Janet Orchard – författare

How can schools foster more authentic and meaningful professional learning for their teachers? How do expert and veteran teachers respond to professional development activities? How do teachers’ personal and professional identities affect their commitment, career progression and impact in their classrooms? Drawing on narrative research carried out with working teachers, this book explores how engaging with critical intellectual research can be a site of transformation. It draws out powerful stories that highlight the complexities and challenges of reforming the personal, professional and political dimensions of teachers’ identities, and how they engage with professional learning. Through school-university partnerships and new approaches to postgraduate pedagogy, Transforming Identities through Research-led Professional Learning reconceptualises the university as an ontological site. It is key reading for teachers, teacher educators, policy makers and researchers with an interest in teachers’ professional learning, underscoring the potential of critical, intellectual knowledge and research work as transformational for veteran teachers.

What do teachers learn ‘on the job'? And how, if at all, do they learn from ‘experience'?Leading researchers from the UK, Europe, the USA and Canada offer international, research-based perspectives on a central problem in policy-making and professional practice - the role that experience plays in learning to teach in schools. Experience is often weakly conceptualized in both policy and research, sometimes simply used as a proxy for ‘time', in weeks and years, spent in a school classroom. The conceptualization of experience in a range of educational research traditions lies at the heart of this book, exemplified in a variety of empirical and theoretical studies. Distinctive perspectives to inform these studies include sociocultural psychology, the philosophy of education, school effectiveness, the sociology of education, critical pedagogy, activism and action research. However, no one theoretical perspective can claim privileged insight into what and how teachers learn from experience; rather, this is a matter for a truly educational investigation, one that is both close to practice and seeks to develop theory.At a time when policy-makers in many countries seek to make teacher education an entirely school-based activity, Learning Teaching from Experience offers an essential examination of the evidence-base, the traditions of inquiry - and the limits of those inquiries.