As I write this editorial it is the start of a new academic year and by the time many of the readers of this journal get to see this editorial the new year will be well underway. It will of course be a new academic year like no other. We are beginning to slowly and tentatively emerge from the immediate impact of the coronavirus pandemic, but it is already clear that the road to recovery will be a long one and the future remains uncertain. Many who work in education, and students too, will have already had the experience of making a dramatic pivot to online learning. As the new academic year awaits it seems likely that teaching in my own institution will be some sort of hybrid model involving face to face and online provision but even now, just 3 weeks before teaching starts, that is not completely clear. It is also possible that the way the year starts may change quickly if second, or third, waves require emergency measures of some form.
We are all having to learn, very quickly, to live in uncertain and fast-moving times. Perhaps these times attest to the importance of lifelong learning in a way that has not been posed so starkly for many of us before in our working lives. What is clear is that the coronavirus pandemic has reminded us very forcibly of the need for collaboration and the power of learning from each other. Not only in the fields of natural science, where our hopes are pinned on a solution that can lift the fear and uncertainty caused by Covid-19, but in every aspect of our lives as we learn to adapt to new circumstances.
In many ways, however, none of these issues are intrinsically new, and the apparently new imperatives to find more effective ways to collaborate, share and learn from each other are perhaps not so novel after all. Certainly, many of the professional learning issues that appear to have grown in importance are ones that have previously been well covered in the pages of this journal and the articles in this issue highlight many of these themes.
In our first article, Jiang Heng, Choy Ban Heng and Lee Kim-Eng discuss Refining Teaching Expertise through Analysing Students’ Work: A Case of Elementary Mathematics Teacher Professional Learning during Lesson Study in Singapore in which the authors offer further insights into the potential benefits of lesson study and the ways that this approach to professional learning can promote valuable forms of collaborative enquiry. The focus on collaboration is also reflected in the article by Fred Huijbroom, Pierre Van Meeuwen, Ellen Rusman and Marjn Vermeulen – How to enhance Teachers’ Professional Learning by stimulating the Development of Professional Learning Communities: Operationalising a comprehensive PLC Concept for Assessing its Development in everyday educational Practice. However, Huijbroom and colleagues recognise that the development of collaborative practices is often complex and in their article, they discuss the development of measurement tools that can help deepen our understanding of the professional learning communities in our institutions.
David Duran, Mariona Corcelles, Marta Flores and Ester Miquel’s article Changes in attitudes and willingness to use co-teaching through pre-service teacher training experiences provides another example of a study that looks at popular practice in teacher education, that of co-teaching, but recognises that operationalising these practices in an effective way is often problematic and it is, therefore, necessary to identify innovative and creative ways to deepen the effectiveness of what can often appear as taken-for-granted practices and experiences.
We are delighted to include the article by Nikolett Szelei, Luis Tinoca, Ana Sofia Pinho as it discusses Professional development for cultural diversity: The challenges of teacher learning in context. We are pleased to include a contribution from colleagues in Portugal as we are aware that the perspective of Southern European colleagues has been under-represented in the journal for some time. Given what the Southern European countries have been going through ever since the financial crisis in 2008 it is particularly important to focus on developments in these countries that have a specific context that has been shaped by chronic austerity. Perhaps more importantly the article focuses on the importance of professional development and cultural diversity which are issues that we must all recognise we have been too slow to address. Szelei and colleagues remind us that professional development can be part of the problem we need to address when considering equity and social justice issues and there is a need for more critical perspective in relation to much that is presented as professional development.
The article by Hyunwoo Yang The Effects of Professional Development Experience on Teacher Self-Efficacy: Analysis of an International Dataset Using Bayesian Multilevel Models attests to the importance of not only posing challenging questions but also the need to think creatively and rigorously about the methods we use to explore critical issues in professional learning, while the article by Douglas Mitchell, Andrew Kwok and Debee Huston, Induction Program Structures as Mediating Factors for Coach Influence on Novice Teacher Development, offers an example of a fascinating mixed methods study that opens up discussion about the role of induction procedures and coaching processes in shaping the experiences of novice teachers.
In the final two articles, our contributors focus on a range of issues that highlight the importance of encouraging professional learning research that reflects a broad range of interests. Orit Avidov-Ungar and Osnat Herscu help deepen our understanding of how professional learning experiences are shaped by one’s pre-existing experiences and career trajectory, Formal professional development as perceived by teachers in different professional life periods. Meanwhile Trudy Ambler, Ian Solomonides, Andrew Smallridge, Trish McCluskey and Lyn Hannah in their article Professional learning for academics teaching first-year undergraduate students focus their attention on the specific requirements of those who teach particular student groups and the need to recognise these specificities when designing professional development programmes.