Although recent years have seen an increase in professional learning communities, use of video and lesson study groups, most teachers still work and learn in isolation. What they know is personal and remains private; little opportunity exists for most teachers to develop shared knowledge or language. The scale of the teaching force, and the rapid turnover of new teachers, makes this lack of shared knowledge an acute problem. This paper explores the potential of records of practice for developing collective professional (...) knowledge about teaching and learning. We define and illustrate what we mean by records of practice and elaborate the meaning of the term collective professional knowledge. Three concrete examples of records of practice, originating in different contexts and times, are presented and their special features are analyzed and discussed. The paper clarifies that records are not in themselves professional knowledge, but constitute a valuable and unique resource for the study of practice and the generation of knowledge originating in and useful for practice. To illustrate varied approaches for studying practice, possible uses of records of practice for the generation of collective professional knowledge are described and analyzed. The paper concludes with questions about records of practice and their uses. (shrink)

While researchers are currently studying various forms of social network interaction among teachers for their impact on educational policy implementation and practice, knowledge on how various types of networks are interrelated is limited. The goal of this study is to understand the dimensionality that may underlie various types of social networks in schools. We assessed seven types of social interaction using social network data of 775 educators from 53 Dutch elementary schools. The quadratic assignment procedure, multidimensional scaling and network visualisations (...) were used to discern underlying dimensions that may explain the interrelatedness of these seven types of social networks. Findings suggest small to moderate similarity between the seven forms of social interaction. Results support a distinction between instrumental and expressive networks and suggest a second dimension of mutual in(ter)dependence to explain differences in social interaction among teachers. Implications for practice and research on teacher collaboration are discussed. (shrink)

Pourquoi avons-nous mis l’accent sur la pratique réflexive de façon si abusive dans la formation initiale des enseignants? Sur quoi nous appuyons-nous pour avoir la certitude que de développer la réflexivité permet l’amélioration de la qualité des enseignants que nous préparons? Quelle qu’en soit sa forme, la pratique réflexive, ne doit pas être une fin en soi: elle est un moyen qui permet d’atteindre une finalité qu’est l’enseignement, voire, une finalité de développement des apprentissages des élèves. Dans cet article, nous (...) explorons la réflexivité à partir de plusieurs angles d’entrée, y compris nos expériences personnelles en tant que formateur d’enseignants travaillant avec des personnes qui se préparent à devenir des enseignants de physique. La question posée dans le titre exprime notre crainte quant à la finalité de la formation des enseignants que les formateurs d’enseignants attribuent parfois à la pratique réflexive; ce qui, à notre avis, peut faire plus de mal que de bien dans la formation des enseignants, avant l’emploi. Nous nous attarderons d’abord sur la différence entre les pratiques de formation des enseignants avant et après l’arrivée du terme pratique réflexive. Nous examinerons ensuite les travaux de Schön (1983) à travers cinq articles sur la réflexivité en formation des enseignants. Il ne s’agit pas d’une revue de la littérature systématique, mais cet effort démontre comment presque tous les articles sur la pratique réflexive semble être dictés par les intérêts personnels de ses auteurs respectifs. Nous poursuivront avec des interprétations et des illustrations et terminerons par cinq généralisations au sujet des pratiques de formation des enseignants qui indiquent qu’un travail colossal reste à faire afin que les références à la réflexivité fassent in fine plus de bien que de mal dans les programmes de formation des enseignants. (shrink)

Our analysis reveals two major types of "Community of Learners" (COL) projects: instrumental and ontological. In instrumental COL, the notion of community is separated from instruction in order to reach some preset endpoints: curricular or otherwise. We notice three main instrumental COL models: relational, instructional, and engagement. Ontological COL redefines learning as an ill-defined, distributed, social, multi-faceted, poly-goal, agency-based, and situated process that integrates all educational aspects. We will consider two ontological COL projects into: narrowly dialogic and polyphonic.

