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Abstract
A recent literature review in support of the ‘State of the Nation’ (SoN) investigation into CPD in England indicated a number of limitations both in how researchers see CPD and how schools themselves participate and register this participation in such activities. The SoN review was conducted in the period from late 2007 to early 2008, but was subsequently updated during 2009, to form a starting point for this article. The initial review focused only on the UK literature and was confined to the period 2004–2007. Although the focus was the UK, there was a considerable amount of international literature collected at the time and used subsequently to place this picture in a broader perspective. This broader perspective was an examination of how teachers create and share professional practice, and hence develop that practice within their schools. This work was based on looking at the importance of networks, drawing not only on an extensive consideration of relevant literature, but also on a major study of how schools create and share practice associated with the introduction of assessment for learning practices in classrooms and schools. The SoN study indicates that the CPD literature has not served the field well, in terms of a paucity of literature on what happens in ordinary schools and under-theorised work, particularly in terms of teacher learning. The study of networks indicates that there is potential to open up new areas of research and indeed practice in schools. However, there are a number of approaches based either on networks as communities or on electronic metaphors of networks that pay insufficient attention to the thriving network theory literature. This article examines some of the contributions that network thinking can make.
Notes
1. Schools and Continuing Professional Development (CPD) in England – State of the Nation research project (T34718).
2. The reports to the TDA on these can be found in McCormick et al. (Citation2008), Opfer et al. (Citation2008) and Storey et al. (Citation2008) and a synthesis report in Pedder et al. (Citation2008). Other articles in this special issue are from this project.
3. ‘The Learning How to Learn Project’ is reported in James et al. (2007) and the ‘network’ part of the project is fully reported in McCormick et al. (Citation2010). Note also that the project interpreted ‘assessment for learning’ as ‘learning how to learn’; see Black et al. (Citation2006) for a theoretical justification for this.
4. In the event, the international and UK-wide literature retrieved was not used.
5. The search words used in the search of databases to retrieve items concerned with CPD included: professional development, teacher professional development, teacher inservice/in-service, teacher INSET, teacher learning and teacher improvement.
6. We were, however, mindful of the cautions provided by Dunkin (Citation1996) on the errors that occur in literature reviews, such as simply incorrectly reporting findings, and the often poor quality of conference papers.
7. At a simple level the problem the TDA study had in dealing with ‘professional learning communities’ systematically is indicative of its limitations. This is a matter of ‘theorising’ CPD activity, which is difficult to do in the ‘search word’ approach of systematic searches of databases.
8. In their discussion of learning they make reference to Lave and Wenger (Citation1991) in relation to communities of practice and a ‘culture of practice’ (Stoll et al. Citation2006, 234), but this is not part of the ‘learning’ discussion.
9. Indeed, we added a review of some of this literature on teachers' views in an appendix to the quantitative study as part of the TDA ‘State of the Nation’ study (Opfer et al. Citation2008, Appendix 1).
10. Their studies focus on heads of English, mathematics and science in secondary schools and coordinators of these subjects in primary schools, and not on the generality of teacher CPD experience. In any case there are sample problems with the studies and, of course, they report, at this stage of the work, only quantitative data.
11. This approach to CPD based on a view of teacher learning is essentially what Borko (Citation2004) was endeavouring to do but, as McCormick et al. (Citation2010, 54) argue, her view of scaling up of professional development (e.g. from single studies of particular instances of CPD to studies of multiple sites of many forms of CPD) contains a flaw in its over-emphasis of ‘fidelity of an innovation’ by denying teacher learning (rather seeing ‘reproduction’ as the metaphor).
12. However, it is not as simple as this as they use a model of identity that indicates professional, situated (school context related) and personal elements (Day and Gu Citation2007, 431), which has some similarities with multiple identities discussed by Wenger (Citation1998).
13. There are, of course, exceptions, as in the case of Cordingley et al. (Citation2005), who reviewed the evidence on the effect of collaboration on student outcomes.
14. This draws on the complementary nature of reification and participation as argued by Wenger (Citation1998).
15. Such SNA studies typically ask respondents to rate the strength of a relationship and this can be a limitation, as it not only ignores the specific nature of the relationship (Palonen et al. Citation2004 is a notable exception), but it tends to reduce it to a single dimension.
16. de Lima (Citation2010) discusses the importance and insights that networks contribute to education, focusing on SNA approaches.
17. There is some controversy in the literature about what kind of knowledge is made available by such weak connections, but we have few studies in education to examine this (Lawrence [Citation2007, Citation2009] is an exception).
18. Valente, in a later work on diffusion of innovation, acknowledges that there is a lack of understanding in the processes involved (Valente Citation2005).
19. These were published in a special issue of the Journal of Curriculum Studies (36, no. 2), in 2004.
20. There is also a parallel set of issues related to school learning, but that only extends the point made about already complex issues at the core of what CPD is trying to achieve.
21. Boyle et al. (Citation2004, 8) say that 77% of their sample participated in (one-day or two-day) conferences, but they combine this with ‘workshops’, whereas Pedder et al. (Citation2008) report these separately, with 32% attending conferences and 60% out-of-school workshops.
22. See chapter 8 of McCormick et al. (Citation2010) for a detailed account of the contribution of ‘time and space’ as a context for network activity of the kind taking place at conferences.
23. At the time of working on the study of teachers' experiences and views of CPD there was a study of leadership and CPD, which we were not able to benefit from (Earley and Porritt Citation2010).
