Parallel professionalism in an era of standardisation

Today’s American educational context is characterised by increasing standardisation coupled with heightened accountability. While some view standardisation as a lever for equity, many view it as problematic for the work of teachers. Efforts to improve student achievement by focusing on the activities of teachers have resulted in an over-riding sense that teachers have lost control over their work and that teachers’ professional identities are being worn away by the changes asked of them. Research has demonstrated the ways in which understandings of teachers’ professionalism have changed over time. Here, I argue that not only have views of professionalism changed over time, but that different teachers or here different groups of teachers, experience and understand professionalism differently. In this article, I first look at teachers’ professionalism across two decades using data from a large national database and then focus on how different generations of teachers experience professionalism in a context of standardisation in multiple ways based on qualitative interviews. The findings show that unlike veteran teachers from the Boomer generation (born 1943–1960) who started their careers as idealists but have become increasingly bitter about changes being asked of them, many Generation X (born 1961–1981) teachers are able to accommodate the changes asked of them in a more neutral fashion. While these teachers do not particularly like all aspects of standardisation, they feel that it is just part of the work they do, not who they are. This flexibility is not a function of diminished professionalism but rather a generational difference, as teachers from Generation X tend to be more flexible, less rule-bound than those from the Boomer generation whose mission is who they are. The data presented demonstrate the need to understand professionalism in a new light. Some teachers feel more control in this era of standardisation, and some feel less. Rather than viewing professionalism as a singular phenomenon that everyone experiences in the same way, it is increasingly important to view it as a complex phenomenon that can be experienced in unique ways at the same time by disparate groups of teachers. In this sense, professionalism can morph from more than ‘old’ or ‘new’ to complex, or what I term in this article parallel professionalism.     

Speaking ‘over’ performativity

In a time where standards and accountability override trust in teachers and principals, mandated versions of pedagogy have recently appeared in the Australian landscape. This article critiques one pedagogical reform initiative and suggests that in performative times, it may be preferable for principals and teachers to speak ‘over’ reform than to speak ‘back’ to it. While reference to competency standards increasingly replaces discussion about professionalism, the argument is developed here that key elements of professionalism include trust, agency, identity and judgement, which are excluded from the standards discourse. The article proposes that the tenuous hold teachers have on professionalism might be strengthened by critical school leaders adept at navigating their way around performative demands and who encourage teachers to speak ‘over’ codes about appropriate behaviour to instead explore what it means to be a teacher professional.     

Human elements and the pragmatic approach in the Australian,Scottish and Swedish standards for newly qualified teachers

Teacher standards are used in many countries, but it has been argued that there is a disconnection between the standards and teachers’ everyday practices. Mega-narratives about teachers’ practices have been recognised as powerful for educational change and when implementing and legitimising standards. In this comparative study, the standards for newly qualified teachers in Australia, Scotland and Sweden are analysed in order to determine the extent to which they contain human elements, here framed as contextual professionalism, and/or paradigmatic knowledge (Olson and Craig in Teach Coll Rec 111(2):547–572, 2009a). This comparison facilitates an exploration of how teachers’ work is envisaged in the respective countries and what is expected or required from newly qualified teachers. The results indicate that the Australian and Scottish standards emphasise paradigmatic knowledge in teaching, whereas the now abandoned Swedish standards emphasise contextual professionalism in teaching.     

TRAINING TEACHERS TO TEACH FOR CREATIVITY

One of the misconceptions about creativity which prevail among teachers is the belief that it is present only in a small proportion of children. This leads to underestimation of the influence of school and society on the creative process. The creativity training program described here was designed with the main purpose of arousing teachers’ awareness of their own creative abilities and introducing basic concepts about creativity and how to nurture it into the school setting. Several studies were conducted to investigate the effects of this program on teachers’ creative thinking abilities and behaviour in the classroom. The results obtained indicated that the program was successful in developing teachers’ creative thinking and in helping them to learn the skills which are related to creative thinking and how to further it in the classroom.     

Reflective Teachers and Teacher Educators in the Pacific Region: Conversations with us not about us

This article reports on a study of Pacific primary school teachers’ and university lecturers’ reflections on their involvement in the in-service Bachelor of Education degree programme offered at the regional University of the South Pacific (USP) in Fiji. Two rich sets of data have emerged from this study. Firstly, there are a number of critical reflections by ourselves as teacher educators concerning levels of equitable student access and participation in our degree as it is reconceptualised for distance and flexible delivery to increase levels of teacher professionalism across the Pacific region. Secondly, there has emerged a set of statements from teachers themselves about: teaching and learning; professional development opportunities; and what it means to be a professional educator in the Pacific region. This later data suggests an alternative set of voices in what has largely been a “conversation between us about them” conducted by Ministries of Education, Curriculum Development Units, USP, other educational bodies and the media in the Pacific, but particularly Fiji, about teachers and teachers’ work. Critical reflection upon our own practice as teacher educators and the voices of experienced teachers are particularly pertinent not only as we seek to reshape a degree programme to suit the needs of the region’s primary school teachers but also as “rethinking” debates about the purposes of education in the Pacific region are on-going yet exclusive.     

