Session Information
13 SES 05, Preparing to Teach, Examination and Education
Long Paper Session
Contribution
The question of teachers' ability and effectiveness in the classroom is a matter of national and international importance. Politicians, researchers and senior management pour over the latest statistics comparing different schools, countries and approaches to education. A model of teacher led improvement finding favour in many circles is the idea of a 'professional learning community' (PLC). Hargreaves and Fullan (2012) have recently drawn together a range of, largely case study, evidence concerning the efficacy of large-scale adoption of this approach. They develop the notion of 'professional capital' as a means of capturing what is generated by such communities which can influence both individual teacher performance and arrogate up to impacting on regional improvement (see Davies, 2012 for a review). PLCs are seen by some as advantageous over a number of other approaches to improving teacher effectiveness which have found favour by governments in recent decades.
The ideal PLC offers a vision of schoolteachers supporting and challenging each other to be on their mettle, reviewing, debating and engaging with emerging 'best evidence' on teaching and learning, and developing and testing improvements to practice. In doing so schoolteachers take the professional lead, but in partnership with others also committed to improving pupil performance. The difficulty with the PLC, and it is one shared by other approaches to improving schoolteachers' abilities to improve pupils performance, is two-fold. The first is that is a lack of any normative account of what schooling is for. There are various claims about what schools ought to develop in terms of the attributes for economic success, or the liberally educated mind; there are further claims about what ought to be central, such as White's (1990) 'formation of rational desire'. Without such an overarching account of the purpose of the school it is difficult to see how these differences can be resolved (although we might come to some political compromise). The second is that there is no coherent discourse of human agency underpinning the work of PLCs. Thus, we have a concern with the agency of two groups of individuals, pupils and schoolteachers, with no systematic account of how to make their activity and interactions intelligible. Whilst such an account is of general importance, it is particularly significant in the pursuit of co-operative endeavours such as schooling.
In a recent paper Davies (2013), has sought to make some inroads into the first of these issues; the purpose of schooling. Drawing on MacIntyre (1985) he argues that schooling needs to be justified in relation to: (a) enabling pupils to live the good life, and (b) the school's responsibility for this shared task with a range of other agents and institutions, most notably the family and local community. He identifies this central task as 'upbringing', the purpose of which is to enable the individual neonate to develop into an interdependent adult able to pursue a life they consider valuable and given value by the community. This account of the good life and the framework deployed by MacIntyre, is used to articulate the function of the school and the activity of the teacher.
In this paper, I review the implications for the professional development of the schoolteacher for such an account of schooling. In particular, I seek to provide a coherent underpinning account of human agency for what is emerging as a model of schoolteacher professional development, namely ‘professional learning communities’.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Davies, R. (2012) Book review: Professional capital: transforming teaching in every school, Journal of Education for Teaching, 39(1), pp. 144- 146 Davies, R. (2013) After Higgins and Dunne: towards of multi-practice account of schooling, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 47(3), pp.475-490 Dunne, J. (2003) Arguing for Teaching as a Practice: A Reply to Alasdair MacIntyre, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 37.2, pp. 353–369 Hargreaves, A. and Fullan, M. (2012) Professional Capital: Transforming Teaching in Every School, New York, Teachers College Press Higgins, C. (2010) Special Issue: The Good Life of Teaching: An Ethics of Professional Practice, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 44.2–3, pp. v–viii, 189–478. MacIntyre, A. (1985) After Virtue (2nd edition), London, Duckworth MacIntyre, A. and Dunne, J. (2002) Alasdair MacIntyre on Education: In Dialogue with Joseph Dunne, 26(1), 1-19
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