The implications for my professional practice

The realisation that ‘cognitive participation’ might be about ‘knowledge’ rather than ‘learning’ has impacted on my own work as TESSA Academic Director. Despite the challenges, I remain

committed to the belief that if teachers’ pedagogy is to change in line with policy aspirations, then teacher educators need to change as well, and that TESSA OERs (with practical examples of classroom practice) have the potential to support these changes. I believe that TEs have a responsibility to be agents of change (Cochran-Smith, 2006), and this study has provided insights and a better understanding of what this might involve. It has certainly highlighted some of the challenges (embodied structures and certain social norms), but also given me ideas about how to leverage the most from the opportunities that we have. In this institution, Paxima had identified TP as a lever for change and designed a questionnaire for TP supervisors designed to highlight the need for student teachers to receive more support in ‘active teaching’ (Paxima interview and field notes). Stephen also identified the after- lesson discussion between the tutor and the student teacher as an opportunity to co-construct knowledge about teaching (Stephen interview and field notes). As a result of these insights, working with my senior project manager, the TESSA co- ordinator in Zambia, and a Principle Officer (with responsibility for the colleges of education) in the Ministry of General Education, we re-designed our plans for the final year of the current TESSA grant. We have produced a ‘Zambian School Experience Guide’, which will support TP, by bringing together a team of TESSA MOOC graduates to version the TESSA TP Supervisors Toolkit for the Zambian context. This is more likely to result in interest in TESSA OERs from TEs than further attempts to influence the college curriculum. The toolkit also foregrounds ‘knowledge of practice’ and ‘knowledge in practice’. As teacher educators become more aware of the way in which student teachers develop their knowledge of how to teach, it is possible that new approaches to the assessment of teaching – and therefore eventually to teaching teachers - will emerge.

There is of course the question of generalisability, and the extent to which these causal

mechanisms might apply to other situations. The aim of CR is not to generate generalisable causal explanations, rather to obtain insights which could inform an investigation in a similar setting (Wynn & Williams, 2012). Therefore I am treating these findings as what Bassey (1999) would refer to as a ‘fuzzy generalisation’ – tentative suggestions which may or may not be replicable in other situations, but could provide lines of inquiry in future studies. However, there are other studies which provide some overlap with my findings. For example, in a study in Ghana,

147 teacher educators learn to teach pre-service teachers’ (p202), and he highlights the importance of TEs acquiring ‘knowledge in practice’ and ‘knowledge of practice’ (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999) (although it is not specifically expressed in these terms). Others have also commented that TESSA has the potential to ‘question what is valued knowledge’ (Murphy & Wolfenden, 2013, p270), highlighting the disruptive potential of TESSA OERs.

One of the strategic objectives of the current TESSA programme is building the capacity of TEs to embrace LCE themselves. The key activity associated with this objective was designing and running a MOOC for TEs (The Open University, 2017). I was the lead author of the MOOC; and, although it did not include an explicit account of the different ways in which knowledge can be conceptualised, it constantly challenged the notion that there are fixed rules about how to teach (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999; Putnam & Borko, 2000) and highlighted the significance of PCK for student teachers and teachers (Shulman, 1986). Many of the activities explicitly encouraged collaboration by suggesting participants shared responses to a question or task with colleagues. We trained 142 facilitators across Africa, who did the MOOC themselves alongside the people they were supporting, thus modelling what the ‘teacher as facilitator’ might look like. The impact of the MOOC is still being investigated, but it won the ‘Digital innovation of the year (learning)’ at the PIEoneer Awards in 2018 (The PIEoneer Awards, 2018), reflecting the innovative learning design, which was based on operationalising ideas about teaching learning.

The MOOC has also served to provide new ways of collaboration through social media. TEs from the TESSA network have shared examples of activities they have run in their institutions – and one colleague has installed a kettle, some mugs and teabags in her department in an attempt to encourage more conversation between colleagues.

I have also changed the way in which my team and I introduce TESSA to TEs, focusing on supporting them in analysing specific examples from the OERs in terms of teacher learning and student learning. This serves to highlight the fact that there are always alternative interpretations of practice, and encourages adaptation to different contexts. In a recent ‘mapping workshop’ in Zambia, in which we worked with Zambian colleagues to ‘map’ the revised primary-school curriculum to the TESSA library, teachers outnumbered Government and college TEs. Although it met with some initial resistance from officials, this was a deliberate attempt to challenge the positioning of TEs as being more expert than teachers because they hold theoretical academic knowledge, and to emphasis the value of the practical ‘knowledge of practice’ (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999) that teachers hold.

The opportunity provided by this study to explore the literature in depth has also made a significant impact on my practice. Schweisfurth’s work on LCE (2011, 2013 and 2015) informs all the workshops I run and was the basis for a week of activity on the TESSA MOOC. I have a much

148 deeper understanding of the nature of teacher learning, which again is informing our work on a new project which is bringing TESSA to schools in Zambia (Zambia Education School-based Training - ZEST). In ZEST we have specifically worked with Government in the hope that

‘conducive circumstances’ (for the use of TESSA) (Pawson and Tilley, 1997) will be created through institutional requirements. Likewise, my ideas on implementation (the notions of coherence, cognitive participation, collective action and reflexive monitoring) informed the bid for ZEST and are influencing the way in which we are working. As part of on-going ‘reflexive monitoring’, we recently completed a ‘realistic evaluation’ (Pawson et al., 2005) of cohort 1, in which we identified a set of ‘programme theories’ (reasons why we thought the actions we were taking would yield the desired outcomes) and collected and analysed data in order to explain which theories do seem to be working, and which need to be changed.

Within the International Teacher Education for Development group at my university, my new understandings are influencing my contributions to our regular discussions around our theories of change, and attempts to draw learning across projects to feed into future ones. For example, we have learnt that the TESSA OERs – and others we have produced – need to be mediated for teachers and TEs, and I am doing what I can to ensure that we focus on ways of supporting and encouraging collaboration, and emphasising that learning to teach is about local problem-solving, reflection and flexibility.