Inbound,outbound or peripheral: the impact of discourses of ‘organisational’ professionalism on becoming a teacher in English further education

This article explores constructions of teacher identities at a time of significant changes to public service professionalism. The article draws on different discourses of professionalism, contrasting ‘organisational’ and ‘occupational’ professionalism, with discourses of ‘personal’ and ‘critical’ professionalism, to explore changing meanings and enactments of teacher professionalism in the 2000s. Narratives of three novice teachers, followed over eight years, are used to consider the impact of dominant discourses of ‘organisational’ professionalism in English further education, resulting in inbound, outbound and peripheral trajectories. In response, the article considers how practitioners might engage critically with current changes, arguing that it is necessary to work with what matters to teachers, such as their relations with students, teaching and learning and subject specialism. Such work might create, at least temporarily and locally, spaces in which more favourable conditions towards socially just and enabling educational practices can be worked towards.     

‘To be professional is a never-ending journey’: Indonesian early childhood practitioners’ views about the attitudes and behaviours of a professional teacher

Focus group discussions with 21 degree-qualified early childhood education teachers in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, and individual follow-up interviews with 10 volunteer participants, were conducted to investigate the teachers’ perspectives on early years professionalism. Thematic analysis of the data identified the key elements that made up the teachers’ understandings about professionalism in early childhood practice. This included the idea that the attainment of professionalism was a life-long journey towards achieving an ideal image, that of a role model, or guru. We argue that the notion of role model was a complex one that not only reflected the teachers’ aspirations to achieve ‘a better classroom’ and better pedagogical outcomes for children, but also a broader aspiration to become a better person defined through a number of attitudes – ways of thinking and being – and behaviours that were socially valued within the teachers’ community and work context.     

Shifting the reflective focus: encouraging student teacher learning in video-framed and peer-sharing contexts

Since many studies that use video to support teacher learning are situated in strongly guided contexts and encourage particular kinds of thinking, we still know very little about how more loosely guided contexts can support teachers to think about the dilemmas of practice associated with their own goals by reflecting about video. This study explores how video-based and peer-based reflections about one’s own and others’ practices both indicate and guide the development of teachers’ change-directed thinking when they are sequenced before supervisor feedback. Six secondary preservice teachers reflected about peer-evaluated mini-teaching and videotaped field-based teaching in the prestudent teaching term and then about videotaped teaching alone, with peers, and alone again with supervisor feedback in the student teaching term. These reflections were coded by their subject, degree of reform-mindedness, and tendency toward three foci (player, stance, and source). Patterns in their ‘higher focus’ codes across the three reflective resources during student teaching showed how teachers were developing the goals they espoused in the fall term. Teachers situated their learning in contexts where the degree of scaffolding matched their degree of readiness for change, which was better characterized by their tendency toward subjects and foci that were less ‘one-sided’ than by their tendency toward only reform-minded (standards-based) thinking. While teachers whose reflections were intermediately different from the peer group were better supported by it, most teachers found direct support from the self-video and/or peer-video contexts to advance change-directed thinking associated with their own goals for teaching. The findings reveal not only how goal-related teacher learning can be powerfully supported with loosely guided video-framed contexts, but also how the diversification and/or expansion of teachers’ reflections across the categories used in this study provide robust indicators of both the content and efficacy of their change-directed thinking.     

Teachers’ voice,power and agency: (un)professionalisation of the early years workforce

This article examines Slovak early years teachers’ concerns with conceptions of teacher professionalism. It suggests that there is a mismatch between understandings of professionalism, policy aspirations and the attitudes of teachers to their own professionalism, and that this mismatch fuels early years teachers’ sense of agency. These tensions between conceptions of professionalism, teaching practice and actual working conditions have led to a ground-up approach to self-governance within the early years teacher workforce. We analyse teachers’ discussions in an early years online forum of 12,500 members that was started and remains governed by the teachers themselves. It represents in itself a very particular attitude and response to the need to determine what it means to be a professional teacher. This analysis examines intersections of policy, quality and professionalism, and highlights considerations of power and voice, and the complexities of uncertainty and change. The article concludes with the suggestion that teacher attitudes, power and agency are impacted in unpredictable ways by the policy landscape.     

