Professional Development Across the Teaching Career: Teachers’ Uptake of Formal and Informal Learning Opportunities

Current theories propose that professional competence is primarily constituted by scientific and tacit knowledge, knowing-in-action, understanding of work or practice. While providing valuable insights we contend that they present a fragmented understanding of professional competence. In particular, they do not adequately explain how central aspects of practice such as knowledge and understanding are integrated into a specific professional competence in work performance. An existential ontological perspective is proposed as offering a more comprehensive and integrative analysis of professional competence. It is explored through an empirical study of corporate lawyers and the findings suggest that professional competence should be understood as ways of being. The results show that different ways of practising corporate law distinguish and integrate a specific understanding of work, a particular self-understanding, other people, and tools into distinct forms of competence in corporate law.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm?abstractid=1486892

Professional Competence as Ways of Being: An Existential Ontological Perspective

Profiling Teachers' Continuing Professional Development and the Relation with Their Beliefs about Learning and Teaching.

This paper explores the impact of the increasingly performative nature of the assessment of teachers’ performance in England leading to the introduction of Professional Standards for Teachers in 2007. It reports the findings of a small‐scale study of newly‐qualified primary school teachers in the context of literature on teacher identity, performativity and professional development. It suggests the possible emergence of a ‘post‐performative’ identity; a generation of teachers whose experience as pupils has been of an increasingly performative schooling system. These post‐performative teachers cannot be categorised as either ‘compliant’ or ‘resistant’ to the demands of performative management systems and government initiatives. They are still largely motivated by affective rewards, but have clear career ambitions; they are aware of the potential conflicts between the demands of accountability and the desire for autonomy, but are generally comfortable with the balance they feel able to strike between these....

/pdf/professionalism-and-the-post-performative-teacher-new-7a6ph13sk3.pdf

Professionalism and the Post-Performative Teacher: New Teachers Reflect on Autonomy and Accountability in the English School System.

The Organization Studies Summer Workshop is an annual activity, first launched in June 2005, to facilitate high-quality scholarship in organization studies. Its primary aim is to advance cutting-edge research on important topics in the field by bringing together on a Greek island, in early summer, a small and competitively selected group of scholars, who will have the opportunity to interact and share insights in a stimulating and scenic environment. Following on the tremendous success of the First Organization Studies Workshop on Santorini, we are happy to announce that the Second Workshop will take place at Saint John Hotel (http://www.saintjohn.gr), Mykonos, on 15 and 16 June 2006. Mykonos (http://www.mykonosgreece.com/, http://www.mykonos.net), a worldfamous resort with beautiful sandy beaches, unique Cycladic architecture, and unrivalled night life, will provide an ideal setting for workshop participants to relax and engage in authentic dialogue. With this workshop we aim to create a setting in which the juices of intellectual creativity will naturally flow. Because the aim of the workshop is to generate opportunities for creative interaction and intelligent conversation, the number of participants will be kept intentionally small — up to 50 papers will be accepted. Papers will be circulated in advance and participants will be urged to read them prior to the workshop. More about the practicalities and costs of the workshop will appear later on the Organization Studies website (www.egosnet.org/os).

Professional competence as ways of being: An existential ontological perspective

This article aims to increase understanding and knowledge concerning teachers’ competence enhancement. Models used in industrial contexts are analysed in order to elaborate a framework relevant to understand teachers’ learning. This specifies components of the work environment that are mobilised by teachers in order to achieve their goals. It is used to identify ways in which teachers in France manage to improve their practice despite being involved in complex and difficult situations. The data come from 60 interviews. The results highlight the effects of the organisation of the collective work situations: spurring exchanges amongst teachers and school partners appears to be a main factor for improving teachers’ conceptions about teaching. Some ideas are outlined for constructing new continuing professional development programmes and studying their effects.

Factors influencing teachers' professional competence development

This article has the apparently contradictory aims of describing a discourse of new teachers that is at odds with the policy-derived competence-based discourse of the professional standard for teachers, but of also seeking to find some points of connection that may help start a dialogue between policy and research. The experience of new teachers is conceptualized as personal stories of identity formation with a clear emotional-relational dimension and a sense of self and intrinsic purpose in which others, especially colleagues and children, are central - themes not visible in the standard. The empirical context is that of new teachers in Scotland but the argument is supported through a wider literature that extends beyond the traditional limits of teacher education, drawing on, for example, notions of self-identity, pure relationship and ontological security in the work of Giddens. Whether a more constructive dialogue can begin depends partly on the extent to which the formal standard can be expected to capture the complex, personal nature of the beginner’s experience, and partly on the possibility of research identifying particular areas of competence, such as understanding difference, that connect in some way to the standard.

