Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, Heriot-WattUniversity, Edinburgh, 11-13 September 2003

Exploring teachers’ professional learning

PETER KELLY, University of Plymouth

ABSTRACT There is much current concern with identifying the impact of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) on practice and student outcomes. However, difficulties in ascertaining the effectiveness of CPD in improving student learning have been identified, most recently by HMI. Thus the relation of professional learning to practice is an important focus for research. A socio-cultural view of professional learning is presented in contrast to the currently dominant cognitive view, and its implications for impact discussed.

Introduction: A cognitive view of impact

Evaluating the usefulness and effectiveness (or impact) of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) is of concern to teachers, head teachers, CPD providers, funding bodies, policy makers and many others. This is recognised in the Ofsted framework for inspecting CPD programmes (Ofsted, 2001), which requires evidence of the impact of such programmes on pupil learning.

That there is such a link between teachers’ engagement in CPD and changes in their pupils’ learning is central to school development planning: areas for development are identified often by means of student performance data, and CPD opportunities provided in order to bring about improvement. In this process, Flecknoe (2000) identifies two important areas for consideration: which aspects of pupil learning should we select to evaluate impact, and what is acceptable evidence of impact for these. He warns of the serious and limiting effects which the adoption of simple indicators such as test data would have on school and teacher development.

In providing this warning, Flecknoe accepts that CPD can and does affect student learning; but providing evidence of this link is not straightforward. For example, Billett (2001) suggests that, from a cognitivist perspective, the pathway to vocational expertiseis through the acquisition of procedural and conceptual knowledge, organised and richly indexed to facilitate complex thinking activities – adaptability, transfer and non-routine problem solving. In this regard a cognitivist analysis of the process by which professional learning affects student learning would comprise a number of steps:

  • professional learning takes place during CPD;
  • transfer of professional learning subsequently takes place from the context of CPD to the classroom;
  • professional knowledge use involves adapting professional learning to students and setting;
  • teachers’ use of professional learning in their professional practice brings about student learning.

If we accept such a sequence (which others might see as being entirely implausible, and an alternative to which is provided later in this paper), then impact on pupil learning is dependent on the success of each of a series of complex events, and small changes in teachers’ or students’ responses to any part of this process might produce quite different outcomes. It is little wonder, as Glover and Law (1996, p83) suggest,that ‘attempts to measure the impact of CPD are fraught with difficulties,’ or that impact evaluations have been limited to one perspective on the process: ‘evaluations have invariably been reliant on participants’ self-reports and reviews’.

Many studies have considered the impact of CPD on the professional learner, without seeing this as limiting: rather it is seen as providing an approach which avoids the need for speculation about subsequent links between teachers’ and students’ learning. It is fruitful in that such studies form:

‘the basis on which unique individual patterns of professional learning and development, and potentialfor impact, can be identified’ (Burchell et al., 2002, p220, my italics).

So, for example, Davies and Preston (2002) found that impact varies from individual to individual, but includes both professional (that is, work related) and personal (more widely related) effects. An holistic view, recognising the teacher as a person with a life outside the classroom is also adopted by Day (1994), who suggests:

‘professional development must extend beyond classroom practice, such that support for the personal and long term needs of the teacher as artist, connoisseur, craftsperson and technician are legitimated’ (p300).

Accredited CPD potentially leads to an increase in participants’ self esteem and, perhaps, new opportunities for promotion, both having implications beyond work. In addition, the need to reprioritise both workplace and personal commitments when engaged in extended study might serve to focus and clarify. Outcomes such as these mean CPD can positively affect relationships, but this can also be negative: the pressure placed on relationships by extended study could, for some, be damaging. As such, the boundaries of professional impact blur with those of personal impact.

But much research which focuses on impact as professional learning does so within the cognitive model: For example, Chambers (2001), discussing the role of dissertation writing in postgraduate study, suggests:

‘Perhaps the acid test of the professional dissertation is the extent to which it enables the learner to transfer and apply the knowledge, skills and sensitivities from the dimensions of the ‘professional as learner’ model to their own workplace’ (p125).

As before, professional learning here is conceptualised as a separate cognitive entity to be acquired during specific CPD opportunities and transferred to the workplace. Many other recent reports implicitly adopt this perspective by assuming postgraduate level CPD to take place largely through courses (for example, Burchell et al., 2002; Davies and Preston, 2002; Glover and Law, 1996).

Impact is a complex construct, which the DfES CPD Strategy (DfES, 2001a) identifies as under-researched. I have suggested that current considerations of impact are largely conceptualised within a cognitivist framework. I will now show that this view also pervades the wider CPDclimate inEngland. This will lead me to explore professional learning from a socio-cultural perspective, thereby raising issues for future considerations of impact.

