2020: fresh perspectives on familiar themes

It seems like yesterday when we were seeing out the 20^th century and labelling everything as ‘new millennium’ this and that. It’s sobering to think that it was 20 years ago. A glance at the contents of this journal for issue 1 in the year 2000 shows articles on national standards in England and Wales, self-directed reflection and practitioner research in England, mentoring in Zimbabwe and the role of universities in the in-service education of teachers in Hong Kong. Many of these themes have been re-examined and researched many times since then but that does not make the findings and conclusions of more recent work irrelevant. Professional learning is best when undertaken in a collaborative way, but the spark of enlightenment which is generated by new ideas must light individual fires before it can be used to light others. The Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore wrote ‘A lamp can never light another lamp unless it continues to burn its own flame. A teacher can never truly teach unless he is still learning himself’”¹

Ideas, initiatives and policies have a habit of reappearing in different forms, but they work best when individuals become enthusiastically engaged with them and adapt them to their own contexts. New teachers will amend and claim established ways of working as their own; policymakers will do the same. Ownership of and commitment to professional ideas is fundamental if professional learning is to provide tangible change in practice, and almost without exception, articles in academic and professional journals such as this one convey energy and enthusiasm for initiatives which have lit sparks at some point with the authors and with others.

This journal is not immune to change and periodically needs to refresh. The beginning of the new decade provides an opportunity for this. Professor Howard Stevenson is now established as one of the Managing Editors of PDiE and continues to be jointly responsible for the first sift of articles submitted to us before they go for peer review. We are delighted to announce that Dr Aileen Kennedy has now stepped up to the role of Managing Editor to work alongside Howard in selecting and overseeing the articles which have been chosen for publication. As a highly respected author, speaker and practitioner in the field of professional learning Aileen will bring fresh ideas to the journal’s editorial team. My new position as Chair of the Editorial Board will be to maintain the positive trajectory and status of this journal accomplished in previous years and, in the open and constructive culture we have built as an Editorial Board, help to set the direction of the journal for the immediate future.

We lose Dr Anja Swennen as one of our Associate Editors this year. While this is a disappointment for us because of the way she has worked with the Editorial Board it is an achievement for Anja who moves on to co-manage a different journal. We wish her every success in the future. Our other Associate Editors continue to provide support for authors and each other and a great depth of thanks goes to them for their hard work and constructive comments. They are Alex Alexandrou (England), Simon Clarke (Australia), Laura Desimone (USA), Fiona King (Ireland) and Sue Swaffield (England).

We work closely with our parent organisation IPDA and it was a great pleasure last year to see the launch of their new journal Practice: Contemporary Issues in Practitioner Education edited by Alex Kendall and Hazel Bryan. The articles published in the new journal will complement and enhance thinking on practitioner learning across professions.

We are also pleased to look forward at new initiatives and have chosen three themes for Special Issues in the next two volumes. They are The Place of Professional Growth and Professional Learning in Leading Socially Just Schools (guest editors Christine Forde and Deirdre Torrance), Leadership for Professional Learning (guest editors Sue Swaffield and Phil Poekert) and Non-Linear Perspectives on Teacher Learning and Practice (guest editors Kathryn Strom, Linda Abrams, and Tammy Mills). Full details of these can be found on the journal’s website (https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rjie20/current).

Finally, we take pride in being ‘more than a journal’. Members of the editorial Board are committed to working in the field with other professionals to seek new ways of stimulating professional learning. Our most recent symposium at the ECER conference in Hamburg engaged an international audience in looking at ‘Beyond reproduction: the transformative potential of professional learning’. We look forward to developing this theme through another Special Issue and through conferences, seminars and workshops in the near future.

Moving back to the current issue, the articles fall into a number of common themes which will allow comparability of practice, interpretation, culture and impact. The Editorial Board of PDiE reviews the purposes and remit of the journal on a regular basis. One issue that has been addressed on a number of occasions is whether or not to include articles which focus on pre-service education or whether to restrict the journal to a focus on ‘in-service’ matters. When the journal was called ‘The Journal of In-service Education’ this limitation was justifiable, but with an extended remit to cover professional learning and development it seems too restrictive not to include research into pre-service practice. Our current stance on this issue is to favour articles which have pre-service focus within practice settings (such as mentoring of pre-service professionals) but not to exclude those examining the learning of pre-service professionals.

Our first article is a case in point. The reconfiguration of initial teacher education in many countries is increasing the contribution of partner schools in relation to university provision and new models of partnership are emerging. Elton-Chalcraft, Copping, Mills and Todd focus their longitudinal research on Developing research-informed practice in initial teacher education through school-university partnering and explore significant issues of how cultural factors enhance or inhibit the creative approaches of emerging and established teachers. Discussion of the nature of ‘partnership’ is important here and although the location of this research is England, which has varied approaches to pre-service partnership, there is much to consider of relevance for other countries redefining the ways in which prospective entrants to the profession are supported.

Elton-Chalcraft et al make reference to the Netherlands in their discussion of how the academic attributes of teacher educators potentially affects learning at the pre-service stage. The next article by Baan, Gaikhorst and Volman is based in the Netherlands and focuses on The involvement of academically educated Dutch teachers in inquiry-based working. This article provides further insight into the ways in which cultures and structures of pre-service provision influence future practice and, specifically, how the graduates of ‘academic’ programmes in The Netherlands engage in inquiry-based approaches in practice situations. They identify three forms of inquiry-based working: systematic reflection, using research and conducting research and conclude that the last of these was least common. This article will enhance thinking on inquiry-based working and the merits or otherwise of labelling certain routes and individuals at the pre-service stage as ‘academic’.

