‘It’s time to offer teachers career-long opportunities’
Now is the time to offer the teaching profession in Wales the career-long opportunities common in other professions that could make Wales a truly great place to teach, say Professor David Egan and Dr Russell Grigg
The three pillars of the Education Reform Programme through which the Welsh Government hopes to transform education in Wales are the new curriculum, the changes to initial teacher education and the career-long professional development of our teachers.
Research on school effectiveness suggests that the quality of teachingis highly important in raising school standards and that this requires teachers to develop their knowledge and skills throughout their careers.
What, therefore, is now needed to develop in Wales a future teaching profession that can build upon the reforms in initial teacher education, deliver the new curriculum and ensure that we have the excellent education system in future?
The Wales Journal of Education, our only scholarly and researchbased journal on education in Wales, has recently produced a special number that is intended to throw light on this pressing question. We have brought together contributions from leading academics in the area, drawn upon extensive research literature and begun to capture the views of practitioners who have themselves recently undertaken significant developments in their own professional learning.
The results, we believe, represent a comprehensive evidence base to inform the future of professional learning for teachers in Wales.
We point to three key features that should underpin the future of teacher professional learning in Wales.
Firstly, it should be based on an entitlement for teachers that first and foremost enables them to meet their own needs. It shouldn’t, therefore, be part of a “top-down” and prescribed approach from government or employers tied to performance management and accountability. Such approaches are more accurately described as “training”: they may have their place but they are not true professional development of the type common in other professions. Nor should there be prescription based on mimicking what is in place in other countries.
Learning from what is in place and appears to be effective elsewhere is sensible, but the Welsh education system is unique and what is available to teachers here should reflect that distinctiveness. Effective practice from elsewhere is usually not a good traveller!
Secondly, the best model for informing professional learning is one based on research, inquiry, evaluation and critical reflection. Teachers, like most other professionals, prefer professional learning opportunities that are based in their own schools and classrooms rather than at off-site locations. This enables them to undertake real-life inquiries based on action research techniques, followed by time to reflect on what they have learnt and how they can then embed the learning in their own practice.
Fortunately, this is the model of professional learning that the Welsh Government has already developed and it would, therefore, now seem sensible to build the future of professional learning upon these sound foundations.
Thirdly, successful professional learning should be collaborative, allowing teachers with similar interests and needs to work together in undertaking research and inquiry, sharing their reflections and disseminating their findings to their fellow professionals. Successful collaboration usually requires facilitation and specialist support – enabling teachers to have the time to develop collaborative networks and to acquire the skills to carry out action research. This is where the regional education consortia, universities and other organisations have a key role to play.
It is a much more open question as to whether professional learning should be based upon core pedagogical principles – what some education experts would define as a “science of teaching”. Traditionally, teachers have instinctively been nervous about what they perceive as being the prescriptiveness that is implied here.
Might it be the time, however, to move away from such sensitivities to a “language of teaching” that would underpin initial teacher education, professional learning and the new curriculum?
This should not be an official orthodoxy set in stone, but a living and developmental pedagogy that enables teaching to overcome the perception once articulated by Richard Elmore that “teaching is a profession... but without a practice”!
We suggest that the set of pedagogical principles recently set out for the future of the Foundation Phase in Wales may well represent an appropriate starting point for developing a distinctly Welsh pedagogy for teaching.
In recent years, many of those involved with the teaching profession in Wales will have observed that whilst teachers continue to do remarkable work, that too often they feel unloved, undervalued and often scapegoated. Currently there is a new sense of optimism that it beginning to lift this gloom. If it is to flourish, now is the time to offer the teaching profession in Wales the career-long opportunities now common in other professions that could make Wales a truly great place to teach.
Professor David Egan, Cardiff Metropolitan University and Dr Russell Grigg, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, are the Editors of the Wales Journal of Education