Dimensions of Teachers’ Professional Learning

Citation

Elliott, J. (2013), "Dimensions of Teachers’ Professional Learning", International Journal for Lesson and Learning Studies, Vol. 2 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijlls.2013.57902baa.001

Dimensions of Teachers’ Professional Learning

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal for Lesson and Learning Studies, Volume 2, Issue 2.

Introduction

Writing an editorial for a general issue of an academic journal is no easy task. The contents are not pre-structured except in the broad terms that define the discipline in which the journal is located. They depend in the main on which submissions have passed successfully through the rigorous process of peer review at the delivery deadline set by the publisher. With a recently launched journal like the IJLLS such a process delivers high-quality articles, but the editor is unlikely to have a surplus of such articles when the time comes to write the editorial. To date we have been lucky enough to publish five good articles for each of the three issues per year. In this issue we can give the reader six, if one includes the book review article couched in the form of a dialogue between a university professor and a secondary school teacher. What is more, all speak quite coincidentally to a common theme; namely, “Dimensions of teachers’ professional learning”. In this editorial I hope to pinpoint these dimensions, and attempt some kind of synthesis, mindful that the articles originate from different subject contexts, reflecting pedagogical thinking and research in the fields of mathematics, chemistry, history, special educational needs and early childhood education. They also embrace diverse professional, societal and policy contexts, in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Spain, England and Austria. The reader will also find that two of the articles are authored by teacher researchers, while the book review is co-authored with a teacher. The IJLLS is building a strong base of pedagogical knowledge that is informed by the professional scholarship of teachers, as well as academic scholarship based in higher education institutions. We aspire to publish more collaboratively written lesson and learning studies by teachers and teacher educators. We are also experimenting with alternative ways of presenting lesson and learning studies and welcome submissions in the form of discussion pieces, and diagrammatic/visual depictions of processes, challenges and outcomes, in the form of posters. We shall try to maintain a steady core of traditional articles, while hoping to engage more teachers in publishing their research through alternative formats.

It is our editorial policy to maximise access to high-quality academic publishing in an English language journal, on the part of collaborating teachers and academics, whose first language is not English. We welcome submissions initially in the authors’ first language, perhaps mediated by a member of our Editorial Review or Advisory Boards (see cover), or by a member of the World Association for Lesson Studies (we are the official journal of WALS). This initial submission will be reviewed by a user of the language in which it is written, and possibly revised until the reviewer recommends translation into English, for the purpose of resubmitting the article for a second review, before a decision to publish is made. In this way we hope to increase the flow of lesson and learning studies carried out in classrooms and schools to build a useful pedagogical knowledge-base, across topic and skill areas that teachers find professionally challenging.

Professional learning as the reinvention of teaching through lesson study

For Law the professional learning of teachers involves nothing more than the reinvention of teaching. He cites influential voices who have argued as much over the years, yet he claims such a pedagogical breakthrough has yet to be witnessed in any sustained manner. Such professional learning would depend, he argues, on being able to change deeply ingrained habits, which are underpinned by a system of deeply held common sense beliefs. Teaching, he argues, is all too often assumed to be simply a matter of transmitting information one way from a sender to a receiver, of telling the latter what to do and then making sure they do it. From this commonsense perspective the experience of student learning is a passive affair, and professional learning little more than acquiring practical skills in the form of techniques of information transmission. Changing habits of practice involves the reinvention of teaching by teachers themselves since, Law claims, such changes cannot be taught in the conventional sense. It implies a new methodological orientation for the professional learning of teachers.

Law's paper proceeds to ground this new methodological orientation in pragmatist conceptions of experience (Dewey) and practical judgement (Peirce). In Dewey's thought experience is a dynamic concept, in which the reality experienced is not objectively given to a passive subject, but inseparable from the process of experiencing and the person having it. Such a process is both interactive and continuous. There are points, however, when the flow of experience is disrupted and an agent experiences “surprise” and “doubt” about how to proceed. The situation is rendered problematic. Meaning is no longer “given”, but has to be actively and deliberatively re-constructed through a process of inquiry aimed at forming a practical judgement that will eliminate doubt. The professional learning of teachers from a pragmatist perspective involves the reinvention of a practice, and this entails continuous practical experimentation in classrooms conceived as laboratories in search of an answer to the question that emerged from the problematic situation; “How shall we teach?” The answer will be a matter of personal judgement, inasmuch as the teacher must decide when the experimentation has realised sufficient congruence between expectation of the requirements of the professional role (aims/values) and practical experience in the classroom.