The article by Maaranen, Kynäslahti, Byman, Sintonen and Jyrhämä takes a different perspective on a similar theme, focusing on the research expectations of teacher educators in Finland. Along with the first two articles, this study provides an excellent opportunity to compare perceptions of research in different countries and the nuances of teacher education and practice that exist. The shift to a research-based model of teacher education in Finland is explained, though there is an irony in that there is relatively little research on the professional development of teacher educators there. One of the conclusions of this article is that while research and publication featured prominently in the repertoire of (and requirements for) teacher educators in Finland, and that research is regarded as being an important feature of teacher educator professional development, experience of conducting self-study research is limited because the focus of the research is on their own specialised field rather than on their work as lecturers. This has implications not only for the teacher educators themselves but also for the novice teachers they work with.

Johnston, Hadley and Waniganayake provide an Australian perspective of practitioner inquiry in their study of technology integration in early learning centres. The theme is significant and fluid in that the use of technology is developing at a rapid pace and its accommodation by practitioners in early years settings is continually being reinterpreted. Interpersonal factors and contextual considerations in this study are brought out through practitioner inquiry and the research concludes that the process of inquiry informed the actions of the designated professional learning facilitator and consequently the professional learning programmes in which staff engaged.

The practice of lesson study has been adopted, interpreted and enacted in many forms and contexts, and the observation of teaching and learning is a central element of this. The differences in practice operating under the generic heading of lesson study may be seen to be unhelpful, but on the other hand they are undoubtedly a natural consequence of local interpretations being given to an adaptable concept. Similarly with observation, the many permutations of approaches from performative to educative are inevitable in practice. There follows a series of five articles focusing on the themes of lesson study and observation which will add to the international literature base on the processes and practices involved while, from our perspective, giving an insight into their professional learning implications. The conceptual discussion paper by Saito, Khong, Hidayat, Hendayana and Imansyah provides an excellent overview of approaches to the coordination of lesson study (‘the rules of the game’) at school level using a comparative institutional analysis approach. The authors argue that there is more scope to utilise in the field of education and specifically to interpret professional development activities more effectively. The need to conduct empirical studies on the coordination of lesson study is highlighted and we look forward to receiving articles on this theme when the research has been completed.

Jhang’s Taiwanese study of Teachers’ attitudes towards lesson study, perceived competence, and involvement in lesson study: Evidence from junior high school teachers provides an interesting perspective on these important attitudinal elements. Significantly, the study provides a potentially valuable insight for education leaders in identifying potential barriers to the implementation of lesson study and the ways in which these can be overcome to provide a more holistic approach to the process. A different set of lenses is taken by Stokes, Suh and Curby in Examining the Nature of Teacher Support During Different Iterations and Modalities of Lesson Study Implementation. They focus on the perceived support teachers receive from their involvement in the lesson study process, specifically identifying the social, emotional and instructional support gained by participants. They include consideration of in-person as opposed to video-based analysis of teaching and both single-school and cross-school initiatives. Although the research emanates from the United States of America there are similarities in the findings which will resonate elsewhere.

A third approach, this time from The Netherlands, draws attention to the fact that many teachers still work in isolation when it comes to critical analysis and feedback on their teaching. The article by Schipper, de Vries, Goei and van Veen (Promoting a Professional School Culture through Lesson Study? An Examination of School Culture, School Conditions, and Teacher Self-efficacy) examines the collaborative processes brought about by lesson study and the cultural contexts that allow these to thrive. They see collaborative inquiry as ‘the engine for professional learning’ (p3) and identify the pivotal role of school leaders in enabling and encouraging collaboration and increasing teacher self-efficacy. They conclude with the important observation that the focus should not simply be on creating professional school cultures but on sustaining them.

We then move on to include two articles looking more closely at the observation element of lesson analysis. Visone uses a qualitative comparative case study of two secondary schools in the USA to look at the planning stage of a peer observation initiative, an element of the process largely ignored in outcome evaluations. The involvement of teacher leaders in this part of the process is emphasised and the study makes the interesting and valuable conclusion that the decision to exclude formal leaders from the planning process enhanced buy-in to the initiative from teachers. The focus switches to learning and teaching in Higher Education for the next article by O’Leary and Savage. There is a sense of irony that while teacher educators from universities have spent many years advising and advocating the process of lesson observation in schools, it has often been lacking in university departments where the autonomy if the expert individual professional has been dominant. The importance of Breathing new life into the observation of teaching and learning in higher education: moving from the performative to the informative cannot be understated and the article provides an insight into one university’s approach to reconfigure the process of observation, moving it away from its use as a tool for assessment and towards its use to stimulate educational inquiry and professional learning through collegial engagement.

The final article by Hamilton provides a perspective on professional learning through the use of portfolios to provide evidence in a cross-sectoral context. These are all important elements to consider in a critical way, engaging with issues of the nature of evidence and what this may look like in terms of learning, teaching and professional learning, and how cross-sectoral engagement can enhance or, logistically, impede individually focused PL. The article Evidence Based Portfolios: A Cross-sectoral Approach to Professional Development among Teachers highlights the complexity of intersection between ‘self’ and ‘profession’ as a teacher but does this through a collaborative process in which teachers from different educational sectors and contexts engage with each other in professional environments. The article examines the connections between thinking and reflecting and how these are made concrete through writing and rewriting as part of the collaborative professional learning process.

The themes explored in this issue have been researched, discussed and critiqued before, but for each article there is an energy and vitality that comes from identifying new perspectives on familiar issues. If this journal can provide an avenue for this vitality to be shared (and critiqued) it will continue to be of service to professionals committed to continuing their own professional learning and that of others.

Notes

1. Sodhi, H.K. (2013) Parview 2:1, p20.