Teaching is a highly demanding profession that requires handling multiple and potentially contradictory goals. Therefore, it is likely that teachers experience conflict between work-related goals on a daily basis. Intraindividual goal conflict may occur when individuals pursue multiple goals drawing on the same limited resources, or when two or more goals are incompatible in terms of goal attainment strategy or desired end states. Because goal conflict is typically associated with negative effects such as attenuated motivation and wellbeing, teacher goal conflict (...) may jeopardize teaching motivation. This cross-sectional study investigated the effects of in-service teachers’ goal conflicts on their autonomous and controlled teaching motivation and tested the satisfaction of teachers’ basic need for autonomy, competence, and relatedness as mediators. In line with our hypotheses, results from structural equation modeling showed that frequently experiencing resource-based goal conflict leads to a lower satisfaction of the basic need for autonomy, which, however, was unrelated to teaching motivation. In contrast, frequently experiencing inherent goal conflict attenuates the satisfaction of the basic need for competence, which, in turn, positively predicted autonomous teaching motivation and negatively predicted extrinsic regulation. As expected, relatedness was not associated with the experience of goal conflict. The discussion focuses on differential effects of the two types of goal conflict on teaching motivation and on the relevance to expand research on teachers’ intraindividual goal conflicts. (shrink)

Filming lessons is one of the most common and effective tools in teacher professional improvement and development. In-depth interviews with 60 teachers in Israel Southern District reveal their experience with filmed lessons in professional development. This qualitative constructivist study showed that the main reason for teachers' objection to lesson filming is that the camera affects the processes occurring in the classroom. The study further demonstrated that filmed lessons significantly enhance insights into processes of learning and instruction and advance teachers' reflection (...) on their practice. (shrink)

Although the efficacy of teacher written feedback has been widely investigated, relatively few studies have been conducted from feedback practitioners' perspectives to investigate teachers' beliefs regarding it, particularly compare beliefs held by teachers with different sociocultural and linguistic backgrounds. Consequently, much remains to be known about teachers' conceptions about written feedback, who has different first languages. To bridge such a gap, we conducted this qualitative study to examine the similarities and differences between native English-speaking and non-native English-speaking teachers' beliefs in (...) Chinese University EFL settings. We analyzed the in-depth interviews with eight teachers through thematic analysis. The findings showed that NES and NNES teachers espoused a range of beliefs in relation to the five themes of written feedback: Purpose, scope, focus, strategy, and orientation. While they shared similar beliefs with regard to feedback focus, their beliefs differed in terms of feedback scope. Important implications are discussed for educational practices. (shrink)

The teacher self is a composite psychological construct which encompasses the cognitive, affective, emotional, and social dimensions of teaching. This qualitative study draws on Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogism, answerability, and addressivity to discuss how English language teachers negotiated the shifting and conflictive context to construct selves in relation to the promoted communicative language teaching approach. Based on narrative interviews and classroom observations with five tertiary English teachers in China, we found that these teachers were actively engaged in the dialog with (...) their prior learning experiences and active, responsive in answering their contexts while authoring selves in everyday teaching practice. The multiple-case study data support a Bakhtinian understanding that teachers are active users and producers of theory in their own right, highlighting teachers’ agency, creativity, and autonomy. Based on Bakhtin’s dialogism and the case study findings, we bring cognition, identity and practice together and conceptualize the teacher self as having multiple facets and layers: the autobiographical self, the discursive self, and the pedagogical self. The three selves are constitutive of the consummated whole of the teacher self instead of being separate entities functioning individually. The study is concluded with implications for language teacher education and teacher development. (shrink)

