Researcher-teacher collaboration is powerful for professional development and provides a direct means to understanding how learning theory applies to classroom practice.  Empirical studies focusing on the relations between learning and teaching present opportunities to bridge theoretical principles and everyday classroom practices.  How educational research is influenced by collaborative practices in relation to teacher professional development is a current issue in the European research field (Ligozat & Almqvist, 2018) and is an issue in Australian education, where it is debated that teachers’ voices are not accorded equal recognition to those of academics and bureaucrats (Scanlon, 2018).  Much can be learned when researchers value and appreciate the knowledgeable voices of teachers, who as reflective practitioners strive for continual improvement and pedagogical expertise.  To deal with the complex demands of situations, teachers carry with them philosophical knowledge of educational objectives as well as content and general pedagogical knowledge, and knowledge of their learners and the educational context (Shulman, 1986).  

The study presented in this paper explored how teachers talked about fostering students’ effective learning in the context of the middle years of schooling.  Effective learning is proposed to be when students engage in tasks and enact a suite of strategies to advance their knowledge and skill development.  Teachers’ experiential knowledge is a powerful source for developing understanding of the complexities of classroom practices.

Following the principles of Appreciative Inquiry (Hammond, 2013), rather than an approach that looked for a problem to solve, the act of asking questions grounded this research in the teacher participants’ actual experiences.  Interviews were conducted with the teachers to identify planning, instruction and classroom organisation that were embedded in their everyday practices.  The teachers were positioned to gain a sense of commitment, confidence and affirmation that they have been successful in contributing to their professional development (Hammond).  Collaboration between the researcher and the teacher participants involved dialogue to draw out broad explanations of their practices intended to engage their students in tasks for knowledge and skill development.

The teacher participants were open to sharing and recounting what they did in their classrooms and spoke about their everyday practices using conversational language.  They talked about the multiple roles of teachers and about their teaching experiences.  These reflections were expressed with mixed emotions of enthusiasm, pride, pleasure, frustration and satisfaction.  The teachers were encouraged by the researcher to explain the impact of their practices on their students’ learning and to consider their practices beyond the technical skills of teaching (Loughran, 2010).  At times during the conversations, the teachers included references to theoretical underpinnings to justify their practices by identifying from where they sourced their ideas for the applied practices.  Many of the teachers’ practices were implicit to them and they communicated most effectively their tacit knowledge (van Manen, 1999) through recounting what they did when working with the students in their classrooms.

The researcher’s role was to represent the interpretations using the teacher participants’ words to communicate their practices intended for fostering their students’ effective learning.  Evident in the discussions was the teachers’ acknowledgement of the relationships that exist between teaching and learning.  The alignment of theoretical understandings about teaching and learning with the applied practices was shared as an outcome to address the research question.

The unfolding of the dialogue between the teachers and researcher was intended to provide a basis for the development of teachers’ skills and capacities, and to enable future proficiency of practices.  The articulated practices for effective students’ learning were constructed from experiential knowledge and theoretical understanding.  Fundamentally, the teachers’ reflections were extended beyond the technical skills towards consciously understanding what underlies their personal beliefs.

An exploratory case study design was chosen as the most appropriate approach for addressing the research question as it provided a holistic, in-depth, investigative design (Yin, 2014). This research contributed to a larger study that explored how teachers provided opportunities for young adolescent students to be empowered as self-regulated learners. The primary–secondary school transition years, from Years 5–9 in Australia, provided the context for this study. These years represent a time of potential transformation from childhood towards adulthood and they exemplify an important stage of development for students’ learning. The two chosen schools were specifically selected because of their student transitional relationship, aligning the primary school with the secondary school. It was important that the selected school communities valued the opportunity for participation in the research and that the teacher participants were available and open to reflecting on their pedagogy. Qualitative data were collected through semi-structured interviews with eight teacher participants who volunteered to be part of the study. The teacher participants, four males and four females, had varied personal experiences, ages, teaching proficiencies and professional backgrounds. The interviews were guided by open-ended questions aimed at eliciting understandings from the teacher participants. Five topic questions were included about the teachers’ personal life history; contemporary professional experience; personal pedagogy; knowledge about student learning; and perceptions of successful learners in the transition years. Rather than posing a structured regime of questions, the teacher participants were encouraged to talk. Accordingly, the topics were not introduced in any particular order but instead they evolved throughout the conversations. The thematic data analysis operated iteratively at different stages of the collection process to identify and classify codes and categories. Extracts of significance where drawn from the transcripts as potentially meaningful segments of data, revealing information relevant to address the research question (Braun & Clarke, 2006; Merriam, 2009). At this stage, the analysis relied on the researcher’s interpretations of the data. Through this inductive coding method, a list of tentative codes expanded as the data were reviewed and re-reviewed (Creswell, 2013). The codes were sorted into code-categories that were generated to represent a collection of similar data and enabled the researcher to identify and describe the characteristics of the category (Morse, 2008).

Six code-categories were generated through the data analysis to represent the teacher participants’ practices intended for fostering students’ effective learning. Findings were informed by the literature and supported by snapshots from the data. The code-categories described how the teacher participants talked about their practices to: (1) design meaningful learning; (2) manage learning; (3) scaffold learning; (4) adjust learning support; (5) build relationships for learning; and (6) expand their professional knowledge. These code-categories provide a framework to guide researchers and teachers as they unpack narratives of classroom activities and procedures to analyse and critique processes of pedagogical reasoning (Loughran, 2016; Shulman, 1987). Pedagogical reasoning creates knowledge of practice by defining, describing and reproducing effective teaching as standards of practice. Teachers’ practices guide, inspire and contribute to determining the detail of the everyday life in the classroom (Cuffaro, 1995). This makes the business of teaching and researching teaching complex and sophisticated (Loughran, 2016). Professional development contributes to the ongoing development of knowledge, understanding and skills that shape education for the future, with the ultimate purpose of improving students’ learning outcomes. The role of reflection is to trigger new ways of thinking about and exploring knowledge of practice (Schön, 1983). Reflecting on pedagogical experiences enables teachers to understand why they do what they do so that they can subsequently do what they do well (Seidman, 2012). The transformation of teaching practices in the classroom is often an outcome of the exchanges between the teachers’ reflections and the researchers’ interpretations. To reduce the gap between educational research and teaching (Ligozat & Almqvist, 2018), it is recommended for future research that teachers and researchers productively play a dual role in developing the interpretations. Successful professional development outcomes are more likely when teaching practices are underpinned by an appreciation of why things work.

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