Jane Mitchell

Teacher educators and 'accidental' careers in academe : an Australian perspective

While teacher education is often seen as the key to preparing qualified teachers who are able to educate students for the demands of the twenty-first century, relatively little attention is paid to the teacher educators who actually do this work. Given the increased demand for teacher educators in Australia due to retirements, and the changing political and institutional context of teacher education, it is timely to understand a little more about the teacher educator workforce. Who are they, why do they work in teacher education, what career pathways have led them to teacher education, what are key aspects of their knowledge and practice as teacher educators, and what are the critical issues faced by those working in teacher education? This paper reports on a study that investigated the pathways into teacher education and the career trajectories of a small group of teacher educators working in a range of university sites in three states in Australia. The study draws on interview data to examine the ways in which these teacher educators talk about the accidental nature of their career pathways, their views about teaching and research, and the variable ways in which experiential and research knowledge are recognised and valued within the field of teacher education and in the academy. The report highlights important considerations for the preparation of the next generation of teacher educators as well as for their induction, mentoring and career planning in order to build and sustain a viable teacher education workforce for the twenty-first century.

Leading Professional Learning in Schools: Emotion in Action.

School leadership and teacher professional development are two well‐defined fields of research within the education literature, yet there is relatively little research that has examined the leadership of teachers’ professional development and learning. The study reported in this paper seeks to understand the experience of teachers who have responsibility for leading professional learning in their schools. The first part of the paper describes the Leading Professional Learning program funded by the Victorian Department of Education and Early Childhood Development and designed by Monash University. The program aimed to build teachers’ capacity to lead professional learning within their school settings. The program involved a series of workshops for 70 teachers over a period of six months; the design and implementation of school‐based Professional Learning Projects; and, the writing of cases that reflected program participants’ experience of leading professional learning in their school and their own learning about leadership and professional learning. The second part of the paper analyses the cases written by program participants in order to describe and account for key dimensions of school‐based leadership of professional learning. The analysis reveals important facets of the relational and emotional dimensions of leading professional learning in schools. The identification of these dimensions provides important insights for understanding the complexity of teacher‐led professional learning, as well as for the design of policy and practice pertaining to leading professional learning.

Crossing school and university boundaries to reshape professional learning and research practices

This paper examines the ways in which school teachers and university faculty can work together for the purposes of school reform, professional development and educational research. The paper describes the ongoing interactions between teachers and university personnel in two sites in Australia. Each case considers the ways in which the interaction between teachers and academics contributed to the nature of professional learning for all participants, and transcended some of the boundaries between school and university. We argue that the exchange of ideas across institutional boundaries is an important condition of professional learning within partnerships, and that the negotiation and codification of knowledge serves important research and practice purposes.

Praxis and the language of improvement: inquiry-based approaches to authentic improvement in Australasian schools

In this paper, we explore the notion of school improvement through the lens of praxis as it relates to equity, inclusion, and transformation, with a particular focus on inquiry-based school and teacher development. We argue that authentic improvement is a consequence of praxis, and highlight, through examples, key ways that authentic school improvement might be achieved through inquiry within a praxis framework. While many recent policy initiatives related to school education in Australia, and internationally, place emphasis on competitive and performance-based mechanisms to drive improvement, the argument in this paper runs counter to these emphases, not in its recognition of the need for school improvement but in its understanding of how that improvement can be defined, developed, and documented. The examples presented illustrate ways in which inquiry-based approaches to teacher professional learning, and teaching practices in classrooms, provide tools for framing authentic school improvement.

Teaching practices that re-engage early school leavers in further education: an Australian study

Re-engaging young adults who have ‘dropped out’ of school is an important and challenging task for educators. The purpose of this study was to explore the teaching practices that encourage young people to re-engage in further learning. Through interviews with teachers and students, the study identified five major interrelated teaching strategies that were effective in re-engaging young adults in education. These strategies were: strong concern for student welfare; positive teacher–student relationships; relevant course content; a mastery-based approach to learning; and an overarching goal of building students’ confidence in their ability, and more generally, in themselves. Together, these strategies address the behavioural, emotional and cognitive components of student engagement.

The Insider and Outsider Model of Professional Learning

The chapter presents two case studies of pedagogical innovation in and across school classrooms; the first titled Engaging Pedagogy, speculated about a ‘fresh technology equation’ conceptualised to promote high levels of intellectual engagement where the pedagogy required particular technology tools, content integration and a ‘meddler in the middle’. A second study, extending education (e2) is about a school-based research partnership that extends curriculum options for senior students in rural schools using new technologies.