This thesis investigates how preservice teachers understand ‘challenging behaviour’ and how this knowledge informs their teaching practice. Challenging behaviour is problematised as a knowledge referent and the epistemic tensions that preservice teachers experience in coming to ‘know’ about challenging behaviour are explored. This is an in-depth, qualitative study that focuses on the experiences, knowledge and knowledge-change of five final-year preservice primary teachers before, during and after their final Professional Experience. Data was gathered via interviews, focus groups, concept maps, document analysis (...) and classroom observations. Foucault’s theories of knowledge comprised the theoretical framework of the study and discourse analysis was used for data analysis. Major conclusions reached were threefold. Firstly, this study embraced the ambiguity and complexity of ‘challenging behaviour’ by avoiding the definitional debate and instead identifying and positing three discourses of challenging behaviour. This approach was found helpful in understanding preservice teachers’ knowledge of the topic. Secondly, it was found that the preservice teachers’ knowledge of challenging behaviour was, at best, ‘confused’ insofar as it was rarely discursively consistent. Thirdly, the types of epistemic processes through which the preservice teachers reconstructed their discursively inconsistent knowledge were theorised as either ‘matching’ or ‘squishing’. These epistemic processes were cast as problematic. Both ‘matching’ and ‘squishing’ demonstrated potential to maintain epistemic equilibrium and so limit possibilities for knowledge expansion and reflective practice. Moreover, in the case of ‘squishing’, this epistemic process was found to generate confusions, which were at times unsupportive of pedagogical decision-making. Two major implications of the research concern teacher education. Firstly, because the preservice teachers’ confusions, pedagogical distress and quandaries around challenging behaviour seemed to stem from discursively inconsistent knowledge, there is a call for teacher education programs to more clearly delineate multiple knowledges of challenging behaviour. Secondly, the preservice teachers’ epistemology was characterised by an overwhelming propensity to perceive a theory/practice divide in their professional knowledge. However, for these preservice teachers, there was not such a polarity to be bridged regarding challenging behaviour. Recasting the theory/practice problem in terms of knowledge showed the preservice teachers were doing a good deal of complex epistemological work ‘in the middle’ of theory and practice. Theory was not considered irrelevant, it was mobilised to make specific pedagogical decisions during practicum. However, understandings of these ‘practical theories’ were fraught with the incoherence and confusions associated with the epistemic practice of ‘squishing’. Thus, although the preservice teachers’ knowledge indicated they were ‘working in the middle’ of theory and practice, they were not doing so with great accuracy or effectiveness. It then is necessary to offer preservice teachers more comprehensive tools to work with and understand ‘knowledge’, rather than ‘theory/practice’. (shrink)

The integration of technology into the classroom infers changes in the role of teacher with two emerging tensions. The first tension is between the idea of technology as a tool providing technical proficiency and efficiency and the vision of technology as a catalyst for educational reform. The second conflict is between the traditional culture of schooling and life in classrooms and the anticipated transformed culture. This article focuses on data found during three separate case studies involving the implementation of technology (...) in a grade school, a high school, and a university. Significant questions raised relate to teacher beliefs about the culture of classrooms and schools, specifically about relationships with students. Recommendations for policy and practice include the importance of a clear purpose for the implementation of technology and an understanding of classroom culture. (shrink)

Esta obra se concentra en cuatro temas cruciales de la formación de docentes, tanto antes como durante el servicio y en la enseñanza en diferentes áreas y niveles educativos. En primer lugar, se aborda el asunto de las creencias que los docentes tienen sobre el proceso educativo, las cuales parecen influir en la práctica profesional que estos desarrollan y, por lo tanto, deberían recibir la atención explícita de los procesos de formación de docentes que deseen promover prácticas específicas. El segundo (...) tema de la obra es la relación entre la formación de docentes y la política pública que la rige. En particular, se analizan las reformas curriculares implementadas por varias licenciaturas en universidades privadas colombianas, en respuesta a reformas a la normatividad sobre las condiciones de calidad que a las que deben ajustarse todas las licenciaturas del país. El tercer tema analizado es en qué medida los docentes en educación superior van más allá del dominio de su saber disciplinar atribuyendo importancia a la pedagogía, la didáctica y la práctica reflexiva en su propia práctica docente. Finalmente, se discuten aspectos de la formación de docentes relacionados con los procesos vividos y los retos encontrados por los docentes al entrar en la profesión, su socialización en la comunidad docente, sus identidades como maestros y su motivación para ser docentes. Vale la pena señalar que las contribuciones a este libro comparten el uso de metodologías cualitativas y presentan los resultados de historias de vida, entrevistas, observaciones, y análisis documentales, entre otros. (shrink)

