Collaborative Professional Enquiry and Teacher Agency: No Pressure, No Diamond; No Grit, No Pearl.

Author(s):

Mark Priestley(presenting / submitting)Valerie Drew

Conference:

ECER 2015

Network:

03. Curriculum Innovation

Format:

Paper

Session Information

03 SES 03 A, Capacity Building for School-Based Curriculum Development

Paper Session

Time:

2015-09-08

17:15-18:45

Room:

415.Oktatóterem [C]

Chair:

Nienke M. Nieveen

Contribution

Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) was formally implemented during 2010-2011, following an extended period of reflection since its first inception in 2004(Scottish Executive, 2004). In common with other European and worldwide curriculum developments, CfE represents a shift from the prescriptive input regulation of previous curricula (Nieveen & Kuiper, 2012; Sinnema & Aitken, 2013), towards a more developmental approach which positions teachers as agents as change and professional developers of the curriculum. Nonetheless, it is one thing for policy to demand that teachers have agency; it is quite another for this to occur in practice. Firstly, new forms of output regulation of the curriculum have eroded teacher autonomy (Biesta, 2004; Priestley, 2014), creating difficult dilemmas for practitioners as they develop the curriculum. Second, while recent policy discourses have tended to focus on the quality of the teacher (e.g. OECD, 2005) accompanied by interventions to develop teacher capacity (e.g. Donaldson, 2010), research suggests that teacher capacity forms only part of the ecology of teacher agency (Priestley, Biesta & Robinson, 2015 in press). To focus narrowly on the teacher neglects the importance of context, particularly the cultures and structures which frame teachers’ work. This partial approach to fostering teacher agency has been associated with particular problems when teachers are required to develop or implement centrally mandated curriculum reform, as there is often dissonance between the new initiative and their existing frames of meaning (Wierenga, et al., 2015), contributing to an ‘implementation gap’ (Supovitz & Weinbaum, 2008) between policy and practice.

Collaborative enquiry by teachers has been widely posited as a means of addressing these difficulties (e.g. Horn & Little, 2010; Reeves & Drew, 2013). While the benefits of this general approach have been explored in the literature, the processes that occur within collaborative enquiries are less well understood (Butler, Schnellert & MacNeil, 2015). This paper explores some of the processes that occurred during a research and development project, conducted as part of a partnership between a Scottish Local Authority and a University to facilitate the development of CfE. The project adopted a distinctive approach to critical collaborative professional enquiry (CCPE), engaging teachers with curriculum development in two discrete stages:

A conceptual stage which involved engaging with the ‘big ideas’ of the curriculum, considering fitness for purpose of content and pedagogies, and addressing contextual conditions.
A practice-based stage, as teachers undertook a collaborative enquiry.

The research mapped the participation of three separate cohorts of teachers undertaking CCPE over a three year period, and was guided by the following research questions:

In what ways have teachers’ understandings of the ‘big ideas’ of CfE changed as a result of their engagement with the programme?
What are emergent curricular practices, and how have these changed from prior practices?
To what extent does the intervention enhance teachers’ agency as they develop the curriculum?

In this paper, we examine how this approach to collaborative enquiry enabled teachers to make sense of the concepts underpinning the new curriculum, enhancing both their professional knowledge and their confidence. We also explore how their approach to curriculum development and emergent practices were socially mediated by cultural and structural aspects of their school working contexts. Understanding how this ecology of practice manifests in different settings in turn allows us to understand what is required to maximise teacher agency.

Method

During each year the project (2012-15), the researchers worked interactively with cohorts of teachers on seven occasions over the course of a full school year. The sessions comprised a full day workshop introducing key themes in curriculum development, followed by six half day workshops with a more practice-based focus on developing a collaborative professional enquiry to be implemented in the teachers’ settings. The CCPE methodology comprises three phases: planning, intervening and sense making (Drew, Fox & McBride, 2008). The methodology is designed to encompass elements identified as pertinent to improving teacher learning, namely: collaborative action, critical reflection and self-evaluation, and teacher leadership (Reeves & Drew, 2012). The teachers were required to work through the three phases to explore an aspect of practice that was of mutual intrigue or concern AND related to the purposes of CfE, in order to develop, trial and evaluate new forms of professional action through curriculum development. It was expected that this process, informed by principles of inclusion and social justice, would support teachers in improving learning experiences for all young people in their classrooms. The research generated data from three cohorts of teachers, utilising the following methods. Participant observation data from the seven workshops • Reflective diaries kept by participants • Artefacts developed by the group • A detailed presentation from the group, delivered first to peers, and then to the local authorities Headteacher conference. • Individual (semi-structured) and focus group interviews with teachers and senior managers involved in the process. Analysis drew upon an ecological model of teacher agency (Priestley, Biesta & Robinson, 2015 in press), allowing us to explore how new ideas and approaches transacted with existing school cultures, structures and practices, and the extent to which these stimulated the development of new practices. The research complied with the BERA ethical guidelines for educational research. All participants provided informed consent for their participation in the research. Data provided by participants is treated as confidential, with participants having the right to withdraw data pertaining to them at end stage of the project. While full anonymity was not possible to guarantee in a publicly-run project of this nature (the partnership with the local authority is a matter of public record), we recognised the need to protect individual respondents, and sought to minimise the risk of identification by using pseudonyms for participants and their schools.

