Facilitator-teacher co-construction of research is effective professional
development; with such critical reflection a change in philosophy can either lead
or follow a change in interactions with children.
4.6 THE PROGRAMME OF PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Each professional development programme was co-constructed with the participating teachers and in the fourth centre, Haven, this included the Facilitator of their professional development programme. For the three centres in which this included the
full teaching team, meetings were generally conducted with the full team. For the one centre in which only one teacher of some
1 5-20
maintained involvement, it was important we set up communication with the rest of the team, so they were aware of the purposes of my presence in the centre, and also so they could support and perhaps learn alongside their colleague.The programmes of professional development for the four centres occurred over a two year-period during
1998
and1 999
(see Table4.1
p.88), allowing some application of Stake's(2000)
method of "progressive focusing". Times of meetings were negotiated with the teachers. Following the fIrst exploratory session with the team I (or for Haven their facilitator) was available to support the teachers in a variety of ways: through attending their sessions to observe their interactions with children; through making video segments of their interactions with their focus children available, both as video and as transcripts and also, in the last two centres, as photos copied from the video frames; through meetings with the teachers in which we analysed data collected by them and/or by me; through providing models of reflection (Brookfield,1 995;
Smyth,1 99 1 ;
Stewart,1 997);
and through providing readings relevant to their discussions on theory and practice.All meetings with the teachers were tape-recorded, transcribed and loaded in NUDist (see Appendix D l for an example of a record sheet of a centre's professional development session, and Ap
P
endixD2
for a coded record of each centre's programme of professional development).4.6.1 Exploratory professional development session
• To ensure the teachers and I were in accord with our expectations that they use their
professional development programme to work on developing their skills of interacting, especially through dialogues, with the children.
• To ascertain how the staff currently planned for the scaffolding or co-construction of
learning with children. This invariably involved both the teachers and me in a gradual coming to tenns with the centre's systems of planning for the whole centre programme, for the core curriculum (see Glossary) and for group and
individual children's learning in their emergent curriculum (see Glossary). As part of this process we reviewed together all programme planning documentation and processes. This was the fIrst of many opportunities for the teachers to articulate their work with the children, to each other and to me. Their philosophies of
-
learning and some of their life histories were relevant in this articulation.
• To consider ways teachers might gather more accurate evidence of their scaffolding/co-constructing of each child's learning (as base data for discussion of ways of improving interactions), any equipment and time required to do so and how I might support this data gathering, such as through videoing their interactions with the children.
A sample transcription of a session with a teaching team is located
in Appendix
D3 .4.6.2 Schedule of video recording
I negotiated with the staff members concerned, the sessions and times when it would be most opportune for video recording of children and teachers working together to take place. If the teachers were carrying out their own recording, they could choose to do so at any time, and to choose the segments they wanted to analyse in our professional development. If they chose me to do the video recording, then we needed to schedule times for me to do this. The teachers maintained the right to veto this recording both when it was in progress and before sharing it with the professional development group. The intention here was to gather the best dialogue the teachers could engage
in
with each focus child, during interactions with other children and/or teachers in their regular centre programme, at any activity, to provide data for analysis. Meetings were held with teachers either outside their session times, or in one centre through the provision of a reliever, to enable the teacher to be available for discussions. Following discussion ofthe video and/or tape recordings, the teachers collected further dialogues before the subsequent discussion session with the team and me. During my own video recording
sessions I also kept field notes to record any events that:
a) seemed significant for a focus child or a teacher, which might not otherwise be recorded, and
b) I could not identify as having been described by the teachers' articulated planning processes.
These observations were subsequently used in the discussion sessions with the teachers to clarify procedures and underlying philosophies.
4.6.3 Schedule of discussions with participants
My action research with each centre was planned to involve me in discussing each observation with the relevant participant(s), sometimes with one teacher, though more often with the full team. These discussions were at fortnightly or monthly intervals, to allow the teachers time to gather their data between our discussion sessions.