This research aims to analyse the ways in which one early-career teacher learns through and about professional practice. Data presented in this study are drawn from thirty months of reflective teaching and focus on pedagogical practices, critical reflection upon those practices, and the teacher's ongoing professional learning. The research methods used in this study are a combination of qualitative methods including reflection, action research, and case-study (more specifically, self-study). Also, reflective journal writing has been a useful tool for the teacher-researcher to understand his own development. It is interesting to note that reflective practice was the glue that kept the research process together, while also being the main focus of inquiry. A range of data analysis procedures were undertaken including reflective analysis, narrative analysis, and grounded theory analysis.

Behavioural, emotional and social difficulties (BESD) can develop early in a child's life, and the earlier the onset the poorer the prognosis. Classroom-basedin terventions have been effective in reducing and preventing these problems, but many do not possess a robust evidence-base. One series of programmes that has a tradition of scientific evaluation is the Incredible Years (IY) series; the IY Teacher Classroom Management (TCM) programme is the focus of this research. This thesis contributes to current research in the following ways: Firstly, by developing and refining a new classroom observation measure (Chapter 4), the Teacher-Pupil Observation Tool (T-POT); a relatively flexible measure of teacher, classroom and individual pupil behaviours and interactions. Secondly, study two (Chapter 5) utilised the T-POT - in combination with questionnaire measures - in order to evaluate the IY TCM programme. The contribution of this study was that the IY TCM programme had never been previously evaluated independent of other IY programmes. The TCM programme successfully increased positive teacher behaviour and decreased negative teacher behaviour to the classroom, and to children with behaviour problems in particular. Pupil compliance significantly increased as a result of TCM training, while non-compliance, deviance (especially in children rated as problematic by the teacher), negative behaviours aimed at the teacher, and off-task behaviour showed significant reductions in intervention classrooms, post-classroom management training. Thirdly, the final study (Chapter 6) contributed to current research by investigating mechanisms of intervention-related change. This study examined barriers to positive outcome and investigated factors that facilitated implementation of TCM skills and principles. Teacher experience, job-share status, and teacher stress level, predicted multiple variables. Broad implications of the findings are discussed in the final chapter (Chapter 7) and suggestions relevant to future research are made.

This thesis was devised to explore my central interest in finding out empirically how individuals learn to become Vocational and Technical Education (VTE) teachers in Brunei. This study was based on a case study of twelve participants which includes five males and seven females undergoing a one year full-time Post Graduate Certificate Technical Education course in Brunei. Each participant was interviewed twice: once at the beginning of the course and once at the end of the course. My main empirical findings show that social relationships in learning situations are important with regard to becoming a VTE teacher in Brunei. Within different learning situations, individuals were also proactive in taking control of their own learning. In addition, my findings illustrate that most, if not all, student teachers have learned and changed towards the end of the teacher training course. The process of becoming a VTE teacher could logically be seen as two separate stages; choosing and learning to become a VTE teacher. One of the thesis objectives was also to understand the relationship between career decision-making and learning in relation to the Brunei VTE teachers. Drawing from Hodkinson et al.'s (1996) careership theory and Hodkinson et al. 's (2008) integrated theory of learning cultures and cultural theory of learning, I conclude that the two stages are integrated in practice and should be viewed as an on-going learning process called an individual learning journey. Based on my empirical findings, I also conclude that Hodkinson et al.'s (2008) learning theories need to be extended in order to fully understand social relationships, individual agency within learning cultures and to take into account that learning cultures change even within the same learning situation when individual position and roles change. This thesis concludes by identifying some implications for research and practice that arise from the findings of this study.

