primary school teachers the twists and turns of everyday practice

Version 20 Oct 08, edited final
fundamental disconnect between the theory and practice of teacher development:
that is, the discourse on what teachers ‘should’ be and do on the one hand, and how
the educational system acts to promote or discourage these attitudes and behaviours
on the other.
To summarise, available literature suggests that approaches to effective teacher
development are:
Multifaceted, attending to a variety of aspects in the evolution of a teacher;
Continuous, requiring the availability of different types of platforms and
opportunities for growth throughout their careers;
Comprehensive, requiring attention to these different aspects of teacher
development in an integrated manner; and
Responsive to teachers’ needs and realities on the ground: supportive rather than
prescriptive, flexible rather than rigid, and locally developed rather than
prescribed from above.
To conclude this section we reproduce below a series of questions with which to
evaluate current and potential policies related to teacher development (Box 6.1).
Box 6.1. Designing teacher development policies
Experience with successful professional development efforts suggests a number of design
principles to guide national and state officials struggling to devise ‘top-down support for
bottom-up change’ and to guide local actors who are rethinking their policies. Each proposed
and existing policy can be ‘interviewed’ - that is, subjected to a number of questions - to
determine how well it corresponds with key factors related to teachers' learning and change.
For example:
⇒ Does the policy reduce the isolation of teachers, or does it perpetuate the experience of
working alone?
⇒ Does the policy encourage teachers to assume the role of learner, or does it reward
traditional ‘teacher as expert’ approaches to teacher/student relations?
⇒ Does the policy provide a rich, diverse menu of opportunities for teachers to learn, or
does it focus primarily on episodic, narrow ‘training’ activities?
⇒ Does the policy link professional development opportunities to meaningful content
and change efforts, or does it construct generic in-service occasions?
⇒ Does the policy establish an environment of professional trust and encourage problem
solving, or does it exacerbate the risks involved in serious reflection and change and
thus encourage problem hiding?
⇒ Does the policy provide opportunities for everyone involved with schools to
understand new visions of teaching and learning, or does it focus only on teachers?
⇒ Does the policy make possible the restructuring of time, space and scale within
schools, or does it expect new forms of teaching and learning to emerge within
conventional structures?
⇒ Does the policy focus on learner-centred outcomes that give priority to learning how
and why, or does it emphasise the memorisation of facts and the acquisition of rote
skills?
(Source: Darling-Hammond and McLaughlin 1995)
Looking to the future
Is there a way out? Is there something that we can do to shake up the ‘control raj’ and
breathe some life and fresh air into it? We talked to teachers and parents, researchers
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