Maximising the effectiveness and efficiency of teacher education and induction for pre-service and early career teachers requires an attentiveness to the complex interplay of multiple and highly contextualised forces. These forces include the changing demographics and dynamics of the teaching profession, its increasing politicisation, its ambivalent position with regard to educational access and opportunities for specific marginalised groups of learners, and debates about the efficacy of particular information and communication technologies in enhancing learners’ capabilities and understandings.

One among several fruitful ways to enrich current awareness of teacher education and induction as they pertain to pre-service and early career teachers is to focus on the constitution and impact of communities of teachers – what we have called elsewhere “the greater community of teachers” (Kelly, Clarà, Kehrwald, & Danaher, in press). This is important because, despite the norm of individual teachers working separately from one another with groups of students, teaching is fundamentally a collaborative and collegial profession, depending on considerable interdependence with a range of colleagues and other stakeholders if successful educational outcomes are to ensue. Furthermore, communities of teachers have provided both the backdrop and the impetus for the profession’s diverse developments in different countries and historical periods. Communities of teachers therefore help to constitute the foundations and the developmental forces framing the teaching profession and informing its potential future trajectories.

These propositions are illustrated in this presentation by means of a theoretically grounded analysis of the significant features of multiple enactments of communities of teachers from countries throughout Europe and globally. The analysis is clustered around four themes: teacher communities that are face-to-face, at a physical distance, and online and blended, and the implications of these communities for apprehending the proposition of “the greater community of teachers” (Kelly, Clarà, Kehrwald, & Danaher, in press). Conceptually, the analysis draws on the notion of psychological sense of community (McMillan, 2011), the affordances of certain types of technologies in teacher communities (Matzat, 2013) and an acknowledgement of the potential ‘dark side’ of such communities (Watson, 2014).

The analysis generates two main findings. Firstly, teacher education and induction for pre-service and early career teachers emerge as constituting a “wicked problem”, in the sense of being difficult to define clearly, having multiple interdependencies and being multi-causal, and often being unstable and having no clear solutions (Australian Public Service Commission, 2007). Secondly, elaborating the notion of “the greater community of teachers” is proposed as an effective means for addressing such a “wicked problem” as it pertains to teacher education and induction for teachers with varying levels of experience.

References

Australian Public Service Commission. (2007). Tackling wicked problems: A public policy perspective. Canberra, ACT, Australia: Author.

Kelly, N., Clarà, M., Kehrwald, B. A., & Danaher, P. A (in press). Online learning networks for pre-service and early career teachers. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Pivot.

Matzat, U. (2013, January). Do blended virtual learning communities enhance teachers’ professional development more than purely virtual ones? A large scale empirical comparison. Computers & Education, 60(1), 40-51. doi: 10.1016/j.compedu.2012.08.006

McMillan, D. W. (2011, July). Sense of community, a theory[,] not a value: A response to Nowell and Boyd. Journal of Community Psychology, 39(5), 507-519. doi: 10.1002/jcop.20439

Watson, C. (2014, February). Effective professional learning communities? The possibilities for teachers as agents of change in schools. British Educational Research Journal, 40(1), 18-29. doi: 10.1002/berj.3025

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