Are teachers really conscious of the extent to which their professional thinking is directed? Through this small-scale study I looked for an answer to this question. My motivation was to understand more about my own active location within a professional context. This research contributes to wider debates about what can be metaphorically understood as the dark side of the moon of the collective, occupational thinking of teachers. It provides an exploration of what lies behind their consciously held views: what informs teachers' classroom practices and their stated pedagogical beliefs. I build upon a theory that I have explained as provisional compliance among teachers, a phenomenon identified with the help of colleagues in earlier I.F.S. pilot work. This focused on teachers' experiences of Ofsted inspections and their professional responses to being inspected. Here, my colleagues are portrayed as workers for whom the scope for deep thinking about their roles as primary school teachers is restricted to a limited and ideological set of possibilities. It is argued that this phenomenon is creating a subtle and real professional reorientation in teachers' minds. A clearer understanding of such professional misrecognition at the level of the individual can provide teachers more widely with an opportunity to counteract the de-professional ising effect of politically derived, mass thinking in our schools. The research method is adopted from institutional ethnography for a study located within my own workplace. Data for the empirical investigation were collected in a loosely structured, oblique interview format. The recorded conversations between colleagues revealed a pattern of professional misrecognition. Such misrecognition may be understood if teachers are explained as being psychologically defended workers who are undergoing a fundamental professional re-alignment to prevailing educational ideologies. Crucially, this research suggests a new means for teachers to exercise greater intellectual freedom by reconciling their professional identities with ideological imperatives and thinking.

The focus of this self-study action research is the facilitation of teachers' engagement in collaborative inquiry to improve practice. The purpose of the inquiry was two-fold: primarily to improve the quality of teaching and learning of writing, within the English curriculum, in a primary school in Ireland; secondly, it was to improve my understanding of the issues and practices involved in leading school-based professional learning. In year one of the research, I worked with the school's staff to develop structures and processes supporting participants' action learning about collaborative inquiry. Following a multi-level model of intervention, teacher learning teams became the foundation stone of the intervention. While pedagogical content knowledge was the focus of much of the inquiry at base team level, critical examination of cultural norms of practice through collective reflection typified the professional dialogue at whole school level. The moral dimension of teacher professionalism anchored the intervention and was mediated through an unwavering commitment to dialogic action and inquiry. Data gathering and analysis served to assess the impact of the strategies on improving professional as well as student learning. Findings highlighted the significance of teacher-to-teacher discourse in shaping teacher learning; and teachers' commitment to adopting an incremental approach to learning illustrated in a co-created model of staged development. In year two the teachers pushed out the boundaries of current norms, by observing peer practice. The findings from data gathering in phase two, informed by discourse analysis of videoed post-observation conferences, led to the creation of conceptual models of practice for peer professional dialogue. The findings emphasise the need to create system-wide structures in Ireland to support embedded professional learning and suggest that teacher collaboration, rooted in professional values and supported by purposeful capacity building has the potential to replace autonomy as valued practice in Irish schools.

This longitudinal study explores the power and potential of feedback for expert professional learners. Feedback designed for professional learners has complex goals, including higher cognition, greater independence, increased perception within the field of activity and increased levels of reflection, both on and in action. Feedback definitions, which focus on improvement of product outcome, need to reflect the constructivist nature of giving and receiving information about learning. Feedback, as linked to assessment and evaluation practices, has roles for both teacher and learner. if feedback is to be optimally effective, its interaction with learner, learning environment, curriculum and teacher need to become understood through experience by learners in that context. The context of this study is a fulltime Master's programme for teacher educators at the Institute of Education, University of London. The findings, using data from interviews, course documents, field notes and written examples of feedback, demonstrate that feedback as a concept is somewhat uniquely constructed. This construction has the potential to either assist, or impede, or leave undisturbed the learning intentions of the feedback being understood and acted upon by the learner. Feedback can assist the process of perspective transformation. As learners learn, they are transformed, if feedback acts as catalyst to learning for knowledge construction, learning about the construction process itself and associated values in a given context. Therefore, feedback when perceived as a curriculum within a curriculum can provide a powerful means by which the goal of transformation is achieved. Feedback, as a socially situated practice, can operate as catalyst, process, product and curriculum when adopted in higher professional learning. The learning process, as knowledge and action, moves from the interpersonal to the intra-personal, with the feedback curriculum acting to enhance self assessment and self-directed learning, as learners actively seek and interpret feedback from the learning contexts which they lead.

