Teacher self-efficacy (TSE) is an often cited factor in teachers’ practice and student outcomes. However, a relatively small evidence base supporting a positive relationship between higher TSE and better practice is often cited. A systematic literature review (chapter 1) was carried out examining existing studies on TSE and teachers’ practice. A meta-analysis suggested a highly significant and moderate positive correlation between TSE and teachers’ examined practice. The correlation accounted for a limited level of variance in the data, and a narrative exploration of the studies highlighted a breadth of other factors that were reported to contribute to the relationship of practice and TSE. Methodological issues within the studies were examined, highlighting that both the TSE measures and the practice investigated were heterogeneous. These issues meant that findings could only account for a static conceptualisation of TSE with relative consistency across different types of practice and time. As such, the studies examined precluded consideration of a dynamic perspective on TSE and of the construction of TSE in the social context of the classroom. The bridging document (chapter 2) explains the development of an appropriate epistemological stance for exploratory research on the dynamics and co-construction of TSE in the classroom along with implications of this stance for research methodology. Chapter 3 summarises articles and research relevant to considering TSE as dynamic and socially situated in classroom systems. It then presents the rational for a piece of empirical research investigating this in the Philosophy for Children (P4C) classroom. The research reported took a constructed grounded theory approach to investigating the experiences of three primary teachers delivering P4C in the classroom. Observation of their lessons and interviews about TSE and P4C were undertaken. The analysis suggested support for the idea that TSE should be investigated in a classroom self-efficacy system and for dynamic processes which support the co-construction of TSE in the classroom. In particular, change, role identity and collective efficacy in the classroom were explored as important factors in creating TSE and practice in the P4C classroom. Tentative evidence for student self -efficacy also being constructed in a classroom system was suggested. In conclusion, chapter 3 considers implications for further research and professional practice. Ethical issues and researcher reflexivity relevant to the research are considered in Chapter 2.

This thesis assesses the possibility of pedagogical transformation through teacher education. Though this is the substantive focus, it also addresses what is essentially the intellectual question of our age: how are we to respond to the crisis of transcendence which accompanies the twentieth century critique of Enlightenment aspirations? How can it be possible for humanity to transcend the parameters of existing thought and practice when the empirical foundation of that critique has been put into question? With regard to teacher education this is considered through an assessment of models of teacher learning and their meta-theoretical rigour. I assess the validity of teacher education premised upon three major theoretical movements: liberal-pragmatism, poststructuralism and dialectical materialism. These theoretical movements have all influenced my research over the last decade; the intellectual journey I have taken is traceable in the publications presented here and in the reflection that forms the commentary. Ultimately my intellectual search has led me to reject pragmatist and post-structuralist accounts of teacher education and to advance an incipient but nonetheless radical understanding of teacher learning as dialectically transformative.

A Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) project between an English state secondary school and a northern UK university from January 2008 to December 2009 was the first of its kind. It was designed to develop a community of enquiry within Key Stage 3 and a formative assessment framework for enquiry skills. Upon its completion, I moved from being the main researcher on the project to a position of senior leadership in another school. Here, I found that the contrasting experiences of leading a divergent approach to pedagogy in one school and then adhering to dominant discourses of performativity in another school created tensions between my personal beliefs about teaching and learning and the expectations of externally imposed agenda in UK education. My thesis is therefore motivated by a personal desire to explore whether the teachers with whom I worked during the KTP project experienced similar tensions and uncertainties when developing their understanding of enquiry based learning. My conceptual framework comprises an evolving view of curriculum change through teacher professional learning and teacher agency. This complements the theme of underlying social and cultural issues which runs throughout my work. My research strategy is qualitative and my methodology is dialogic. My accounts of the research process and its findings are interpretive and validated in the form of feedback loops. Findings demonstrate teachers’ theoretical understandings of enquiry. They also provide reasons why teachers include or omit enquiry from their teaching practice over time. Indeed, teacher agency is mostly ‘internal’. Where it exists externally, teacher agency is often ‘contractual’. Teachers come to terms with the dominant factors of their social and cultural contexts and reduce their pedagogic practice to ‘pseudo-enquiry’. As further study, the concepts of ‘internal’ and ‘contractual’ agency are useful lenses for exploring curriculum change and understanding teachers’ professional learning.

