Globally, there is growing acknowledgement that teachers’ professional learning is a key feature for future development across the education sector.  This increased interest is apparent in primary physical education where studies regularly report on the practices of generalist primary teachers (e.g. Ha et al. 2004, Morgan and Bourke 2008, Petrie 2010, Harris et al.2011, Jess and McEvilly, 2015).  Much of this attention stems from a growing interest in young children’s health, concerns about the capacity of generalist primary teachers to teach physical education and the quality of children’s learning experiences in primary physical education (Griggs and Ward 2012).  Traditional top-down and short term professional development approaches that have dominated for many decades however are regularly being reported to have limited impact on teachers’ thinking and practice.  Consequently, calls for professional development models that are more transformative in nature and contribute to teachers’ professional autonomy and agency have become increasingly common.  This shift in emphasis is important as teachers attempt to assert their professionalism within neo-liberal contexts that challenge their autonomy and reduce their perceived role to that of technician.  Buildingon the work of Kennedy (2014), we have theorised what a transformative approach to teachers’professional learning in primary physical education may look like (Keay, Carse & Jess, 2018).  Employing a complex ecological lens, teachers are viewed as complex adaptive practitioners who, over time, develop as self-organising, interactive and emergent professionals.  Central to this recursive and non-linear process we suggest that teachers should be supported regularly in their efforts to interpret and negotiate the task, environment and individual boundaries they constantly meet in their day-to-day work.  As this on-going learning process unfolds, we stress the need for an enabling and supportive environment that will help teachers deepen their knowledge, skills and relationships through experiences that consolidate, challenge and support creativity. In our roles as teacher educators, we subsequently present two key themes that are critical to this complex ecological approach to teachers’ professional learning: the need to recognise and value the ‘starting points’ of each teacher we work with and the importance of taking a long-term approach to their professional development that focuses on five complex professional learning drivers i.e. self-organisation and interact; reflect and inquire; identify and negotiate boundaries; consolidate, challenge and create, and make connections. Together, we suggest that these drivers can contribute to teachers’ evolving capacity to exercise their professional autonomy and engage in a long-term professional learning process that is transformative in nature.

With this complex ecological framework as the theoretical background, this presentation reports on a longitudinal physical education practitioner inquiry project we have facilitated with primary teachers since 2016.  These teachers had all previously completed a part-time Masters level postgraduate certificate in primary physical education at the University of Edinburgh. We have taken a collective self-study approach to research this project which we have reported on elsewhere (Carse, McMillan, Jess, McIntyre and Fletcher, 2018).  In this paper we present data from our self-study to consider how these complex ecological drivers can be employed to help us critically reflect on the efforts we have made as teacher educators to design and facilitate this transformative approach to teachers’ professional learning.

The research design, guided by LaBoskey’s (2004) key features for self-study, was self-initiated, improvement-aimed, interactive, employed qualitative research methods, and was mindful of trustworthiness. The main participants in the research were the three authors of this paper and we invited the nine teachers involved in the practitioner inquiry project and an international colleague skilled in self-study to act as ‘critical friends’. These questions guided the research: 1. What are the experiences of four teacher educators facilitating a practitioner inquiry project with teachers? 2. In what ways do these experiences contribute to the improvement of our own practice and influence the practice of our teachercolleagues? Following ethical approval from the University of Edinburgh, data were gathered using the following research methods: audio recorded conversations, fieldnotes, self-reflection templates, individually recorded conversations with three of the teachers and written feedback from teachers. The audio recorded conversations document the discussions that took place between us (the authors) during eight ‘group meetings’ between early-2016 and late-2017. The fieldnotes were taken at network meetings where the authors and teachers met to share their experiences of inquiry and engage in discussion about physical education research. The self-reflection templates were designed to scrutinise our (the authors) individual and collective experiences of working together, these templates were completed in early-2018 as we revisited the project data. Finally, involving the teachers as critical friends, in 2017 and 2018, authors 1 and 3 engaged in a recorded conversation with three of the teachers they had been working with to discuss the practitioner inquiry process. In addition, all the teachers were asked to share written anonymous feedback on their thoughts about the practitioner inquiry project in relation to their own practice and our practice facilitating the group. Analysis of the data was flexible, recursive and grounded in the data (Boeije, 2010). Initially it inductively involved: individually reading and coding the transcripts, fieldnotes, templates and written feedback; sharing these initial codes at a group meeting; merging initial codes into a shared coding framework. Following on from this inductive analysis we then undertook deductive analysis, as we recognised a connection between our emergent findings and conceptual work authors 1 and 3 had been developing (Keay, Carse and Jess, 2018). Therefore, for this paper we have analysed the data deductively in relation to complex ecological drivers to consider the extent to which these are illustrated in our experiences and practice of facilitating professional development.

In this paper we focus retrospectively on the initial phase of the project to consider ‘starting points’ and how they influenced the subsequent trajectory of the project. Central to the initial phase was the recognition that all participants, both teacher educators and teachers, had different ‘starting points’ and that all were engaged in a self-organising process taking place within an array of different dynamic boundaries. Critically reflecting on these different ‘starting points’, two key findings emerged. As teacher educators, we grappled to design and facilitate a project that was concurrently a connected experience for all involved but also differentiated to support the teachers’ inquiry projects. From the perspective of the teachers, the data revealed that, while they were invested in the project, their active engagement in the practitioner inquiry process was dependent on a range of factors that included their specific interests, their ownership of the projects and the need to incorporate the projects as part of their day-to-day practice. As such, in the early part of this project, it was apparent that teachers and teacher educators were all active participants in a process that was self-organising, interactive and emergent. In conclusion, in efforts to move away from traditional top-down, linear conceptions of teachers’ professional development, this paper will explore how key themes and principles from complexity thinking can be used to inform future projects. Our findings highlight the importance of teacher educators acknowledging the different starting points of all participants and also recognising how the teachers’ professional learning projects evolve as a differentiated process of self-organisation within boundaries. As such, we finish by highlighting the need for an initial shift in the thinking and practice of teacher educators by ensuring they take the time to set an appropriate foundation for professional development projects.

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