Paul Keown

Communities of practice and professional development

The Internet has had a transformative effect on many aspects of contemporary living. While there may be a tendency to overstate the impacts of this technology, workplaces and work practices in many societies have been greatly affected by almost instant access to massive amounts of information, delivered through broadening bandwidth. This paper embeds a discussion of professional development in this technological context, and comments on the emergence of a range of Internet‐based tools designed to assist with the delivery of professional development programs for secondary teachers. We argue that the tools by themselves are not enough to guarantee effective professional development and that building ‘communities of practice’ will become significant in lifelong learning models. We discuss some work undertaken in a professional development project with secondary school teachers distributed at a distance from the host institution.

The tale of two virtual teacher professional development modules

Virtual communities of practice (VCoP) have been advocated for some time as a promising means of taking professional development to teachers in widely distributed locations. However, geography, and indeed education literature as a whole, contains very few examples where this has been achieved. This paper reports on two VCoP professional development modules for New Zealand geography and social studies teachers. The first module focused on perspectives in geography and the second on values in social studies. The paper describes the design of the modules and tells the story of each module in practice as two “tales” or narratives. The second tale tells a much happier story than the first, and the reasons for this are explored. The paper concludes by discussing what can be learned about implementing successful professional development for geography teachers through VCoPs as indicated by the results reported through the two tales.

Geographical Education in New Zealand during the Last Decade

The restructuring of the national economy of New Zealand in the last decade of the 20th century left its mark on education generally, with some quite specific consequences for geographical education in the secondary sector. This review of commentaries and research on geographical education considers debates about curriculum development, the changing assessment regime and the influence of geography educators on contemporary pedagogy.

Emerging Models of Pre-service Teacher Education in New Zealand

National Contexts for Change A change in government in 1984 introduced sweeping reform into every part of New Zealand society. A treasury briefing paper in 1987 ‘argued that education was not fostering equity, participation, or achievement; that it was marked by “middle-class capture”; and the “inputs” were not producing the “outputs”’ (Mitchell et al., 1993). A series of reports and the Education Act of 1990 followed and changed the structure of education dramatically. These reforms provided more autonomy to the tertiary sector; however, at the same time a new policy-oriented Ministry of Education (MOE), and crown agencies for qualifications – the New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA), and review – the Education Review Office (ERO) were established, retaining central control of some items. The concept of an educational market where competition was said to lead to increased quality was central to the reform process, and has changed the nature of teacher education in New Zealand. The New Zealand Curriculum Framework (NZCF), and a new qualifications framework, the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA), placed a new emphasis on generic skills and discrete units of knowledge. This opened the door for a number of new subjects in the senior secondary curriculum – tourism, legal studies and social studies now compete with geography and history for humanities students in senior secondary school programmes. At the same time, teacher (and student teacher) quality has been an issue. Itemising, appraising and rewarding the successful achievement of specific competencies was seen as a way to improve quality (Fitzsimons, 1997; Fitzsimons & Fenwick, 1997). This led to a number of policy groups publishing their own (different) lists of competencies and qualities of ‘good’ teaching (Education Review Office, 1998b; Gibbs & Munro, 1993; Ministry of Education, 1997; Teacher Registration Board, 1997).

The cost of compliance: Unit standards for teacher education in the light of recent experience in secondary schools

Observations of the demands on the work of teachers created by a year long trial implementation of unit standards in secondary schools highlighted an initial tendency for the assessment requirements to dominate teaching and the need for teachers to develop new strategies and systems to combine assessment with teaching, track the achievements of individual students and cope with the practical requirements of re-assessment. Towards the end of the trial some evidence was noted of teachers reducing the quality of the evidence on which assessments were based in order to cope with the demands on their time. The implications of this experience for teacher education, where unit standards are to be applied, are considered. It is argued that the problems noted in secondary schools will need to be addressed but the costs of compliance are likely to be greater because the teacher education unit standards, on which judgements are required, contain more detailed and numerous performance criteria, many of which will need to be assessed in more than one course, often taught by different departments, and during practical teaching. Three ways in which the difficulties might be resolved are proposed.