Teacher learning and CPDopportunities for teachers in England

CPD in England currently takes many forms. In addition to informal opportunities for teacher development in schools including school based in-service training, more formal opportunities include short courses run by local education authorities, national training programmes such as those relating to the National Professional Qualification for Headship (NPQH) and the National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies (NLS and NNS respectively), and postgraduate study. For the most part these approach teacher development in the same way as that described for initial teacher education and induction models in England by Fiona Patrick and her colleagues (2003):

‘[These] … stress a specific and simplistic conception of professionalism: firstly, that the professional is one who is competent and develops excellence only in respect of measurable, pre-defined standards; and secondly, that professional skills can be described readily, defined meaningfully and delivered through simple transfer (with values, attitudes, knowledge and understanding being classes ad subsets of general teaching skills).’ (p240)

This is exemplified in the Teachers Standards Framework (DfES, 2001b), which links professional competences to each stage of a career ladder, in a cradle-to-grave embrace of the teaching professions’ development. As such it has provided the opportunity for national qualifications for each rung of the ladder, and thus gateways to particular career positions. Some would claim that there are great advantages to this: such qualifications hold nationally, providing a clear and objective career structure; the competences identify and profile the professional expertise or specialised skills which, it is asserted, teachers need, thus raising the status of teaching; and they offer the potential to reward those who want to stay in the classroom by recognising a role for expert teachers whom they call Advanced Skills Teachers (ASTs).

However, as with other competency models, this framework ignores both the personal qualities required of teachers and the complexity of expertise (to which I will return in a later section). The shaky ground on which the suggested competencies are offered is revealed when we ask: how are such competences arrived at, who decides them, on what evidence are they based and what aims and values underpin them? From the perspective of teacher learning, the implicit suggestion in the framework is that competencies are general transferable skills, applicable to any situation by those who hold them. Context is simply not considered an issue.

Day (1994) voices the concerns of many:

‘The consequences of adopting and developing competence-based profiling systems will be the downgrading of teachers as autonomous, responsible and accountable professionals to teachers as operatives who implement, rather than mediate, the curriculum.’ (p300)

This can be seen in CPD associated with the Teachers Standards Framework, such as that leading to the NPQH award, is instrumental and highly regulated to ensure that one model is provided for all, whether or not it ‘fits’: again context is not an issue. In this, the results of inspections and surveys of successful schools, school leaders and so on are distilled to provide wisdom about ‘good practice’, and this is imparted through training to the receptive but empty vessels which make up the teaching profession. Teachers develop by taking this wisdom and applying it to their own practice – perhaps gaining some degree of self-awareness of how they are doing along the way. A similar picture can be painted for training linked to the NLS and NNS.

These initiatives define a role for expert teachers, be they Leading Mathematics Teachers, Leading Literacy Teachers or ASTs. The role of Leading Mathematics or Literacy Teachers is largely to provide demonstration lessons for others to observe and learn from. In relation to ASTs, the Teachers Standards Framework (DfES, 2001b) describes their role as:

“[demonstrating] … the skills and experience necessary to provide pedagogic leadership within their own and other schools. They play a key part in raising teaching and learning standards through the quality of their own teaching and by supporting the professional development of their colleagues.”

Thus these initiatives adopt a similarly instrumental view of expertise: experts apply distilled good practice, support others doing the same, monitor the process and evaluate outcomes.

Another framework which has undergone several revisions, the Ofsted framework for inspection (2003a; 2003b), has also had a dramatic effect on theculture which now prevails in schools in England. In its current form it is increasingly adopted by head teachers and senior managers as a vehicle for school self evaluation. This process begins with an analysis of school data, including that held within annual Performance and Assessment (PANDA) reports. Performance management and threshold assessment, linking performance to pay, play their part, requiring the application of specific criteria and the use of performance data to evaluate teacher performance and set targets for improvement. Professional development portfolios record and monitor individual teachers’ CPD towards meeting targets.Such a culture clearly encompasses (and has to some degree helped to establish in other areas) the same cognitive model of professional learning described earlier, and can be characterised as performativity and technocratic rationality.

Encouragingly, recent national CPD initiatives have been less technicist: from 2001-2004 the Teacher Training Agency(TTA) promoted teacher research through Best Practice Research Scholarships (DfEE, 2001; DfES, 2002), and has also encouraged teachers to use research to inform their teaching through the research informed practice initiative ( study has been identified as amongst the most effective forms of CPD (Soulsby and Swain, 2003), and the TTA have committed large sums of money towards funding Postgraduate Professional Development (PPD) for teachers through masters degree level study in partnership with Higher Education Institutions. Most recently the General Teaching Council for England (GTCE) have produced a framework for professional development in which PPD is central(GTCE, 2003).