This document consists of a Systematic Review, a Bridging Document and an Empirical Research report. The Systematic Review explores continuing professional development available to teachers, in particular considering what supports teachers to continually develop their practice. Taking a meta-ethnography approach the review examined seven studies. Synthesis and consequent mapping indicated three third order constructs necessary for teachers’ professional learning to occur; intersubjectivity, reflection and common goal. The review led to the development of a model with three overlapping constructs, needed for such professional learning to occur. The Bridging Document links the Systematic Review findings to the Empirical Research, giving critical justification for how and why decisions were made. It includes exploration of research foci, theoretical paradigm, methodology and analysis. A discussion of how ethics, reflexivity, ontology and epistemology are embedded throughout helps the reader further understand the research. In chapter three the Systematic Review model was used to plan an intervention for teachers. Action Research was carried out with four Heads of House. Semi-structured interviews were used before and after the Action Research cycles to explore the Heads of House experience. This intervention led to transformative learning for the group and analysis suggests that although the Systematic Review model is valid it is a dynamic interaction rather than a static model. Also it includes two additional themes – trust and otherness. The main findings were the change in talk from pre to post interview which highlighted a difference in agentic resources individually and collectively. Implications include highlighting the unique contribution educational psychologists can make and how teachers’ sense of agency can increase through collaborative problem solving. Possible future research is also explored.

This thesis uses a framework derived from the work of Wertsch and Bruner to provide a sociocultural analysis of narratives of classroom experience created collaboratively by student teachers, school based mentors and university based tutors participating in a one year secondary Post Graduate Certificate in Education course at one English university. The narratives analysed are constructed during meetings in one placement school between students, mentors and tutors after all three have participated in an episode of teaching led by the student. The thesis explores the ways in which the Professional Standards for Qualified Teacher Status provide what Wertsch calls a narrative template that 'co-authors ' student teachers narratives of classroom experience and, therefore, shapes what sense they make of their experiences and what they learn from them. The thesis also explores the process through which the student teachers master this narrative template during these collaborative narrative making events.

Reflective practice training is one of the main skills fostered by Initial Teacher Education (ITE) around the world in order to prepare the student teachers for future continuous professional development. In the United Kingdom the student teachers are required to provide evidence of their reflective practice during their course placement as an essential standard of the Qualified Teacher Status (QTS). This standard is usually measured through assessing the students' lesson evaluations in their portfolio. Writing lesson evaluations represents a form of developing the skill of reflection and the reflective thinking of new teachers on their teaching practice. This research investigates the development of critical awareness of the student teachers through assessing their reflective writing based on the model of Hatton and Smith (1995). To investigate this issue, the research examines the work of great thinkers of cognitive learning and critical thinking such as Jean Piaget, lev Vygotsky, Jerome Bruner, Paulo Freire and Jack Mezirow as the theoretical underpinning of the study. The legacy of these scholars provided the basis for further investigation into experiential learning and reflection. The discussion was narrowed down to focus on the concepts of reflective thinking and reflective writing in the relevant research literature. The methodology is a case study of a group of five student teachers who were doing a one year PGCE/GTP Secondary Mathematics course at the University of Reading in the academic year 2011/2012. The research tools were two questionnaires: one administered at the beginning of the research, which investigated the participants' pre-conception about reflection and reflective practice. The second questionnaire was conducted at the end of the research period and explored the participants' views about the whole experience of writing lesson evaluations. The second research instrument was the submitted lesson evaluations that recorded the students' thoughts and reflections about their teaching practice. Finally, two sets of interviews were conducted to explore in depth the participants' skills of reflection on their practice. The initial findings showed different themes related to the participants' understanding of reflection before they start the research. Most of them perceived the concept of reflection unconsciously and they showed evidence of being able to reflect mainly on the problematic situations. The analysis of lesson evaluations showed that all students could provide evidence fortheir development in reflective writing based on the model of Hatton and Smith up to the level of Dialogic reflection. The research explored the factors that influenced their development in reflective writing such as experience, time and the format of lesson evaluation used. The study identifies areas for development for the tutoring and mentoring of the student teachers on these courses regarding future training to develop their reflective writing skills, and the need to provide regular feedback about the students' lesson evaluations during placement.