Expected Outcomes

We found that involvement in this project enabled teachers to make better sense of the big ideas and purposes of the curriculum, enhancing their professional knowledge and confidence in curriculum development, as well as their engagement with professional reading. This enabled them to develop practices in their classrooms which were more clearly fit-for-purpose, in some cases constituting radical changes to practices. The collaborative nature of the work provided teachers with valuable relational resources, which further increased their professional agency. The involvement of senior managers in each team of teachers and explicit support of the local authority granted official permission for curriculum making activity that might otherwise have been considered risky, and imbued the participants with an ability to envision a wider repertoire of responses to some of the problematic situations which framed their day-to-day practice. That said, we found that a continued emphasis on accountability practices and output regulation hindered some of the activity; existing cultures of performativity in the schools acted as a barrier to practices that were fit for curricular purpose, but problematic to enact. This suggests that aspirational policies to develop the curriculum, such as CfE, are actively discouraged by the impact of accountability practices, and by the school structures and cultures associated with these.

References

Biesta, G.J.J. (2004). Education, accountability and the ethical demand. Can the democratic potential of accountability be regained? Educational Theory, 54, 233-250. Butler, D., Schnellert, L. & MacNeil, K. (2015). Collaborative inquiry and distributed agency in educational change: A case study of a multi-level community of inquiry. Journal of Educational Change, 16, 1-26. Donaldson, G. (2010). Teaching Scotland’s Future: report of a review of teacher education in Scotland. Edinburgh: Scottish Government. Drew, V., Fox, A. & McBride, M. (2008). Collaborating to Improve Learning and Teaching. In J.Reeves and A. Fox (Eds.) Practice-Based Learning: developing excellence in teaching. Edinburgh: Dunedin Academic Press. Horn, I. S. & Little, J. W. (2010). Attending to problems of practice: Routines and resources for professional learning in teachers’ workplace interactions. American Educational Research Journal, 47, 18-217. Nieveen, N. & Kuiper, W. (2012). Balancing curriculum freedom and regulation in the Netherlands. European Educational Research Journal, 11, 357-368. OECD (2005). Teachers Matter: Attracting, Developing and Retaining Effective Teachers. OECD: Paris. Priestley, M. (2014). Curriculum regulation in Scotland: A wolf in sheep’s clothing is still a wolf. European Journal of Curriculum Studies, 1[1]. 61-68. Priestley, M., Biesta, G.J.J. & Robinson, S. (2015, in press). Teacher Agency: An Ecological Approach. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Reeves, J. and Drew, V. (2012) Relays and relations: tracking a policy initiative for improving teacher professionalism. Journal of Education Policy, 27, 711-730. Reeves, J. and Drew, V. (2013). A Productive Relationship? Testing the Connections between Professional Learning and Practitioner Research. Scottish Educational Review, 45, 36-49 Scottish Executive (2004). A Curriculum for Excellence: The Curriculum Review Group. Edinburgh: Scottish Executive. Sinnema, C. & Aitken, G. (2013) Trends in International Curriculum Development. In M. Priestley & G.J.J. Biesta (Eds.), Reinventing the curriculum: new trends in curriculum policy and practice. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Supovitz, J.A. & Weinbaum, E.H. (2008). Reform Implementation Revisited. In J.A. Supovitz & E.H. Weinbaum (Eds.), The Implementation gap: understanding reform in high schools. New York: Teachers College Press. Wierenga , S.J., Kamsteeg, F.H., Simons, P.R.J. & Veenswijk , M. (2015. Teachers making sense of result-oriented teams: A cognitive anthropological approach to educational change. Journal of Educational Change, 16, 53-78.

Author Information

Mark Priestley (presenting / submitting)

University of Stirling

School of Education

Stirling

Valerie Drew

UNiversity of Stirling