In search of the excellent literature teacher. An inductive approach to constructing professional teaching standards

This study makes a contribution to the development of empirically based, domain-specific teaching standards that are acknowledged by the professional community of teachers and which, therefore, have a good chance of being successfully implemented and used for professional development purposes. It was prompted by the resistance on the part of many teachers to the one-size-fits-all teaching standards imposed on them from above. We, therefore, looked for an alternative and canvassed teacher opinion about what makes an excellent literature teacher. Because our standards will be used to evaluate the profession, we also wished to know to what extent teachers satisfy (or would like to satisfy) their own ideal, and which factors influence their professional development. Contrary to earlier studies, we found that the professional community of literature teachers hold widely shared ideas about what constitutes excellence in their profession. We also found that almost 40% felt that their own level of professionalism fell far short of excellence, but that their professional growth was primarily hampered by external, contextual factors. If the government wishes to promote teacher ‘excellence’, the infrastructure for professional development will need to change so that teachers can acquire the knowledge and skills embodied in the teaching standards.     

Conflicts in teachers’ professional practices and perspectives about inclusion in Icelandic compulsory schools

Inclusive education policy, now the norm in many parts of the world including Iceland, is highly dependent on teachers for its successful implementation. Research on inclusion often attempts to identify teachers’ attitudes of inclusion (against/for). This article takes a different approach. It focuses on teachers’ perspectives of their professional practices; that is, how teachers understand what it means to be and practise as a teacher. We interviewed 10 Icelandic compulsory school teachers and also examined teaching logs and associated documents. The findings suggest that the teachers participating in this study have conflicting expectations towards their professional practice. They have unclear ideas about the inclusive ideology, and external factors influence teachers’ perception of their professional practice more than reflective practices. We suggest that these findings may well be applicable beyond the Icelandic context, and that they have implications for the overall in-service and pre-service education offered to teachers.     

Pedagogical reasoning: the foundation of the professional knowledge of teaching

ABSTRACT

Much of the debate about that which comprises teachers’ professional knowledge has been important in the academic literature but does not necessarily reflect the reality of how they think as they construct the knowledge that underpins their practice. Typically, teachers are not encouraged to spend time talking about teaching in ways that are theoretically robust, or to unpack their teaching in order to show others what they know, how and why. Because they are busy ‘doing teaching’ they are not commonly afforded opportunities to ‘unpack’ their practice to explore and articulate the reasoning underpinning what they do. This paper argues that the essence of teachers’ professional knowledge is bound up in the teaching procedures they employ and that knowledge is accessible and demonstrable through the pedagogical reasoning that underpins their decision-making, actions and intents; all of which come to the fore when their pedagogical reasoning is examined. If teaching is to be more highly valued, it is important to more closely examine the nature of teachers’ pedagogical reasoning as it offers a window into the complex and sophisticated knowledge of practice that influences what they do, how and why.     

A noisy silence about care: Swedish preschool teachers’ talk about documentation

This article investigates what happens to institutional narratives of care in Swedish preschool when a policy on increased documentation is introduced. Questions deal with preschool teachers’ professionalism as expressed through the teachers’ talk about documentation. The analysis is based on theories in education policy, teacher professionalism and institutional narratives. The findings show that the few references made by the teachers to narratives of care are subordinated to narratives of learning. A major conclusion is that narratives of care are in a process of becoming a ‘noisy silence’, which influences teachers’ professionalism as well as shaping our common society.     

Pedagogical bricolage and teacher agency: Towards a culture of creative professionalism

The way in which educators choose to engage with learners and to offer opportunities to share knowledge of both the physical world and the world of ideas is an ongoing area of international research interest but remains diffuse and difficult to systematise. This idiosyncratic quality underscores the privileged position of teachers as creative professionals. By exploring Claude Lévi-Strauss’s conception of how and for what purpose we share knowledge within society, this paper explores the relationship between perceptions of teachers’ professional role and the challenges they face working within formal education systems. The artisan quality of teachers’ practice, gained through experience, association and personal commitment, makes possible a visualisation of teacher professionalism as bricolage that, when read alongside theories of teacher agency, generates an affirmative picture of how teacher professionalism may be reframed as creative and responsive rather than homogenous and mechanistic.     