Experimental teaching will, Law argues, involve three dimensions of change; changes of language evidenced in the way teachers and students talk with each other about the subject-matter; a transformation of gaze evidenced in the way the experience of surprise provides the impetus for teachers to see and understand things differently in their classrooms; and the moulding or metamorphosis of the teacher as an individual agent. Such change, Law argues, takes time. He explores the potential of Japanese style lesson studies as a method for shaping the “triadic” change process involved in the reinvention of teaching, through cycles of prepare, teach and reflect in which teachers collaborate with academic researchers, students and their peers. Law demonstrates, drawing on examples of his own practice as a mathematics teacher educator, how lesson studies so designed are a potentially powerful method of effecting professional learning as a triadic change process. However, he also reminds us of their resource intensive features and the high levels of commitment involved from teachers.

Noemi Trapero's article explores the actual impact of lesson studies carried out by a group of 15 infant school teachers, supported by researchers from the University of Malaga, on the professional learning of a particular member of the group. The context, Trapero claims, is an increasing interest amongst Spanish teachers in reinventing themselves as teachers, in order to tackle the complex problems and challenges that arise in the course of their careers. Deeply ingrained habitual practices embedded in the transmission model of teaching are being called into question. Trapero shows how the lesson study process has been specially designed to enable teachers to reconstruct their practical thinking. Much teacher thinking, she claims, draws on practical knowledge that is tacitly embedded in emotions, attitudes and habits of mind, which are the source of the taken-for-granted assumptions and dispositions shaping classroom practice. Such knowledge, although a major resource for thinking about practice, is difficult to formalise as propositional knowledge organised according to disciplines. The lesson study process depicted by Trapero is designed to open up spaces in which teachers can share experiences, identify problematic situations, debate and test possible solutions in the form of practical hypotheses. In such spaces teachers have an opportunity to increase their awareness of taken-for-granted assumptions and dispositions and to call them into question. The conception of professional learning that informs the design of the Spanish lesson studies has much in common with the pragmatist conception outlined by Law, and particularly with that dimension of change that Law depicts as the transformation of the teacher's gaze. However, the reader will find evidence of Law's triad of change in Trapero's case study of the reconstruction of a particular individual's practical thinking.

Ylonen's article on the “Professional learning of teachers through a Lesson Study process in England: context, mechanisms and outcomes” explores the relationship between procedural aspects of the lesson study process, contextual factors operating at teacher and school levels, and professional learning outcomes for teachers (particularly in relation to the teaching of pupils with moderate learning difficulties) as well as school-wide outcomes. The study largely draws on questionnaire survey data administered to teachers in the schools involved and some semi-structured interviews with a sample of teachers. The data reported support the view that the Japanese lesson study “method” enables teachers to reinvent their teaching. It evidences the triad of change outlined by Law as dimensions of professional learning. First, there is evidence of changes in teachers’ knowledge of pupils as individuals and the quality of their interactions with them in classrooms. Second, there is evidence of teachers transforming their gaze and seeing things differently, e.g. by making their tacit knowledge explicit and open to question. Third, there is evidence of personal change in attitudes and dispositions, such as greater confidence in tackling difficult classroom situations and a willingness to take risks by trying out innovatory teaching strategies. However, the evidence suggests that there is considerable variation in support at the management level, for the development of lesson study conceived as a school-wide “method” of professional learning in English schools. Issues about the management of resources and time are cited as major obstacles. In this Journal we would welcome articles that explore and evaluate innovative organisational strategies aimed at resolving such issues.

Building pedagogical content knowledge through professional learning: two cases of teacher research

The articles referred to above are written by teacher educators who have explored the potential of Japanese style lesson study as a method of teachers’ professional learning. Law's article is a conceptual piece but grounded in his experience as a teacher educator in the field of mathematics education. Trapero and Ylonen's articles are pieces of empirical research by teacher educators into the impact of lesson study on the professional learning of teachers. However, the articles by Carol Jordan and Dominik Palek are authored by teacher researchers themselves, engaged in developing their pedagogical content knowledge in the process of reinventing their teaching. Their primary focus is on how their pupils learn. They are indeed learning studies, but not of the kind referred to by Trapero, which were originally developed at the Hong Kong Institute of Education by my co-editor Lo Mun Ling and her colleagues. These took the form of collaborative lesson studies that are explicitly informed by a learning theory; the theory of variation, developed in Sweden by Ference Marton and his colleagues at the University of Gothenburg (see Lo and Marton in Vol. 1 No. 1). The reader of this issue will be interested in the review by Gabriele Isak (a secondary school teacher) and Peter Posch (a former university professor), written in dialogue form, of Lo Mun Ling's book Learning Studies: A Substantial Approach to Educational Reform, which was especially written for teachers. Isak and Posch tend to endorse the views expressed in the book; that the empirical identification and teaching of the critical features of an object of learning are very important pedagogical tasks of teachers and that this requires them to participate in subject-based professional learning communities.

