In this volume, researchers take on several timely and important topics, with research spanning multiple countries, grades and subjects. One set of articles deepens our understanding of how, under what circumstances and in what ways, teachers learn from different experiences and activities. Specifically, the first six articles in this issue explore how teacher knowledge and instructional approaches are influenced by the focus of their learning, their mentor’s activities, how they engage with other disciplines, and how they interact with data. The next two articles focus on school leaders – their role in fostering teacher growth as well as the factors that influence their own competence. The final four articles in this volume address a current topic – technology and teacher learning. Together, all of the articles in this volume provide an evidence base leading us to a better understanding of how policy, programmes, and teacher education opportunities might be better shaped to foster the most successful outcomes for educators.
Teacher change in relation to the content of their learning activities
Hannah L. Stark, Patricia A. Eadie, Pamela C. Snow and Sharon R. Goldfeld in their article, The impact of a sustained oral language professional learning programme on Australian early years’ teachers’ knowledge, practice and beliefs: a mixed-methods exploration, ground their study in theories about how professional development may work to change teacher knowledge and practice. With case studies of three teachers in Australia, they document how teacher learning and change trajectories differ, despite engagement with the same learning experience, concluding that change in knowledge can occur without change in practice, and vice versa. They emphasise how grounding work in theory can help identify affordances and barriers for teacher learning to translate to teacher change and student improvement.
In How professional development program features impact the knowledge of science teachers, Jacqueline Doyle, Gerhard Sonnert and Philip Sadler provide evidence that focusing on foundational science knowledge may be a critically important factor for improving teacher subject matter knowledge and knowledge of student misconceptions. They analysed data from 1835 teachers participating in science-related PD programs across the United States, including many different science subjects and grades. They expected to find other popular program features to be associated with increased teacher knowledge, such as developing curricula and conducting scientific research. While correlational in nature, this work adds to the literature helping us understand the components of teacher learning that matter most.
Lindsay Joseph Wexler studies one first grade teacher and one third grade teacher, and their mentors, in a Midwestern school district in the United States. In I would be a completely different teacher if I had been with a different mentor’: Ways in which educative mentoring matters as novices learn to teach, Wexler follows these mentors and teachers for two years, through their student teaching year, and their first year of teaching. Analysing lesson plans, journals, interviews and field notes, she concludes the activities mentors engage in matter for novice teacher learning, especially in the areas of planning, instruction and reflection around student thinking and understanding.
Venitha Pillary explores the effects of a professional development program in South Africa, focused on improved content coverage. In Jika iMfundo: A South African study of ‘turning education around’ through improved curriculum coverage, Pillary analyzes data from 2000 teachers of grades 1 through 12 across two districts, who completed open-ended survey questions. The findings emphasise the importance of learner activity as a measure of success, in the absence of formal assessments, and, in contrast to some previous work, found that teachers welcomed the structured guidance provided by the program.
The next article, Challenging boundaries to cross: primary teachers exploring drama pedagogy for creative writing with theatre educators in the landscape of performativity identifies the challenges of boundary crossing. Studying four teachers of students ages 7–11, Tom Dobson and Lisa Stephenson examine teacher reactions to a professional development that fosters the use of drama to teach creative writing. Their analysis shows that challenges of teachers crossing practice and self-identify boundaries include the pressures of the policy system and how aligned those pressure are with the boundary-crossing behaviour; and how aligned the new practices and identifies are with the teachers own identity as a teacher.
The last article in this group addresses a ubiquitous challenge: teacher’s use of data in productive and meaningful ways. M. Dan, F.J.J.M. Janssen and J.H. van Driel, in Making sense of student data in teacher professional development, describe a promising example of how data on student learning can be successfully applied to building teacher knowledge and change practice in productive ways. Studying five biology teachers in the Netherlands, they demonstrate how providing frames for teacher interpretation and use of student data resulted in teachers using the data in systematic ways to improve their practice.
School leaders
The next two articles focus on school leaders. Solvi Lillejord and Kristin Borte in Trapped between accountability and professional learning? School leaders and teacher evaluation, conduct an in-depth analysis of 15 research articles to investigate school leaders’ activities in relation to teacher evaluation. The analysis reveals a gap between teacher expectations of school leaders’, and the leaders’ willingness, time, competence and skills to provide formative feedback. The authors suggest this might be explained by leaders having unevenly distributed skill, capacity and infrastructure, and propose that professional learning communities might be a mechanism to develop formative evaluation practices.
Mei Kin Tai and Omar Abdull Kareem in Headteacher change leadership competency: a study in Malaysian primary schools, describe the results of a comparative study of school leaders in two types of schools in Malaysia, to compare their leadership competencies. With data from 1776 headteachers, senior assistants and teachers, they conclude that headteachers in the National School were significantly more competent in every leadership domain, compared to headteachers in the National-Type Chinese School. Respondents from both types of schools reported less competence in ‘defusing resistance and conflict’, compared to ‘goal framing,’ ‘capacity building’ and ‘institutionalizing.’ The author also found a relationship between being exposed to professional development and increased competence. The authors discuss the possibility that school culture may play a role in these differences.
Technology and teacher learning
The final four articles in this volume help us understand how teachers interact with technology. Talia C. Nochumson in Elementary school teachers’ use of Twitter: exploring the implications of learning through online social media finds that teachers are learning about new ideas, teaching strategies and resources from Twitter, especially technology integration techniques. However, Nochumson cautions that these ideas are not always legitimate or accurate. To draw these conclusions, she uses data from semi-structured interviews with 19 respondents, coupled with an analysis of Tweets over a 3 month period, and surveys from 107 United States K-5 teachers.
Ingrid Helleve, Aslaug Grov Almas, and Brita Bjorkelo in Becoming a professional digital competent teacher conduct a case study of 7 Norwegian and Australian teachers to study the role of digital competence in teacher education, as students transition to becoming teachers. They conclude that one approach to building teacher’s digital competence is including in teacher education opportunities for students to reflect on their personal experiences and ethical dilemmas related to social network sites.
Yue Li and Marianne E. Krasny in Development of professional networks among environmental educators explore how social networks can best be formed in online and hybrid activities. In a study of 94 environmental educators and community leaders engaging in activities sponsored by Cornell University in the United states, the researchers used social network analysis and qualitative analysis of interviews and project reports and found that discussions and collaborative projects were likely to foster network formation. They found that both face-to-face and online learning could build social networks among participants, but networks were denser and stronger when they included face-to-face activities, and project-based learning.
In Disrupting colorblind teacher education in computer sciences, Joanna Goode, Stephany Runninghawk Johnson and Krystal Sundstrom study a week-long PD workshop in which 122 teachers in the United States participated. The workshop was designed for high school computer science teachers. The authors describe how some teacher deflect and avoid conversations about race, while others embrace and emphasise such conversations. Their work suggests that explicit dialogue around race and computer science hold promise for developing culturally responsive pedagogies.