Carey Philpott

Teacher Agency and Professional Learning Communities: What Can Learning Rounds in Scotland Teach Us?

Recently there has been growth in researching teacher agency. Some research has considered the relationship between teacher agency and professional learning. Similarly, there has been growing interest in professional learning communities as resources for professional learning. Connections have been made between professional learning communities and teacher agency, with professional learning communities seen as an affordance for the exercise of teacher agency. However, it has also been argued that there is little detailed evidence of what happens inside professional learning communities or of teacher agency in action. The research reported here focuses on a form of professional learning community from Scotland: Learning Rounds. It uses data from transcripts of post-classroom observation conversations to consider the extent to which Learning Rounds provide an affordance for teacher agency and the extent to which that affordance is utilised. This research makes a contribution in three ways: adding to an empirical understanding of what happens in professional learning communities; understanding how teacher agency is (or is not) exercised in practice; and considering what factors might affect the utilisation (or otherwise) of affordances for teacher agency. The article concludes with several recommendations for developing effective professional learning communities as an affordance for teacher agency.

Creating an in-school pastoral system for student teachers in school-based initial teacher education

Recent developments in initial teacher education (ITE) have produced a number of school-centred models. These mean that student teachers may now spend more of their time in schools than has historically been the case. In some of these models, student teachers are more clearly part of the school as an institution than might be the case in more university-led models. This change of ‘home’ location for student teachers means that schools may have an increased responsibility for their pastoral needs. This paper reviews existing academic literature on student teacher stress, anxiety, emotions and identity in relation to ITE school placements to consider what recommendations have been made about how these pastoral needs should be responded to and who should make that response. It finds that recommendations mostly relate to universities developing student teachers’ skills and emotional and personal resilience before they begin school placements. Where in-school responsibilities are considered, this either stops at the level of individual mentors or there is no detailed consideration of how schools as institutions should organise their response. The paper then considers the small body of existing literature on how schools should meet the pastoral needs of teachers to suggest principles for planning a pastoral care system for student teachers in school-based ITE.

Socioculturally situated narratives as co-authors of student teachers’ learning from experience

This paper reports on research into the ways in which student teachers’ experiential learning is mediated by socioculturally situated narrative resources. The research uses Wertsch’s idea of the narrative template as a co-author of individual narratives. This idea is developed to be useful in the particular context of initial teacher education (ITE). Transcripts from post-lesson observation discussions between student teachers, school-based mentors and university-based tutors are used to analyse the processes by which beginning teachers master the use of narrative templates for making sense of and, therefore learning from, their experiences. This research is put into the context of debates about the centrality of ‘on the job’ learning to ITE and developing interest in recent decades in models of teacher knowledge and teacher learning.

Do Professional Learning Communities reify or interrupt the language of pedagogical practice

In Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) teachers discuss observed classroom practice with the intention of improving it. The research reported in this paper considers how these discussions either reify or interrupt (Little 2003) teachers’ language of practice. Reification will tend to constrain learning within existing ways of linguistically construing sense. Disruption might establish a new discourse for practice that will enable learning. The data is transcriptions of PLCs from two schools in Scotland.

Medical Models for Teachers' Learning: Asking for a Second Opinion.

Abstract Recently there has been renewed interest in basing teachers’ professional learning on medically derived models. This interest has included clinical practice models and evidence-based teaching as well as the use of various forms of ‘Rounds’ which claim to derive from medical rounds. However, many arguing for these approaches may well not have a detailed knowledge of the actuality of professional learning in medicine but may be basing their ideas on idealised models drawn from popular conceptions. In addition, the model used by some calling for medically derived teacher learning is biomedicine, an area in which parallels with Education are difficult. This paper argues that mental health and public health provide a better analogue for Education than biomedicine. It considers some of the lessons that can be drawn from research on evidence-based practice in these areas. The paper concludes that a way forward is neither uncritically to assume the superiority of medical models of professional learning nor to rely only on empirical evidence from Education, but rather to enter into dialogue with colleagues in mental and public health about shared concerns and experiences in professional learning.

Narratives as a vehicle for mentor and tutor knowledge during feedback in initial teacher education

This paper argues that the central role of narratives in forming professional knowledge and identity in initial teacher education (ITE) has been overlooked in much recent research into feedback processes in ITE. The paper reviews a broad sample of recent research into mentor and tutor feedback in ITE and identifies that the role of narrating in feedback is either ignored or downplayed. The paper then uses Wertsch’s work on the co-authoring role of narratives in the ‘effort after meaning’ to suggest that narratives play a powerful and central role in shaping student teachers’ understanding of practice and what they learn from their experiences. Transcript data from actual feedback events is used to analyse the process of co-constructing narrations and role of co-constructed narratives in the feedback process.