Teachers - Teaching and Learning Research Programme

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15 While not disagreeing with the kinds of analysis offered by the likes of McLauglin and Fullan (1994; 1999), it is a characteristic of this approach that it seeks to create ‘professional communities of practice’ based on the belief that in the right conditions all teachers will participate in reform. This view has been challenged by Goodson (2000) who, in the face of similar evidence as that provided by Woods et al (1997) argues many teachers now sustain their creativity by engaging in activities unrelated to teaching or education. Although Fullan (1999: 4-6) argues that change is both complex and evolutionary, neither he nor Mclaughlin have much to say about the processes by which individual teachers move from mere awareness of reform to a point where they are willing to forgo additional resources and work without the active support of colleagues in their own school. In our work on clustering in small rural schools (Galton and Hargreaves 1995) where some teachers, including headteachers, were reluctant to collaborate for fear of losing autonomy in matters of resourcing and staffing, committed teachers in the cluster initially formed the ‘community of practice’. Other teachers, standing on the periphery of the reform, made decisions on the basis of their own selfinterests. They viewed after school cluster planning meetings as a drain of their valuable time and refused to attend. The bulk of teachers, in accepting there might be benefits in clustering chose to concentrate on the practical problems of working together on common curriculum tasks without being over-concerned with the consequences for pupil learning. Only the committed teachers viewed the reform as an opportunity to promote pupils’ cognitive development. As Fullan (1999:47) observes, ‘the intellectual burgeoning of the quality and depth of pedagogical knowledge and means of enhancing learning for all has barely touched schools’. Moving teachers along the continuum that begins with ‘thinking about self’ and moves through ‘thinking about tasks’ to ‘thinking about the child’ (Fuller and Brown 1975) appears to be central to the creation of communities of practice capable of sustaining change. As yet we know little of this developmental process. Finally, I want to look at three projects which are part of the TLRP to explore how far they incorporate the criteria set out by McLaughlin. A summary is presented in Table 2. The first of these projects is the one in which I am involved with Peter Blatchford and Peter Kutnick. It is called the SPRING (Social Pedagogy Research into Grouping) Project and seeks to explore ways of making classroom groups more effective to enhance
16 pupil achievement. Teachers will be brought out of school and presented with summaries of exiting evidence about groups and grouping as well as the theories underpinning different approaches. They will then be asked to use these ideas to create a training programme for pupils that is designed to improve the effectiveness of working in groups. Initially teachers will work on a programme for a specific key stage, but these will then be merged so that the elements that are common and unique to different settings can be identified. These teachers will then work closely to support a second cohort whose task will be to test out the effectiveness of the materials. The professional communities of practice therefore consist of these two cohorts with little formal links to the school or LEA although the key stage samples will be selected from among LEAs where close working relationships have already been established. The argument that change is more likely to be sustained if there is wide whole-school involvement can, in part, be met by selecting, where possible, teachers for each cohort from the same school.
Page 1 and 2: Integrating Theory and Practice: Te
Page 3 and 4: 3 Sources of Research and their Use
Page 5 and 6: 4 Areas of Research Influence The 2
Page 7 and 8: 5 Earlier it was reported that many
Page 9 and 10: 7 The general trend is, as might be
Page 11 and 12: 8 The dominance of Curriculum Devel
Page 13 and 14: 10 More interesting were the result
Page 15 and 16: 12 The approach is now very differe
Page 17: 14 important for teachers to have k
Page 21 and 22: 18 It might be no bad thing, howeve
Page 23: 20 Reynolds, D. (1998) Teacher Effe

Teachers - Teaching and Learning Research Programme

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