This research reports on school teachers and leaders’ experiences of learning on a part-time Master of Education (MEd) course entitled ‘School Improvement for All’. The wider national context in England includes a range of recent initiatives to support teachers’ Masters study, challenged currently by extreme financial constraints under the new government. The immediate context comprises a particular School-University partnership in the East of England, established since 1999. The broad purpose of this partnership is to foster and support development of teachers’ professional development and school improvement and to provide opportunities for university staff to enhance and deepen their understandings of the same. The initial research question was exploratory: How do course members perceive and describe their MEd learning experiences over time? Subsequent data analysis focused on understanding patterns and variations in course members’ perspectives and learning experiences, with the intention of applying this understanding to supporting teachers’ professional learning in the future.

Recent research-based understandings of teachers’ professional learning and its importance for school improvement have described it as collaborative, enquiry-based and contextualised in classroom practice (e.g. Cordingley et al., 2005; Horn & Little, 2010). However these learning processes can be hindered by certain school conditions, including the ways in which teachers’ knowledge is commonly tacit and embedded in classroom practice (e.g. Brown & McIntyre, 1993;  Eraut, 2000). Further difficulties can arise from the operation of different discourses, norms of privacy and individualism, ill-designed school conditions and systems of support, and external requirements for school accountability (e.g. Lieberman & Pointer-Mace, 2008; Skidmore, 2004; Pedder & MacBeath, 2008). One response has been the development of partnerships and networks to scale up and consolidate school teachers’ and leaders’ collaborative, classroom-based and research-informed professional development (e.g. Stoll et al., 2007). This includes partnerships formalised in Masters study which draw explicitly on the potential of university researchers’ participation and support.

The study of professional learning processes within complex systems of educational change has seen increasing acknowledgement of reciprocal and dynamic relationships between individuals and learning contexts (e.g. Hoban, 2002). School-university links often focus this perspective on teachers’ needs to link theory with practice. However we note that there is not a clear binary distinction here. There are, rather, different forms of public and private knowledge which teachers and school leaders seek out and use for different educational purposes. This is central to the non-linear development of ‘practical wisdom’ through reflection on practice from initial teacher education onwards (Lunenberg & Korthagen, 2009: Korthagen, 2010). Learning may be understood generally as experiencing a certain phenomenon in a new way, which in turn changes the relationship between learner and the given phenomenon over time (Marton, 1981; Marton & Booth, 1997). This does not, however, mean that learning experiences are entirely unique. Our assumption is that it is possible to represent significant differences of learning experience within a given group in a meaningful and useful way, and this idea focused our data analysis.

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