‘Shakespeare Reloaded’: teacher professional development within a collaborative learning community

Abstract

This paper describes an instance of continuing professional development and explores the contribution it might make to the ongoing international dialogue of professional development. It reviews the way features of the current debate on effective teaching, teacher learning and continuing professional development overlap and feed into each other and questions the extent to which professional development should be teacher initiated, based in communities of learning and collaborative contexts, and inclusive of different perspectives within these contexts. The paper draws on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin as a theoretical framework to help identify the successful and salient features of this project, as well as its limitation and difficulties. The author draws on her experience of working with the innovative learning communities created in an ongoing project between the English Department at the University of Sydney and the English teaching staff at a Sydney‐based private boys’ school, and on in‐depth interviews and document analysis of one case study involving two teachers within this project. The perspectives of both the academic staff and the teaching staff will be used to inform the exploration of this innovative instance of collaboration and its implications for the ongoing debate about professional development.

Keywords:

• professional development
• teacher learning
• learning communities
• qualitative research
• interim findings
• Mikhail Bakhtin

Acknowledgements

The Shakespeare Reloaded project is funded by the Australian Research Council's ‘Linkage Projects’ scheme.