This research aims to contribute to the debate surrounding perceived beliefs concerning effective teaching, within a primary school setting. The research questions gathered perceptions of teachers, leaders, parents and children on the impact of: planning and teaching on pupils’ academic development; teacher behaviour on the learning environment and Headteacher effectiveness on teacher effectiveness. This study was undertaken in a two-form primary school in Hertfordshire. The data included: nonparticipant observations, follow-up semi-structured interviews, focussed group discussions, individual pupil interviews and parental questionnaires. The data revealed that developing as an effective teacher relies on being an effective planner and practitioner, achieved through inter-linked professional and personal behaviours. Effective teachers are perceived to be ‘skilled performers’ and ‘purposeful communicators’, use reflection to aid professional development and are ‘culturally responsive’. To enhance effectiveness as a skilled performer, teachers should utilise their subject and pedagogical knowledge to plan for and teach well-paced and challenging activities. To develop as a reflective teacher, their experiences must lead to change. To be more culturally responsive, teachers should have high, yet realistic, expectations of children. To develop as a purposeful communicator, teachers need to utilise visual communication as a prompt to remind children of objectives. Honesty and sharing more information regarding subject and pedagogical knowledge is needed to generate more effective teacher-to-teacher communication. Teachers need to generate more opportunities to discuss children informally with their parents. Effective Headteachers are committed to developing teachers professionally through having high expectations and standards of everyone in the school community. They communicate these through a continuous dialogue and enforce them through a fair, consistent and respected behavioural policy. To be more effective they should refrain from an ‘autocratic’ style and adopt a ‘democratic’ style, involving greater leadership-to-teacher communication, incorporating valuing and sharing ideas, being open to new suggestions and explaining protocol .

This study explores the existence of gender discriminatory policies and practices facing staff and students in a Nigerian College of Education. The underlying concern is that teachers trained in a gender-discriminatory context could acquire and transmit such values to their pupils, perpetuating gender inequality in society. While keeping the federal context in mind, the study focuses on one teacher training college, with its own particular geographical and cultural locus, to gauge the extent to which it produces and reproduces gender discrimination through its policies and practices. Against the backdrop of feminist theories of gender inequity, the study seeks to enhance our understandings of the institutionalised formal and informal teacher education context, which in particular undermines females' effective participation in the education process and perpetuates discrimination. Radical feminism underpins this study, although liberal and poststructural feminist perspectives are also taken into consideration. The case study's principal data source was semi-structured interviews with the College's students, staff and Management. Other data were gathered through focus group discussions, students' essays, analysis of documents, researcher observations and field notes. The study finds that the gendered culture of the College explicitly and implicitly favours males. While male applicants are favoured in student recruitment and course allocation processes, male teaching and non-teaching staff find favour in employment, promotion, professional growth and Management opportunities. Further, gender-based violence is 'normalised' in the College, with complaints often dismissed as rumours. Given the underlying patriarchal context of their formulation and implementation, current federal and College policies are inadequate to address the gender inequities affecting students and staff. Policies are often ignored or manipulated to serve idiosyncratic and egocentric ends. The study recommends the development of a comprehensive national policy specifically addressing gender discrimination in teacher education alongside the immediate abrogation of existing discriminatory policies. There is also the need for immediate measures to be put in place to address the prevalence of gender violence, some of it of a criminal nature in the College studied. Furthermore, gender and human rights issues should be integrated into the formal teacher education curricula and institutional structures established to monitor the implementation of these changes.

