When teachers have to effectively swim alone and sometimes in very challenging circumstances, understandably for some, the personal cost–benefit of the journey becomes less appealing.

Through drawing on examples where teachers and researchers have written in partnership, this book works to imagine things differently – what could our profession look like? How could professional learning influence possibility thinking for our children and the schools where they go to learn? And when teachers are already achieving so much in spite of the considerable system and contextual challenges they face, what might be possible if we improved the structures and thinking that underpin their daily lives?

Of course, professional development is not the only issue relevant to teacher retention and recruitment; it is important that teachers’ professional learning is considered within the wider educational and social, political context. This book seeks to ask questions about how teachers can be supportively challenged to thrive in their roles through problematising professional learning as a mediating factor. We explore:

■The types of professional development approaches that support teachers to make meaningful changes within their practices.

■The conditions and school cultures that are needed for teachers to meaningfully prosper from professional development.

■The impact that unintended consequences of system accountability drivers and funding have on teachers’ experiences of professional development.

■The ways in which the development of curriculum and pedagogy can be integrated with models of professional development.

Within the chapters in this book, teachers describe significant professional learning and growth, often through partnerships with others; growth that allows them to inspire and ignite hope and opportunity for children. A simple yet sophisticated explanation for theorising what might be under the surface of such meaningful professional learning is the self-determination model of Ryan and Deci (2000). They demonstrate through research studies across the globe that creative learning – as part of a person’s well-being – will only happen when that person feels competent, agentic and related. Illustrated in examples through this book, teachers need to believe that they are doing well rather than feeling that they are being constantly reprimanded. They need to feel empowered, that they can exercise agency by making and having direction over decisions themselves. And they need to feel related to their colleagues through learning communities and other face-to-face interactions. Without these attributes, self-determination theory suggests that, beyond being compliant, profound experiences of teacher learning tend not to flourish.

Self-determination theory and its emphasis on grasping challenge does not mean impoverished expectations around the life-changing work we expect and ask of teachers. Quite the opposite; as Myatt (2016) points out, as humans, we are in fact drawn to challenge. In the case of the swimmer Sarah Thomas, she was supported to achieve her goal through coaching by others to continue, despite feeling overwhelmed and her goal was situated within her belonging to a supportive and expert group of people who believed in her aspirations. Through such affirming of practitioners’ competence, agency and relatedness, teachers, like other professionals can experience the required ‘psychological safety’ (Edmonson, 2002) to start engaging creatively with the complexity of synthesising theory, research and practice about learning.

Contexts for professional learning: barriers and opportunities

The narratives in this book demonstrate the impact that various accountability measures seem to have on teachers’ sense of agency and teaching practices. Many accounts bring out how such invisible forces of influence appear to significantly shape the enacted experiences of teachers and children in the classroom. For example, Winstanley and Moule (Chapter 10) note how shifts in the assessment criteria for writing have fashioned writing away from authentic experiences based on audience, purpose, enjoyment and creativity, to a technical pursuit of working to a checklist. Cremin and Durning (Chapter 9) list similar issues where ‘reading for pleasure’ can be marginalised in schools and where teachers are experiencing restricted scope to develop children’s will of reading beyond attending to their skill. In several chapters, we see the important role that school leaders play in shielding teachers from external pressures through creating supportive communities of practice; ones where teachers can share their successes and struggles and provide mutual support (Cordingley & Hughes, Chapter 3; Kerschner, Dowdall, Hennessy, Owen, & Calcagni, Chapter 8; Rolls & Seleznyov, Chapter 5). At the level of the classroom, we see teachers and researchers who are committed to understanding their professional competence in terms of children’s needs in the classroom (Hargreaves & Scott, Chapter 7). In collectively problematising and enquiring into their practice, they share unique insight into the lives of their learners and their own professional practice.

Our framework shown in Figure 1.1 builds on Oates’s (2013) work on ‘control factors’ in order help us to consider the levels of context in which professional development takes place.

Figure 1.1Layers of context interacting with professional development in schools

Source: Image courtesy of www.slideshare.com.

The level of policy sets out powerful structures that influence schools and teachers, including funding, curriculum, assessment, accountability and school networks. At the school level, leaders have to mediate these pressures with the needs and ethos of their individual context, their development priorities and the well-being of their staff. They can benefit from working with other schools or professionals in these endeavours although these network structures in the UK appear to now be disparate and varied. Teachers in turn find themselves positioned within these tensions, likely experiencing varying amounts and quality of professional development opportunities alongside the demands of their role.

Governments in recent years have given a renewed emphasis on school ‘autonomy’ allowing some increased level of choice. For schools, however, having agency is a far more complex notion than being given simplified ‘choice’. Having weak curricula guidance for example may give schools freedom of sorts, but in reality creates huge inefficiencies and asks of schools to recreate work that requires domain-specific knowledge and expertise. Case examples in this book speak of a more meaningful experience of agency where there is support for structured collaboration between teachers, subject specialists and educational researchers. Such partnerships on a larger scale require more whole-system thinking about how curriculum, pedagogy, assessment and professional development can be more coherently developed together.

A number of barriers have been identified for why more time is not spent by teachers in the UK on professional development, including cost, work responsibilities and the quality of provision available (House of Commons, 2018). A Department for Education (DfE) report (Sims, 2017) appears to show recognition that in reality, operational school or accountability-related matters often impede teachers’ entitlement to high-quality professional development. Some teachers choose to seek professional development opportunities outside their institution through postgraduate study or by spending their free time outside of school networking with other educators.

When the minds of policy makers turn to system reform, the practices of other education systems are often looked to for answers. Undoubtedly, much can be learned from looking to other ‘high-performing’ jurisdictions, but without understanding their nuances, such ‘borrowing’ seems to have a tendency to overlook the policy, cultural and institutional contexts of those countries. We suggest that rather than appropriating whole accountability systems or isolated areas of provision, it might be more pertinent to borrow and adopt the professional learning structures that have created areas of strength. In Japan, for example, we see well-established and embedded practices around mentoring for early career teachers. In countries such as Finland, teachers are funded to master’s degree level, and supported to specialise further within th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1 Professional teacher communities as creative, inspiring sites of learning
• 2 The importance of the Chartered College of Teaching: a professional body for the future identity and status of our teachers
• 3 Leading professional development that works for pupils and teachers
• 4 How outside organisations work with schools in developing professional learning
• 5 Easily lost in translation: introducing Japanese lesson study in a UK school
• 6 Unlocking coaching and mentoring
• 7 Look no further: inquiring into learning needs as professional development
• 8 Teachers as ‘natural experimenters’: using T-SEDA to develop classroom dialogue
• 9 Inspiring a love of reading: professional learning to develop a culture of reading for pleasure
• 10 Teachers as writers
• 11 Developing collaborative problem-solving in our classrooms
• 12 Creative ways of learning: using therapeutic arts to inspire professional learning
• 13 Becoming our best practice: professional learning to develop singing and musicianship
• 14 Support and teacher well-being
• Afterword: ‘teaching is not a profession’ – discuss
• Index