Students’ beliefs about language learning are an important component which will definitely have an impact in their future as teachers. The beliefs students hold and the way they are formed have been at the center of many studies. This article, however, reports the findings of a quantitative study related to English language students’ beliefs about English language learning. The students surveyed had just finished the third semester of their school practice and the instrument used to collect the data was Horwitz’s (...) Beliefs about Language Learning Inventory –. It included 35 items which covered a wide range of categories such as: language aptitude, nature of language learning, learning and communication strategies, difficulty of the language and last but not the least Motivation. Apart from the beliefs, through the questionnaire we attempted to investigate if students had had other teaching experiences apart from their school practice and if there were teachers among their family members. At the end we tried to find out if these two variables had any effect on students’ beliefs about English language learning. Recommendations for further research and implications of the findings are also part of the article. (shrink)

Within the specific context of The Australian Curriculum: The Arts, this paper explores how teachers of the Arts and teacher educators encounter and enact curriculum change. Adopting Ewing’s notion that curriculum is a complex web of varying stories and storylines that are impacted on by teachers’ underlying philosophy, we suggest that Arts teachers embrace the intent behind The Australian Curriculum: The Arts. This paper unearths and explores insights gleaned from teachers looking inward and reflecting on their own personal curriculum journeys. (...) The learning dimensions of conceptualising, experimenting and developing, reflecting, resolving and communicating are applied to investigate the implementation of the new curriculum. This article shares data from a number of Arts teachers’ interviews with the authors in relation to their thoughts on the implementation of the new curriculum. Two key themes emerged from these interviews, these being navigating challenges and the implications of personal attributes in encountering and enacting change. Interestingly, a number of qualities associated with Arts practitioners such as creative and lateral thinking, resilience and flexibility emerge as significant contributing factors in regard to how teachers encounter, enact and become curriculum change. (shrink)

This retrospective interview study focused on the impact that training and implementation of Philosophy, in Lipman's tradition of Philosophy for Children, had on the pedagogy of 14 primary teachers at one school. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to document the impact of teaching Philosophy on pedagogy, the resources required to facilitate and sustain such change, including the necessary dispositions required to teach Philosophy, and the critical junctures in pedagogical change associated with teaching Philosophy. Interview data were coded and analysed to generate (...) a grounded theory regarding the efficacy of teaching Philosophy in terms of its impact on the pedagogy of the teachers interviewed. This pedagogical transformation is then theorised in terms of Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development re the learning of the adults in this study. This study formed the pilot for a larger empirical study. (shrink)