/pdf/finding-an-identity-and-meeting-a-standard-connecting-the-28owtnjfxd.pdf

Finding an identity and meeting a standard: connecting the conflicting in teacher induction

The four-year study of beginning teachers by the Early Professional Learning (EPL) project found that the developmental experience of new teachers involved seven empirical dimensions of experience: the emotional, relational, cognitive, material, structural, ethical and temporal. These dimensions represent a largely informal process of professional development and occupational identity formation, which reflect the essentially relational nature of teachers’ work as well as the psychosocial aspects of early professional development. Our research found that the main engagement with the professional standard by new teachers was in relation to the bureaucratic requirement to complete the profession’s interim profile, a record of performance which, in the opinion of the teachers questioned, trailed behind the real experience as an imposition rather than an instrument of reflection (Stronach, 2009). In interviews with 128 new teachers in 31 secondary schools in Scotland and England, typical comments were: ‘I found it really dry; it wasn’t seeking to find anything about me personally as a teacher’; or, ‘the idea that we can give everything an [interim profile] code… it’s completely meaningless’. Insofar as there was a small but significant connection with the standard when many new teachers began to adjust their teaching to difference across the children and classes that they taught, and which occurred a few months into their first year of teaching, learning to teach appeared to be experienced as a process of becoming a teacher: that is, gaining a preliminary self-as-teacher identity, mainly through the emotional-relational engagement with colleagues and pupils taught, a process for which the standard provided no guidance or structure. The findings were consistent with the anthropological paradigm of rite of passage in describing this experience (Eddy, 1969), and also echoed those who have found professional development to be intimately dependent on relationships. Hinchliffe (2004), for example, describes the ethical nexus in workplace relationships as being not simply a context for the quality of work and human flourishing, but as central to the experience of the newcomer joining a community of practice. And this is a transition, as Wenger (1998) argues, which involves a relationship between learning and identity in which a sense of self is integral to the individual’s feeling of belonging. The learning is transformative and is a process of becoming a new person or, in this case, a teacher. Despite the often compelling nature of such evidence, our continuing impression was of a policy resistance to such explanations as lacking in hard evidence: soft data based on mere case studies. The backing of ‘harder’ evidence through the more positivist methods of research and evaluation that were adumbrated by the likes of David Hargreaves (1997) and then David Blunkett in the late nineties, validated for some a view of ‘genuine’ social science as being able only ‘to measure the size of the effect of A on B’ (in Hammersley, 2002, p. 83), and suggested to us that an interview-based strategy alone might be methodologically limited in its potential for warranting evidence, as Eraut (2000) puts it, of processes that, if not entirely tacit, do not come readily to mind. In the first phase of the project (2004-05) six teacher-researchers seconded to the project interviewed twenty-five new teachers within their own schools at approximately twice monthly intervals. It was from these findings that five important areas were identified for which quantitative indicators of new teacher development were designed in triangulation of the narrative evidence. These were job satisfaction (jobsat), children’s views (cepsati), expert judgement of teaching performance (exjudge), pupil development (PDI), and interactions with significant others (interact). This archive contains the data collected through these instruments between 2004 and 2008. A discursive analysis of the findings is available in McNally and Blake 2010

Enhanced competence-based learning in early professional development

The majority of the literature on teaching and teacher education focuses either on teachers as autonomous individuals (e.g. Lortie 1975), on abstract concepts related to topic areas or pedagogical techniques, or on teacher identities. Little is known about the everyday interactions of teachers within work situations, and yet the collective aspects of teachers work are becoming increasingly important to concepts of professionalism, in areas such as interagency working, co-teaching and work across topic areas. This paper synthesises French and British research in order to produce a coherent account of teachers’ collective work (TCW), as a basis for developing teachers’ competences in ways which recognise the situated and collective aspects of competence.

Teachers' collective work: theory and research in France and the UK

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Factors influencing teachers' professional competence development

Finding an identity and meeting a standard: connecting the conflicting in teacher induction

Enhanced competence-based learning in early professional development

Teachers' collective work: theory and research in France and the UK