This thesis looks at the ways in which teachers enact change in learning and teaching, how, in doing so, they draw upon internal and external resources and how they make use of tools to re-imagine the potential of each learning situation. It also looks at how this process is supported by collaborative work with university researchers, drawing upon a decade of my work as a researcher at Newcastle University and a range of different research projects across diverse sites of learning in England, from nurseries and primary and secondary schools, to Further Education colleges and community learning projects. These projects, funded by (amongst others) the Nuffield Foundation, The Learning and Skills Development Agency, the Campaign for Learning and UK government departments and agencies, were all focused on discrete questions and outcomes, with specific reports and papers as their outputs. What links them is my own experience of working as a researcher, the connections and questions that formed in my mind as I followed the funding from project to project. In this respect, the thesis is a reflection of one kind of professional learning by an academic researcher: in contrast to a single focused investigation, this work reflects the development of themes across contexts and cumulatively over time. The professional life of the researcher is centred on the evaluation of change. Initiatives in pedagogy and curriculum are introduced either by central government or in response to local circumstances and my task as a researcher has been to co-construct with the change agents (teachers and other professionals, parents and learners) a sense of three things: what was supposed to change; whether or to what extent the change has occurred and finally to understand how it happened, looking at the potential for such change to translate to other contexts. In these respects, my career has had a unity and coherence, both in terms of the process of my work and of the goal: to shed light on learning and ways to improve learners’ experiences. However, an explicit awareness of this core unity is disturbed by the realities of project work: limited funding and short timescales; the difficulty of designing projects to meet the competing agendas of practitioners and funders; the realities of university life and short term contracts for researchers which mean that projects are selected not because they support an emerging understanding of theory or practice but because they guarantee jobs for another six months. Moreover, the professional researcher is not mistress of her own fate but is reliant on a series of alliances with tenured academic staff. This can be blessing or curse – most alliances have elements of both – since the focus of a project must be negotiated, leading to increased complexity and a sense that one’s work does not fit together and the opportunities that working together bring for new ideas and perspectives, leading to a sense that increased complexity means that one’s work does fit together. The work that I present here is the fruit of these alliances: to borrow from Stenhouse, I generated this knowledge for myself but not by myself. The structure of this commentary is a necessary fiction which makes a much more coherent story than real life offered. I did not set out to know what I know now and at any given time I was only fleetingly aware of the underlying meaning of each piece of work in relation to all the others. In other words, in this commentary I am offering a narrative of discovery which is not a Quest but a reflection on a Voyage (Booker, 2004). I went without a map and was driven by the winds and the sea. This is what I learned while I was out there. The thesis will elaborate on three main themes:  How I have come to understand the development of a ‘change agent’ identity : looking at some of the affordances and constraints for innovative teachers working at the margins of their professional roles, working with parents and other professionals or exploring new perspectives on learning  How I have come to understand the scaffolding of the change process: an investigation of the use of enquiry tools (Dewey, 1938) as epistemic objects (Knorr Cetina, 2001) which both enable teachers to enact change and to gain new perspectives on their practice as the change unfolds.  How I have come to understand the role that I have played in this: a slow process of recognition, that I was an agent for creating space for teachers to engage with their questions, that I myself was part of a complex and contradictory system of university funding and objectives and that my navigation of this is important for our growing awareness of the interdependence of practitioner-university partnerships and ‘working space’ (Leat, 2006) for all participants. The publications submitted with this commentary draw on both empirical research and systematic review to support a view of professional learning and change that takes account of learning theory, social and cultural context and the complexity of real classrooms. Throughout the text, these publications will be referenced with this notation [1].

Reflective practice remains the dominant model for the professional development of teachers in the early twenty first century. A large body of research discusses this area from various theoretical standpoints, however, despite numerous calls to expand this research position, scant attention has been paid to the question of what happens when professionals attempt to carry out a process of reflective practice through talk. The few studies that have investigated this area claim to find little evidence of reflection occurring. This study directly engages this question by empirically investigating an interactional context where the institutional goal is to reflect on the participants’ professional actions through talk: the post-observation feedback meetings of a TESOL teacher-training certificate course. The study employs the methodology of institutional conversation analysis to uncover the organisation of talk in this context and relate it to the institutional goal of the feedback meetings. It demonstrates that the meetings are organised into a number of phases, each focussing on different ‘types’ of feedback: positive, critical, self, and group. It also demonstrates that the talk within each phase is oriented around a number of feedback topics, each focussing on a specific aspect of the trainee’s practices. Furthermore, that within these feedback topics the trainees engage in interactional processes with the trainers, through which they reflect on their practices in a series of stages: describing their experiences, drawing interpretations and theories from these descriptions, and finally making plans for future actions. The findings of this study explicate a process of reflective practice, as it is instantiated by the participants through talk. By presenting this data, its analysis, and its relationship to previous research, the study adds to our understanding of the interactional organisation of feedback meetings. It also provides the first systematic description of ‘reflective practice as an interactional activity’ and discusses the implications of this process for teacher-training professionals.