Learning to do: the importance of professional teaching practices (original) (raw)

Building a professional learning community: a way of teacher participation in Mexican public elementary schools

The professional learning communities and communities of practice approaches in the arena of education appear to hold considerable promise for sustainable school improvement. These approaches flow from the assumption that teacher´s collaboration is central to transform a school into a learning organization. They also provide opportunities for teachers' professional development. The literature shows that schools are frequently called upon to improve by developing high levels of teacher collaboration. In this study we describe how the process of building a professional learning community took place in two urban public elementary schools located in Monterrey, Mexico in which seven teachers participated, from which three were novices and four experts. Through this study, we found that teachers visualized as possible the ability to generate a space where they could reflect and solve problems while they shared experiences from their teaching practices. This space of reflection also allowed them to create projects and develop a sense of community when they had more time available since the schools were usually involved in many projects.

Professional Didactics and Teacher Education: Conceptual Contributions for an Alternative Way of Training Teachers

Didactique professionnelle et formation à l'enseignement: apports conceptuels pour former autrement Didáctica profesional y formación docente: aportes conceptuales para formar de otra manera Didática profissional e formação docente: contribuições conceituais para formar de outra maneira Abstract Over the past few decades, in order to renew and modernize the teaching profession, many educational systems around the world, including those in Québec and France, have carried out a number of reforms in teacher education programs. In order to ameliorate the functioning of these programs, some educa tion systems have turned to professional didactics in order to improve the fields of education and teacher education. However, the use of professional didactics in these fields is recent. To sketch a portrait of how professional didactics is used in education and in the training of school staff, this paper sheds some light on the key concepts that have emerged from this area of study, namely...

Avoiding the drive by: Innovative approaches to professional development

Academia Letters, 2022

Multilingual learners are on the rise across the United States, yet access to equitable education in schools continues to lag (Penner-Williams, Díaz, & Gonzales Worthen, 2017), a matter which is further aggravated by increasing anti-immigrant discourse (Migliarini & Stinson, 2021) and global instability. Although professional development (PD) for inservice educators should rise to meet these challenges, educators, who are mostly white and monolingual English speakers (Sleeter, Neal & Kumashiro, 2015), decry a lack of preparation to meet the needs of a changing population. Furthermore, this lack of preparation is not without consequences: achievement outcomes for multilingual students continue to present lower than their white, monolingual counterparts (Soland & Sandilos, 2012). Despite $18 billion dollars being spent annually in the US on teacher PD, "the research on the return on that investment is damning, with all those dollars failing to move the needle on student outcomes" (Horn & Goldstein, 2018, p.82). Appova and Arbaugh (2018) remind us that "even with the plethora of resources and three decades of empirical evidence about effective teacher learning models, teachers continue to respond to PD with less than positive feedback" (p.5). Though much money is spent by districts, PD remains a missed opportunity. School districts treat it as a box to be checked, and often pursue educational fads (Senechal, 2010), rather than diving deeply into transformational practice.

High-Quality Teacher Professional Development and Classroom Teaching Practices

OECD Education Working Papers, 2016

Complete document available on OLIS in its original format This document and any map included herein are without prejudice to the status of or sovereignty over any territory, to the delimitation of international frontiers and boundaries and to the name of any territory, city or area. EDU/WKP(2016)15 Unclassified English-Or. English EDU/WKP(2016)15 2 OECD EDUCATION WORKING PAPERS SERIES OECD Working Papers should not be reported as representing the official views of the OECD or of its member countries. The opinions expressed and arguments employed herein are those of the author(s). Working Papers describe preliminary results or research in progress by the author(s) and are published to stimulate discussion on a broad range of issues on which the OECD works. Comments on Working Papers are welcome, and may be sent to the Directorate for Education and Skills, OECD,

Professionalism and Practice

Deleuze and Lifelong Learning, 2015

Professionalism and Practice If Deleuze's innovation concerns how to live and create as much as any strictly philosophical originality, it develops a philosophical method which deliberately blurs the distinction between research and practice by making practice into an experimental research activity (Williams, 2003, pp. 1-3). So I want to focus critically on this question by examining the extent to which improvisation, chance and error are deployed to creative ends for the sector's research and teaching. This prepares the ground for an ambitious reconceptualization of ethical action in teacher education. Such action, however, must be understood in a context where practice and professionalism are in the lifelong learning spotlight and concern a set of closely interconnected practices. Teacher educators play a pivotal role in the dissemination of professional practice, whether the focus be pedagogy, research or, indeed, the link between the two. Subject to all the particularities of a role in lifelong learning, they are expected to synthesize best practice and literally model it axiologically for reproduction. Best practice here involves the promotion of a practice-research nexus, first because the practice of teaching is inseparable from that of learning: the professional teacher is not just a practitioner whose pedagogy is expected to be centred on the learners' needs, voice and expectations, but also a lifelong learner themselves. Often teachers in the sector come to the role as a second career, having already acquired skills in, for example, vocational areas, and so the process of training and becoming a teacher is a significant one from a pedagogical point of view. In addition to this, as we have seen, the discourse of continuous improvement means that teachers in the sector are expected to maintain their professional credibility, if not their actual status, by CPD. Second, as we have seen, teaching practice is increasingly linked to research practices. The current popularity of evidence-based teaching in