Providing the right opportunities f

Providing the right opportunities for professional learning

132 As Ministers have agreed, initial teacher education should provide all student teachers with the core of professional competences upon which they can build throughout their career. Beginning teachers should receive a systematic programme of support (induction) during their first years in the profession – in order to have opportunities to start the further development of these competences (European Commission, 2010). After the induction phase, all teachers need to be engaged in a continuous process of assessing and developing their competences further.

133 Providing possibilities for further professional development and education can be a useful policy tool to motivate teachers to stay in their profession and to attract qualified personnel to teaching and school leadership positions. There needs to be coherence between the systems that concern the three phases of a teacher’s career, in terms of:

• an incremental perspective (e.g. initial teacher education promotes the necessary research based knowledge, professional attitudes and skills for lifelong learning, paving the way for effective competence development during induction and CPD);

• single frameworks of competence covering all three stages; and

• structures (e.g. political responsibility for teacher education, induction and continuing professional development under one Ministry/administrative body; unified networks of providers of teacher education and continuing professional development, and so on).

134 It is in this career-long context that opportunities for staff to develop their competences need to be planned and provided; the complexities of the teaching profession require a lifelong learning perspective to adapt to changes, evolving constraints or needs. However, international studies have shown that in-service training, considered as a professional duty in about a half of all European states, is in practice optional in many. Incentives to encourage participation in CPD are few (and penalties for no participation rare). Moreover, CPD activities appear loosely linked with instruction, evaluation and feedback; a stronger integration of different functional domains of schooling seems necessary (OECD, 2009).

135 A ‘professional development opportunity’ should entail much more than ‘attending a course’, and be understood to comprise a wide range of formal, non-formal and in-formal learning activities. It is important that all teachers in


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schools are encouraged to reflect upon their own experiences in the light of different theoretical views, and experiment with new approaches, also in a wider concept of a European Teacher - as outlined by ENTEP (European Network of Teacher Education Policies).4

136 Taking stock of the weak impact of ‘one-shot’ professional development approaches, a ‘change as professional learning’ perspective, inspired by theories of situated cognition and adult learning, sees the teacher as a reflective practitioner, responsible for learning to improve professional performance. Accordingly, there is the shift from a technical-rational-top-down approach, towards a more cultural-individual interactive approach (Anderson et al., 2000; Putnam & Borko, 2000; Sleegers, Bolhuis & Gejsel, 2005; ten Dam & Blom, 2006).

137 The conditions for teacher learning include psychological factors (teacher cognition and motivation) and organisational factors (leadership, collaboration, staff relationships, communication, learning opportunities). The organisational factors are prerequisites for linking teacher and school development, with psychological factors as a mediating influence (Geijsel et al., 2009; Kwakman, 2003).

138 Participation in professional communities can be linked to improvement and continuous teacher development, within a cooperative school climate and evaluation/feedback mechanisms (Imants, Sleegers & Witziers, 2001; OECD, 2009). Schools as learning communities, which actively engage teachers and pupils in self-directed learning, have been highlighted as favourable conditions for teachers’ development. The ‘professional learning community’ model entails reflective inquiry, with collective learning and responsibility (Bolam et al., 2005; Supovitz, 2002; Vescio, Ross & Adams, 2008).

139 School leadership plays a key role in mediating collective responsibility; in some countries, schools maintain a record of the continuing professional learning undertaken by each teacher, as a basis for the planning of individual and school development. In the main, policy and practice conditions across Europe seem to suggest that teachers’ collaborative learning within a school, across different schools or even different countries, could be promoted further - as well as the potential of project work, classroom research, mentoring, or shadowing. The great challenge is to balance the increased focus on individualisation with the greater need for collaboration and team work among teachers.

140 The provision of continuing professional development activities for teachers – like the provision of learning opportunities for pupils - should respond to the needs of each individual teacher and cover a wide variety of content and delivery in activities (interactive, informal/non-formal), which:

• reflect the different stages in a teacher’s professional development,

• reflect different levels of competence, and

• take into account outcomes of research on teacher learning.