Teacher Educators' Professional Learning: "You're more or less on your own."

1. Teacher Educators' Professional Learning: "You're more or less on your own." Associate Professor Mandi Berry (ICLON) [2-7 July, 2013] [ISATT, Ghent, Belgium]

2. Conclusions (1) • Professional learning (PL) of Teacher Educators (TEs) matters. • It’s too important to be left to chance. • Distinctive nature of TE knowledge. • TE learning needs to occur within some kind of framework.

3. Conclusions (2) • PL of TE’s should be ‘more or less on your own’, but PL should not be a lonely enterprise. • Shift from alone as ‘isolated and disempowered’ to ‘autonomous with agency’. • Reframe ‘alone’ from a lonely (self) journey that does not pay attention to what we learn through and with others. • Involves perspective transformation. • PL of TE’s is an autonomous journey of interdependence: An apparent paradox.

5. Teacher Educators & their work • Who? “an ill-defined & heteregenous occupational group” (Murray, 2012) of low academic status (Ducharme, 1993). • How? “thrown in at the deep end” (Wilson, 2006) without appropriate support or formal preparation (Zeichner, 2005). • What? Arelative lack of consensus about nature and worth of what teacher educators do (Korthagen, 2001; Davey, 2013).

6. Distinctive nature of TE’s work • Teaching as main task • Teaching about teaching (content and manner) • Need to simultaneously serve many, often contradictory demands • Inherently both practical & theoretical • Working in a complex, ill-structured domain with “few clear right or wrong courses of action” (McRobbie & Shulman, 1991, p. 1).

7. ConsequencesforTEswork & learning • TE’s draw from existing knowledge sources and can remain loyal to communities of practice of entry that shapes (and limits) their thinking & approach (Berry & van Driel, 2012; Hadar & Brody, 2010). • A culture of isolation (Kagen, 1990; Korthagen, 2001) • TE knowledge and expertise development largely individualised and remains tacit (Loughran, 2006). • TE learning & development is largely ignored, mostly a matter of chance & inefficient (Smith, 2010).

9. Calls to change • “…if teacher education is to be taken more seriously…then the preparation of …teacher educators needs to be taken more seriously as well” (Zeichner, 2005, p.123) • “In order to meet the demands placed on the profession, all teacher educators – including mentors at schools – should be given the opportunity to undertake proper lifelong learning of their own.” (ETUCE, 2008).

10. Calls to change • Specific requirements for TE’s; e.g., classroom experience, academic qualifications (PhD), research active. • More and better formalised induction procedures. • Development of a curriculum for educating teacher educators. • Development of knowledge base of TE. • Pedagogy of Teacher Education.

11. Some Responses Systemic • Standards for Teacher Educators (e.g., ATE – USA) • Professional accreditation (e.g., VELON- NL) • National centre (e.g., MOFET – Israel) • Academic Requirements (e.g. PhD - many) Local • Programs of study within institutions (e.g. doctoral) • Professional Learning Communities • Co-teaching, mentoring • Self-study SIG – local became systemic

12. Some Risks • Systemic approaches can reinforce ‘top-down’ culture and accountability pressures. • Approaches may seek to reduce (the necessary) complexity and ambiguity of TEs work; (unintentionally) reinforce assumptions. • Risk losing emphasis on teaching (e.g, through academisation).

13. Limited research knowledge • Few systematic routes for TE’s ongoing learning and little research documentation of these routes (Smith, 2012) • No research that tells us that specific kinds of backgrounds/experiences are predictors of success as TEs, or that that preservice teachers learn better with or without TE’s in organised programs.

14. TE learning: “a field where we let a thousand flowers bloom” ? (Shulman, 2006)

15. Reframing Teacher EducatorLearning • Professional Developmentcarriesassumptions of upskilling/training; ‘spray on’ or ‘done-to’ approaches for short term change; accumulatingknowledge. • Professional Learning introduces a notion of ongoing change thatvalues teacher educators as learners; responsive to theirparticular concerns, issues, needs and contexts; transformingknowledge.

17. Finding my own PL trajectory as a Teacher Educator • Have come to recognise aspects of my own PL and what has supported it. • Can be organised according to framework of Experiences, Processes, Conditions.

18. Experiences A mixture of individual and collaborative, formal and informal, planned and unplanned experiences • Being in a new context • Feeling deskilled/disoriented • Becoming a learner again • Finding and working with colleague/s to discuss, co-teach, stimulate thinking, write, publish • Formal academic study (e.g., PhD) • Participation in a professional community, with a collective goal • Involvement in a range of projects • Ongoing analysis of experience through self-study

19. Processes Becoming conscious of practice, developing a coherent pedagogy of teacher education, leading to professional self-understanding. • Learning to articulate tacit knowledge • Identifying & questioning embedded assumptions • Recognising the broader (theoretical) framework in which practice sits • Reviewing ‘problems’ from different perspectives (e.g. problems became tensions) • Participating in particular discourse communities • Communicating personally developed knowledge.

20. Conditions A set of personal dispositionsandstructuralconditions, includingformalrequirementsand open opportunitiesforlearning • Support and encouragement of others • Guidance but not directing • Opportunities and expectations for my learning & development in different ways (not about ‘just doing the job’) • Own willingness and openness to learn and change.

22. Mapping my learning onto PL of other TE’s • Disorienting experience • Re-learning/learning how to teach • Becoming conscious of practice • Recognising the frames that locate practice • Being able to explicate these practices and frames • Challenging assumptions/frames • Reframing understandings of TE • Taking changed thinking into practice • Communicating new understandings of practice Brandenburg, 2008; Kane, 2007; Nicol, 1997; Ritter, 2007; Russell, 1995; Williams, 2013...

23. Transformation not accumulation • Transformativelearning as a process of “perspectivetransformation” (Mezirow, 2000) • 3 dimensions: Psychological (self-understanding); convictional (revision of belief systems) & behavioural (actions) • Goes beyondacquiringknowledge and skills • Involvesbothindividualefforts and socialinteraction.

24. Returning to conclusions • TEs criticised for being left on their own, but almost have to be left on own to construct own professional knowledge of practice. • Does not mean that every TE needs to ‘start from scratch’ but it does need them to transform their perspective. • Aspects of a shared knowledge base important to develop but needs to be fluid and flexible enough to respond to change, embrace complexity, and TE’s different contexts and tasks. • A professional learning perspective matters.

25. PL of TE’s: An apparent paradox • An individual task that cannot be accomplished alone. • It is both an individual sense making processand a relational participatory process. • Sense making by the individual is invoked and developed as one goes through the process of reconciling oneself to particular social contexts. • Involves a perspective shift. • A continuous process of re-forming autonomy through social exchange. • That is, autonomy as interdependence rather than independence.

26. PL of TE’s: An orderly blooming

27. Thankyou