Whilst some might argue that in each of these initiatives, research and practitioner action research have been high jacked by policy makers for the purpose of better implementation of central policy, others could suggest that such approaches are more likely to lead to those changes in practice which will bring about school improvement because:

  • educational theory and principles are empowering by enabling teachers to make sense of situations and engage in committed informed practice;
  • the process of re-professionalisation requires teacher research to become part of the culture of schools, in their systematic examination of practice.

Nevertheless such initiatives can also be viewed as essentially cognitivist by implicitlyaccepting a view of professional development as the acquisition of procedural and conceptual knowledge, organised and richly indexed to facilitate adaptability, transfer and non-routine problem solving.

In the remainder of this article I will argue that the cognitivist model for CPD is inadequate in understanding the complexity of professional learning and development on a number of counts:

  • It advocates an impoverished view of professional expertise and adopts a simplistic notion of professional knowledge which does not account for what Schon (1983; 1987) has called ‘knowledge-in-practice’ and ‘reflection-in-action’, and Sternberg & Horvath (1999) call ‘tacit knowledge’;
  • It fails to recognise the problematic nature of transfer. There is a considerable and substantive body of research in this area (reviewed in Desforges, 1995), much suggesting that knowledge acquired in one setting is seldom used by learners in other settings, and leading to transfer being described as ‘the holy grail’ of educators (Resnick, 1989).
  • Further, by postulating a causal link between professional learning and student learning requiring a process of transfer, it fails to recognise the much closer and more complex relationship between these;
  • It ignores the wider social context in which professionals work and the perspectives which professional bring to their work including their professional identities;
  • It provides little support for educators wishing to focus on student learning as the movement from novice to expertise.

I will consider these contentions further in relation to a socio-cultural view of professional learning. This perspective has been increasingly adopted by those looking to address such concerns (for example, Dunscombe and Armour, 2004; Hoban and Erickson, 2004; Lyle, 2003). An analysis from this perspective leads to somewhat different assertions which I will discuss in turn:

  • Expert teachers have an active and productive relationship with their professional knowledge;
  • Professional knowledge is inseparably linked to the professional working practices in which it is created and used;
  • Professional identities are significant, and revealed in the stances teachers adopt in their professional lives – particularly towards their knowledge and learning and its relationship to their students’ knowledge and learning;
  • CPD and impact, rather than being separate as in the cognitivist model, are inseparable parts of the teaching and learning activities of schools. These processes can be explored through reference to the knowledge, working practices and identities of all involved.

Professional knowledge

As has already been said, cognitive psychologists assert that experts don’t simply have more knowledge than novices: the structure of experts’ and novices’ knowledge differs. Cognitive research which equates expertise to efficiency in non-routine problems solving, has identified differences between the ways in which experts and novices view problems within their field (Chi, Feltovich and Glaser, 1981; Ferretti et al., 1985; Larkin, McDermott, Simon and Simon, 1980).In summary, experts’ representations of phenomena are accurate and inclusive. They recognise how each of the relevant dimensions interacts within problems, together with their typical patterns of interaction. Experts are therefore better able to plan ahead. They classify problems according to their underlying principles, and those experts with the soundest grasp of such underlying principles are more able to solve problems which are superficially different but structurally similar. Novices, however, adopt representations of phenomena which are shallow, relying heavily on superficial features such as physical appearance without consideration of underlying principles. They recognise only the individual elements of phenomena and see these elements as operating unidimensionally, without interaction.

This view of expertise is exemplified in Louise Poulson and her colleagues’ (Poulson et al., 2001) analysis of the beliefs of teachers judged to be effective teachers of literacy by local advisors and inspectors. They found these expert teachers were oriented towards: whole language theoretical positions which promoted the creation of meaning in reading and writing by helping learners to understand texts; using authentic texts and activities in teaching reading; and focusing on the process of writing and writing for a range of different purposes and audiences. These expert teachers were negatively oriented towards over-emphasising presentation and using strategies focusing on technical accuracy at the expense of meaning.

It is on the basis of this view that cognitivists suggest for novices to become experts they need simply to learn the defined ‘body of knowledge’ which constitutes professional expertise, and then apply this in their practice. Indeed, traditionally professional training has involvedmoving trainees from an academic scientific towards a professional activity basis, as occurred, for example, with the separation of doctors’ initial training into pre-clinical and clinical components. Despite changes in the way professionalism is viewed in education, the search for a theoretical knowledge base for teaching and learning, similar to that which exists for medicine, still prevails - the UK government is committed to ‘evidence based practice’ in education and in 2000 commissioned the EPPI-Centre ( to provide a resource of systematic reviews of research to allow policy and professional practice the be based on ‘sound evidence of effectiveness’. Interestingly the centre justifies its stance thus:

‘In the health sector, for instance, it has become clear that much of what health care professionals do is not derived from reliable evidence, and that sometimes what professionals believe in with all the best intentions may not only be ineffective but sometimes actually harmful’