Professional Development and Professional Learning

There are a number of different terms and conceptualisations associated with

teachers’ development and learning. While long-established terms such as In-Service Training (INSET) and Continued Professional Development (CPD) have been used to describe a range of professional learning activities, these have evolved as continued exploration has led to a more nuanced understanding of the constructs (Borko et al., 2010; Desimone, 2009). Often used interchangeably (Jarvis and Doherty, 2016), there has been a shift towards using terms such as teacher learning, teacher professional learning and teacher professional development to describe teachers’ on-going commitment to maintaining their professional expertise (Cumming, 2011; Borko et al., 2010). However, a distinction can be made between professional development – as something that is done to teachers driven by external imperatives- in contrast to professional learning, as something that is done by teachers in response to their own issues or concerns (Nilsson, 2014).

Ideas about teacher learning reflect the shifts in ideas about student learning which lean towards more constructivist strategies, situated in classroom practice and often involving others in the formation of professional learning communities (Borko et al., 2010). Avalos (2011) stated that “professional development is about teachers learning, learning how to learn, and transforming their knowledge into practice” (2011, p. 10). This complex process required both cognitive and emotional involvement of teachers as individuals and collectively. Broadening the concept

further, Korthagen (2016) put forward a framework representing teacher professional learning, as an often unconscious, multi-dimensional and multi-level activity. The model connects with the sources of teacher behaviour, which were cognitive, affective, motivational, and embedded in the social context of the school. This suggests that outcomes for teacher learning were unpredictable, therefore uniform approaches to professional learning did not impact all teachers in the same way and furthermore, professional learning occurred at any time through different

interactions and need not be experienced as a structured event.

Arguably, professional learning results from engagement with professional

development activities, whether labelled as a professional development programme, CPD or INSET (Jarvis and Doherty, 2016). However, involvement may not always develop a teacher’s classroom practice (Korthagen, 2016; Borko et al., 2010). Factors that impacted the effectiveness of professional development programmes included failure to take into account teachers’ motivation for engaging in professional development, misunderstanding the change process teachers underwent (Guskey, 2002), applying a deficit model to teachers or using programmes which consisted of one-off interventions (Clarke and Hollingsworth, 2002). Pre-packaged, ready-made CPD workshops presented to a passive audience of teachers failed to recognise that teacher learning was an on-going process requiring continued support (Opfer and Pedder, 2011). Furthermore, reasons for poor implementation of new ideas ranged from the time and location of the training, the large teaching load of the participants and the teacher’s desire for the type of social constructivist delivery as described in Murphy et al., (2015) below (EL-Deghaidy et al., 2015). The assumption that

teachers consciously translated theory into practice during classroom interactions also recognised the limitations of applying professional learning to change teacher

actions (Korthagen, 2016). These conclusions reflect Shirley Simon’s earlier remark that

… unless teachers really want to change, or really value how a particular change can make their and their students’ experience more worthwhile, they will not alter how they perceive themselves as science teachers or radically change their practice (Simon, 2012, p. 17)

Despite being time-consuming and challenging (Borko, 2004), the most effective development programmes are contextually situated, self-initiated and teacher-led; involve networking within supportive communities, incorporating peer observations and joint knowledge production (Vermunt et al., 2019; Cheng and Ling, 2013). The types of professional activities that are thought to promote teacher learning and improve practice include experimenting, reflection and collecting new knowledge to keep up-to-date (Pyhältö et al., 2015; Thoonen et al., 2011). Furthermore, different types of collaborative work may instigate different types of teacher learning (Nilsson, 2014; Levine and Marcus, 2010).

Murphy et al. (2015) tracked 17 Irish primary school teachers in a 2-year professional development programme incorporating social constructivist approaches. An increase in the amount of science taught and more frequent use of student-led approaches in science teaching were evidence for the positive impact of the programme on teacher practice. The use of explicit modelling of the approaches expected in the classroom, hands-on reflective, inquiry-based activities; collaboration and the development of critical friendships made the programme successful. Still to be explored in a follow- up study, is the embeddedness of the new practices introduced to this small sample of teachers. A more extensive 2-year study, the Getting Practical programme, involved over 200 trainers, training over 2000 primary and secondary school teachers towards making improvements in the effectiveness of practical work in science (Abrahams et al., 2014). A cascade model, combined with lesson observation, was

used to move teachers from a “hands-on” to a “minds-on” approach to practical work to increase higher-order thinking. Although there was an increased awareness among teachers about why practical work was used, the nature and extent of the learning varied. When delivered appropriately, the cascade model was found to change teacher practice in only one school but was not an effective transfer of knowledge overall. This contrasts with work by Maass and Engeln (2018) whose findings showed that the cascade model was effective in delivering a change to teacher practice in the implementation of a large scale CPD program on modelling.

Change in teacher practice can be on-going in response to the day-to-day

interactions with staff, students and parents and it can be said that professional development takes place every day through individual reflection, staffroom dialogue (Akiba and Liang, 2016), and even lesson preparation (Weißenrieder et al., 2015). Improving teaching practices is a pivotal role of the headteacher, who strongly influences the context in which teachers work (Sammons et al., 2011; Leithwood et al., 2008). For this reason, it has been said that school leadership was second only to classroom teaching as an influence on student learning (Leithwood et al., 2008). The next section looks at how the literature defines leadership in the school context and examines the contribution that this makes to teacher practice.