Ronnie Davey

‘It’s all about paying attention!’ … but to what? The ‘6 Ms’ of mentoring the professional learning of teacher educators

Much of the international literature on professional learning in the field of education is predicated on the assumption that, for teacher educators and the teachers they work with alike, professional learning is a matter of rigorously applying the principles and strategies of ‘reflective practice’ and ‘critical reflection’. Professional learning for teacher educators is not just, or even, a matter of attending conferences, or spending a day reading in the library, or, for that matter, conducting empirical research in schools and classrooms. Rather, it is a matter of undertaking potentially transformative and rigorous investigations of their own professional practices in order to improve those practices. This article reports the findings of the authors’ self‐studies of their role as the mentors of groups of teacher educator colleagues, who were themselves engaged in action research on their work with teachers as their chosen mode of professional learning. From these studies of mentoring the professional learning of teacher educator colleagues, we have developed a conceptual model for ‘contextually responsive mentoring’ in teacher education. This model proposes that there are (at least) six core preoccupations of practice that tend to dominate teacher educators’ thinking when engaged in these kinds of professional learning enquiries, and that need to be attended to in the mentoring of such professional learning. Although it originates from investigations of the professional learning of in‐service teacher educators, we would argue that the model has relevance for all those teacher educators, and indeed all those teachers, who might be engaged in mentored reflective practice, action research, self‐study, and the like, as forms of professional development or learning.

Being a Secondary English Teacher in New Zealand: Complex Realities in the First 18 Months.

This paper focuses on the experiences of a group of beginning secondary school English teachers involved in ‘Making a Difference’, a national New Zealand study of the influence of initial teacher education and beginning teacher induction on teachers’ early development as professionals. Rich data drawn from three rounds of interviews with beginning teachers highlight the challenges faced by beginning subject‐specialist teachers in secondary school contexts. The focus is on how such teachers balance their need to be confident in their curriculum knowledge and at the same time devise strategies to engage diverse learners at all levels. Data from four case studies highlight the challenges and complex realities experienced by beginning teachers as they move from ‘surviving to thriving’ (or not) as specialist‐subject teachers, how these teachers continued to develop sound curriculum and pedagogical content knowledge in their specialism area beyond their initial training year, and the in‐school factors that contributed most to their developing self‐efficacy, identity and socialization into the profession.

Privatization, Illumination, and Validation in Identity-Making within a Teacher Educator Research Collective

Much of the self-study of teacher education practices literature characterizes self-study as a collaborative activity involving various degrees of cooperation and interaction with others, both the others who are our students and the collegial others who assist us in our inquiries into our own professional practices. However, while many self-studies in teacher education mention using collaborative or team approaches, few seem to have made collaboration itself the key focus of empirical interest in the analysis and reporting of those studies. This paper reports a collective self-study by seven teacher educators at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, that specifically analyzed the contribution made to their teacher education practices and self-understandings by the collaborative-collective process itself. We found that this collective approach to self-study research helped to maintain momentum and focus in our own self-inquiries through a strong sense of accountability to the group, insured greater trustworthiness to the study through multiple perspectives to the data collection and analysis, de-privatized, illuminated, validated, and challenged each others practices and professional beliefs, and ultimately contributed to the development of a stronger sense of individual and community identity as teacher educators.

Intimate Scholarship: An Examination of Identity and Inquiry in the Work of Teacher Educators

In this chapter we look across the literatures of identity, inquiry, and pedagogy to explore the place of teacher educators in their institutions and the methodologies for inquiry they use to sustain themselves as instructors and scholars. Through examination of practice that represents a fundamental quality of teacher education and guided by felt obligations to students, teachers and teacher education, the evolution of identity formation as a site for the growth of professional knowledge occurs through experience. This chapter articulates the need for and potential contribution of intimate scholarship to the conversation concerning research on teacher education. We assert that intimate scholarship includes various methodologies but we privilege this label when the researcher is one of the researched. In addition, relational ontology grounds researchers with a focus on the particular rather than the universal, a coming-to-know process through dialogue and a context that includes a space of vulnerability and openness.