The present study has two main purposes: First, investigating the role of sensory-processing sensitivity, describing inter-individual differences with regard to people’s sensitivity to positive and negative environmental stimuli through a deeper level of information processing, in the teaching work place. Second, it aims at revealing further insight into the association between SPS and different mental disorders as well as variables of therapeutic success. The teaching profession is widely accepted as being complex and highly demanding with many expectations and requirements, so (...) the high level of stress found across teachers is thus not surprising. Nonetheless, teachers can only efficiently fulfill their important tasks and have a positive influence on students if they are mentally healthy. Given empirical findings supporting an increased stress level across teachers, numerous studies have investigated the conditions and processes behind the onset of mental ill-health and developed various prevention programs to support teachers in dealing with their perceived stress. Looking through the research area, a clear focus on behavior and personality-related characteristics of teachers is present, including, for example, various dysfunctional cognitions, coping behavior or the Big Five personality traits. Although other studies consider environmental aspects of the work place as well, such as noise or schedules, the integration of these two entities is still a research gap. This is true despite recent developments emphasizing the perspective of person-environment interactions, particularly in the field of stress. The present study takes up this gap by introducing the temperament trait of SPS into the field of teacher professionalism and health research, representing a holistic way of analyzing person-environment interactions as it focuses on individuals’ reactivity to certain environmental conditions and stimuli. Embedded into the project “Risiko-Check für das Lehramt”, two teacher samples participated in the study: a non-clinical sample of teachers, who were actively teaching in the school context and a clinical sample of teachers, who received inpatient treatment and were diagnosed with mental disorders during the data collection process. Both groups filled out the same questionnaire, which included different scales measuring aspects of the teaching environment and personality-related variables of teachers. For a small sub-group of the teachers in the clinical sample, additional clinically-relevant data, such as measures of therapeutic success or additional measures of mental disorders, was also available. In line with the first goal of the study, results reveal further evidence for the validity of the construct: SPS was successfully differentiated from other variables measuring psychological well-being, including Depression, Anxiety, and Stress. The second aim represents the investigation of the role of the temperamental trait of SPS in the teaching context. Of particular interest are the perception of certain workplace-demand characteristics unique to this profession and the extent to which certain characteristics related to SPS are activated in teachers in their everyday lives. Findings suggest that highly sensitive teachers feel more attuned to the students, who need help, but, at the same time, have more difficulties with regard to the characteristics that are very open and include a certain degree of flexibility. Those are for example, maintaining an efficient work-life balance, dealing with their tasks and deciding when certain demands are fulfilled, lack of feedback, and the various expectations teachers are confronted with. In spite of these difficulties, they perceive themselves as similarly successful as non-highly sensitive teachers. Additionally, SPS mediates the relationship between different demands and teachers’ perceived stress. Three ways this is possible are an increased frequency of applying dysfunctional cognitions, coping strategies, and lower self-efficacy. Research questions in line with the third general goal of the present study include a more detailed investigation of the association with clinically relevant variables; the difference between mentally ill teachers and those teaching actively; and evidence for the presence of the Vantage Theory framework in clinical contexts, describing increased effect of positive and supporting environments, such as those found in therapeutic interventions. In general, participants in the clinical sample reach higher mean scores on the scale measuring SPS than participants in the non-clinical sample. Additionally, investigating the symptoms of teachers in the clinical sample, highly sensitive teachers show more severe symptoms of anxiety and depressive disorders. Finally, in line with one of the hypotheses stated in this context, results support the presence of vantage sensitivity in this study. While almost all patients show improvements in their general functioning and clinical global impression at release, patients with high levels of SPS are found to benefit even more from the treatment, on average, than patients with lower levels of SPS. This is true for the majority of symptoms that are associated with SPS, which include phobic anxiety, anxiety, and depressive disorders. Finally, the fourth objective of the present study aims at broadening the findings by investigating the hypothesis of the existence of different sensitivity types. Then, all theoretical and empirical models as well as existing findings and those generated in the present study are taken together in order to develop an overarching model for the development of stress in teaching, including SPS as one facet. Results of a cluster analysis including the highly sensitive teachers of both samples disclose the existence of three sensitivity types that differ significantly with regard to their core areas of certain characteristics of SPS. While one group reaches comparably high scores across facets, the remaining two sensitivity types show a particular focus, either the facet Aesthetical sensitivity or the two factors Low sensory threshold and Ease of excitation. The majority of the clinical sample is found to be more aesthetically sensitive, whereas most teachers in the nonc-clinical sample are assigned to the group with comparably higher scores across facets. Furthermore, these sensitivity types differ with regard to their work-life balance and dysfunctional cognitions as well as coping strategies in a such way that the Aesthetically sensitive type reach mean scores that can be interpreted as most functional when compared to the remaining types. Finally, with regard to a general model of stress development for teaching, despite the final model not reaching statistical indices indicating a fit to the data of the present study, comparisons of regression weights reveal support for the significant role of SPS in comparison to already-established variables. In summary, the findings of the present study close various research gaps and have multiple implications. First, they reveal evidence for the fact that SPS could add valuable information when implemented into research on teacher professionalism and teacher stress, which has diverse implications for the political, administrational and individual level. Secondly, they broaden the research field of SPS by revealing more insight into the associations between SPS and mental ill-health as well as evidence in support of vantage sensitivity, suggesting that patients with higher levels of SPS benefit more from therapeutic interventions than patients with lower levels. Limitations of the present study are discussed critically and suggested approaches for further research studies are described. (shrink)

We explore some aspects of the elusive idea of a "teachable moment" with a special emphasis on the role of emotion, intuition, and imagination as well as intuition, paradox and possibility. The teachable moment occurs when students and teachers genuinely share an interest in better understanding something, some situation, or, in the case discussed, some text, and wish to inquire into the object of mutual concern together. Some of the aesthetic elements of John Dewey's theory of inquiry serve as a (...) way to gain insight into the "logic" of creating and sustaining teachable moments. (shrink)