What have we learnt about the professional learning process for teachers?

Teaching is a practical profession informed by knowledge. The teachers in the study were clear about what areas of knowledge they recognised they needed to function within the special school. This was context dependent and so needed to be negotiated by and for the specific school. They also learn very effectively from their colleagues. The model of the teacher attending a training course that would then develop their classroom practice is less strongly endorsed in this study and this finding is consistent with Wiliam (2009) who argues that teacher practice development is most effectively developed through a collaborative process of sharing ‘what works’ in a supportive and critically structured way. This moves the teachers into positions where they articulate the view that their practice is continually developing and that their practice is ever changing. The teachers in the study were clear that the key aspect of the change process was an ‘acculturation’ to the ‘ways of being’ in the school – the formalised institution setting that defined their role and effectiveness and through which they realised their personal fulfilment. But they were also clear that the value of their experience of achieving their effective role in the special school was that it gave them a solid base from which to continue to develop their practice and to respond to the continuous challenges the learners in their classes presented them with. These teachers valued the

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creative and rewarding professional practice that was framed by their experience in the special school – practice that was continually developing and improving.

5.2.14 What did the notion of praxis mean and add to our understandings of

teacher practice?

For teachers knowledge is very important and the transition experience points up clearly areas where teachers were able to identify areas of knowledge they needed to have to be able to teach in the special school in addition to those they already had. But this knowledge base is not fixed and some of it is context specific. The areas that the teachers identified did not in themselves count as knowledge disciplines or parts of knowledge disciplines. Rather they seem to be specific skills that training could provide or discrete areas of information that were ‘stand alone’. The notion that there is one knowledge base for teaching that provides the theoretical underpinning for all of the actions that the teacher takes in the classroom is not apparent from the way the teachers talked about their transition experiences. Rather there is a professional practice that is framed in a consistent and replicable way that can be adapted to operate in a range of settings with different learners. Praxis is a term that takes us closer to this active, practical, knowledge based personal experience that the teacher has and how it is based within a dynamic relationship between the teacher and the learner. Praxis suggests the way in which the reflections of the teacher at a range of levels are incorporated into the practice of the teacher as they interact within the classroom co-creating the shared reality of the teaching and learning experience for themselves and the pupils in the class. This leads to a model of the teacher’s learning that looks like this,

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Figure 40: Praxis as the overlap between practice, knowledge and Reflection

The teacher’s reflections include those that are immediate in the classroom situation, those that are shared a bit later in the staffroom or with colleagues, those that become more detailed ‘stories’ of what has happened for reports or analysis and finally those that become elements of action research undertaken by the teacher themselves or as part of a larger collaborative effort with others.

The teacher’s practice is ‘what they do’ in the classroom and it is informed by their knowledge which they can relate and make explicit, their ‘know-how’ or cumulative

experience of what works for them which is less explicit, their personal understandings, self-knowledge and memories of episodes from their past and then their tacit self-knowledge which is implicit and which they finds difficult to relate as it comes to them automatically in the classroom.

Practice Reflection

Knowledge

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The overlap is where the teacher’s ‘praxis’ operates as the realisation of their practice and their reflections on their practice in the complex dynamic teaching episodes that make up teaching encounters. This ‘praxis’ is a form of ‘situated learning’ in that it is specific to the context and the moment in which it occurs. If it is then built upon to become a series of

‘performances’ then it adds up to the teacher’s developing competence in their role.

This model is then ‘nested’ in the culture of the school which mediates for the teacher the demands and expectations of the formal and legal framework of policy and practice that defines education and teaching and by which their practice is judged successful or not.

5.2.15 Was personal construct theory useful in illuminating the intuitive

knowledge of teachers?

Personal construct theory is a way of looking at how individuals psychologically adopt cognitive systems that can quickly provide decision making guidance through the continuous secession of episodes that makes up a life lived in socially constructed institutions –

specifically a teacher within a school. It has a number of tools that enable analysis of these cognitive structures and the way that decisions are made to change those structures in the light of experience (or feedback). Through the pilot within the study it became apparent that it provided detailed information about the individual teacher and their context but that it might not provide data that was comparable with others. The complexity of the factors influencing the individual teacher’s cognitive decision making system and then the specific dynamic of their teaching situation as it presented itself just at the time of the research interview generated such case sensitive data that generalisation or comparison was very

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difficult. Working from the individual perspectives of the teachers though and with the same focus on the values underlying that teacher’s personal attitude to their professional

experience enabled general conclusions to be drawn. This development from the PCT

starting point to a more thematic analysis of the teacher’s narratives incorporated some of the approaches and theory of PCT without the utilisation of the tools. In many ways the findings can be seen to confirm the theory of ‘semantic differentials’ present within the PCT tradition.