Challenging a Teacher's Perceptions of Mathematical Smartness Through Reflections on Students’ Thinking

Creating equitable opportunities so all students can learn and succeed mathematically has been a key focus of mathematics education across several decades. Central to student achievement are students’ mathematical identity and their feelings of success during instruction. Researchers (e.g., Boaler & Staples, 2008) have shown that teachers can be particularly powerful in shaping students’ beliefs, feelings of success, and achievement, but few studies have investigated how teachers frame what it means to be successful or “smart” in mathematics. Through the social construct of smartness (Hatt, 2012) and the learning perspectives of incremental and entity theories (Blackwell, Trzesnieski, & Dweck, 2007; Yeager & Dweck, 2012), I examine how one teacher, Mrs. Purl, conceptualized what it meant to be smart in mathematics and how this perception changed slowly, over time, through repeated examination and discussion of individual student's thinking. As Mrs. Purl came to know her students at a personal level, she began to see that her perceptions were not always accurate and warranted reexamination.     

PROFESSIONAL NOTICING PRACTICES OF NOVICE MATHEMATICS TEACHER EDUCATORS

The focus on professional noticing in mathematics education has recently gained increased interest as researchers work to understand how and what is noticed and how this translates into practice. Much of this work has focused on the professional noticing practices of inservice teachers and preservice teachers, with less attention focused on those educating teachers. This research explores how novice mathematics teacher educators professionally notice as they engage in teaching experiments and create models of student’s mathematical thinking. Findings indicate the novice teacher educators are including some evaluative comments in their professional noticing practices but lack in-depth interpretive analysis about student thinking and rarely make connections between student’s thinking and the broader principles of teaching and learning. These findings provide evidence for the importance of supporting teacher educators with developing their abilities to professionally notice.     

The zones framework for both teaching and learning: application to graduate student teaching assistants

The zones framework conceived for the examination of thinking about teaching, is validated, and extended to the examination of thinking about learning. This is done by extending the framework to examine thinking about teaching and learning in a population of science graduate student teaching assistants. Semi‐structured interviews explore these students’ teaching and learning experiences, how their experiences relate to their knowledge of educational theory, and how they have formed their ideas about what constitutes good teaching. The article demonstrates that the zones framework can be extended to thinking about learning, and that it is appropriate for examining the thinking of students as well as teachers. Recommendations for further research are made, including the exploration of discipline‐specific thinking.     

Teacher collaboration: 30 years of research on its nature,forms, limitations and effects

ABSTRACT

This article reprises and reflects on 30 years of the author’s work on teacher collaboration. The distinctive nature of this work has not been in making a case for teacher collaboration in terms of its benefits for students, teachers, or educational change. These arguments are widely available elsewhere. Rather it has examined ways of collaborating that are available to teachers, how formal or informal collaboration should be, how collaborative efforts can be misused or misdirected, and what factors must be considered when deliberately designing teacher collaboration so it will have the most beneficial effects. The article discusses the explanatory and strategic power of three concepts in particular—contrived collegiality, professional capital, and collaborative professionalism. Conclusions are drawn about next steps for educational research in terms of establishing clear typologies of teacher collaboration in relation to their impact and appropriateness in different circumstances.     

The managerial role of the principal in promoting teacher professionalism in selected Eastern Cape schools

Abstract

In the last two to three decades teachers’ work has been plagued by problems internationally. These problems include a growing dissatisfaction of teachers about their working conditions (characterized by heavy workloads and low salaries), the growing attempts by governments to control teachers’ work and the increasing negative public image of the teaching profession. This negative public image of teaching is manifested in the failure of the profession to attract enough students and the fact that those who are already in the profession want to leave. These factors had, inter alia, lead to a collapse of professionalism amongst teachers in general.

There are, however, also other factors that have an influence on the professionalism of school teachers. It is argued in this article that the management role of the school principal is a crucial factor that influences teacher professionalism. This influence can be either positive or negative, depending to a large extent on how effectively the principal is managing the school. This article, derived from an empirical case study undertaken among a number of secondary schools in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa, is an attempt to conceptualise the important and pivotal managerial role of the principal in promoting professionalism amongst teachers in this province.     

Reconceptualising professionalism in early childhood education: insights from a study carried out in Bologna

This paper explores the issue of early childhood professionalism from a socio-cultural perspective. In particular the article is concerned with how pre-school teachers conceptualise their professionalism by making sense of the work they carry out on an everyday basis in early childhood institutions. In analysing teachers’ perceptions special attention has been paid to the socio-political and historical conditions that have contributed to shaping them. Drawing on a recent empirical study conducted within Bologna province (Italy), contemporary issues in early childhood professionalism are analysed and insights for a possible re-conceptualisation are offered through a critical interpretation of teachers’ perspectives. The findings discussed in the article highlight how a complex conceptualisation of professionalism, building upon continuous learning in relational contexts, is currently challenged by recent neo-liberal influences. In facing these challenges a crucial role will be played by teachers’ collaborative practices in the workplace that, if reclaimed as a space for collective decision-making, could potentially become an arena for rethinking teachers’ professional development in dialogue with local communities.