It can be argued that the theory of variation is being tacitly employed in the learning studies of both Jordan and Palek, although the former's study appears to be individually rather than group-based. Jordan, a chemistry teacher in an International School in Shanghai, refers to a significant change she made to her teaching with her International Baccalaureate chemistry class in 2010. She attempted to provide her students with a learning environment that blended e-learning activities and resources with traditional face-to-face instruction. In doing so she was attempting to develop a learning environment based on a constructivist pedagogy. Although she selected activities and resources that would support such a pedagogy, she was careful not to presume that the e-learning components were preferable to the face-to-face components in this respect. Jordan's article is a good example of the kind of practical experimentalism that Law refers to, and the attempt to change the learning environment, informed by constructivist theories of learning, with respect to the ways in which students talk with each other and their teacher about objects of learning. Jordan concludes from her learning study that while on-line learning experiences enhance and support the use of constructivist pedagogies to develop conceptual understanding, they cannot substitute for face-to-face components that draw on the constructivist approach. The pedagogical usefulness and value of on-line technical tools, she argues, depends on the teachers’ role in designing and directing the on-line learning experience. The success of an on-line learning environment, which matches the ways students prefer to learn, depends on “a strong instructional strategy shaped by beliefs of the teacher that emphasise a constructivist approach.” Jordan concludes by mapping out an agenda for further research into the design and construction of online learning environments.

Although Jordan's research is carried out by a solitary teacher it yields findings that can be cast in the form of pedagogical content knowledge, and further refined and developed by other teachers in the laboratory of their classrooms and schools. Although it is important to conceptualise the processes by which teachers reinvent their teaching, it is also important to clarify and systematically set out what they learn in the process; their pedagogical content knowledge. The knowledge outcomes of teachers’ professional learning through their research, need to find forms of public expression if teachers’ are to build a strong professional culture to inform their practice in classrooms and schools. Professional insights need to move out of the private and into the public domain if teachers are to avoid continuously reinventing the “pedagogical wheels” that drive educational practice. This Journal therefore welcomes the opportunity to publish the “knowledge outcomes” of teachers’ research, regardless of whether it stems from the efforts of those engaged in collaborative lesson and learning studies, or from the solitary efforts of individual teacher researchers.

Dominik Palek is a newly qualified teacher, whose article focuses on a learning study he carried out as a trainee history teacher at Cambridge University. This took the form of a dissertation project; a piece of research carried out within an enquiry question tradition, that required the trainee to build a sequence of lessons around a single question enshrining a second-order historical concept. In doing so the training context provided him with the support of a subject-based learning community in which learning to teach one's subject and learning to research one's teaching of it were experienced as an integrated process. The learning community itself consisted of a network of fellow students in his specialist subject linked to their subject tutors in the university and to experienced subject teachers in partner schools, who served as mentors for student teachers on school attachment, supporting their research and practice as part of an integrated process. Palek's research stemmed from a question posed by his teacher mentor after observing one of his lessons. He was asked “in historical analysis what exactly is the interplay between the second-order concepts of diversity and change?” This prompted him to think afresh about the criteria he was employing to judge the quality of his pupils’ conceptual understanding. He began to explore the possibility that conceptual understanding might be strengthened if pupils were helped to use concepts interactively in a form where they were used to modify each other. Hence, he designed, taught and researched a sequence of lessons around a curricular entity that he tentatively called diachronic diversity, whose meaning is greater than the sum of its two conceptual components; namely, diversity and change. In the process he gathered data in the form of pupils’ oral and written responses, interviews and focus groups with pupils and comments from an observing mentor. Such data, not only led him to problematise some commonly accepted pedagogical beliefs about how to develop pupils’ conceptual understanding in the field of history, but also some common ways of depicting what is to be learned in the form of subject content. In other words Palek's learning study as a trainee history teacher, set in the context of a training partnership between a university and local schools, has made a contribution to both the development of publicly accessible pedagogical content knowledge and the curricular dimensions of the subject-matter. It demonstrates the fallacy of divorcing the development of the curriculum from the process of teachers researching their teaching.

John ElliottChief Editor