This thesis exammes the links between the provision of English as a Foreign Language teacher education and development (EFL TED) and the current situation in Tunisia in a period of educational and curricular change. The study starts by examining issues at the macro level and explores the connection between economic re-structuring, educational policy and the role allocated to English within this reform period. It then describes EFL teacher education and features of the new English Language Teaching (ELT) curriculum in Tunisia. At the micro level, a semistructured interview is employed to explore the views of fifteen EFL teachers concerning their education, training and development and issues related to the implementation of some innovative aspects of the ELT curriculum. Qualitative analysis of the data uncovered areas of tension and ambiguity signalling a degree of incompatibility between the teachers' perceptions of learning, teaching and the teacher's role and the concepts underlying the intended ELT curriculum and the educational reform in general. I recommend some strategies that might resolve the mismatch. I suggest ways to strengthen the Teaching of English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) component at university level and to foster teacher reflection at the probationary phase and post-probationary phase. I argue that serious attention needs to be paid to the conceptual dimensions of teaching by strengthening the education of teachers in the area of current issues in the profession and in general education.

No description available.

This study explores the relationship between the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) subject review (SR), notions of continuing professional development and transformational change in academic staff. In a previous study (Blythman 2001) I explored the immediate experience of SR as perceived by academic staff. The current study examines the longer-term impact on academic staff and their professional world, a complex mix of professional life, knowledge, attitudes, practice, skills and values. I examine through qualitative interviews with 23 academics from11 different institutions whether they perceive SR to have contributed to longer-term changes in their professional world. I explore higher education as a site of conflict based on macro issues of wider social division and micropolitical issues of power and power relations. I offer a detailed reading of particular contexts including the role of agency and a Foucauldian model of the operation of technologies both repressively and creatively. These technologies include academic identity and professionalism, and the operation of power through resources including time. I consider that people experience the world in different ways, contingent on contextualised power relations. The social world is understood through diverse perspectives and this is best captured through the voice of social actors. My main data, therefore, were collected through semi-structured interviews. My study shows that SR had positive aspects for some including increased reflection and deeper pedagogic thinking. Generally, however, the way in which SR was constructed damaged its own stated objectives. This happened through a conflation of information with knowledge, encouraging the hegemony of one model of teaching, diverting resource to second-order activities and encouraging institutional conformity and bureaucratisation. This resulted in institutional and individual behaviour which foregrounded compliance and fabrication. I finish by critically exploring alternatives suggested in current literature and tentatively suggest a future approach.

On the basis of the relevant literature it was established that there was a need to conduct an investigation into the development of criteria of teacher effectiveness in two stages. Phase I of the expe~ent .as designed to examine the effect of using a prepared evaluation inst~nt (with and without training in its use) on students' self assessments, and tutors' and head-teachers' assessments of students in a teaching practice situation, and on the differences between the assessmen~s nade by the three parties concerned. Early in their practice periods in three widely dispersed colleges, assessments were made by all participants on a defined scale (5 point: A, B, C, D, E without +'s and -'s). Two weeks later "control" g='Oups ('C') made further sUbjective assessments, "evaluation" groups eE') used the instrument, and "trained" groups ('T') used the same instrtoent after training involving the use of a simulated video taped teaching situation. Appropriate tests and analyses, including a factor analysis, were carried out leading to findings which supported (at an appropriate level of significance) the hypothesis that: differences in the assessment of practical teaching between head-teachers, tutors and students are reduced by the use of a common evaluation instrument, supported by a tr~ng session using a video-tape of a classroom situation. Phase II of the experiment sought further clarification concerni3g those criteria of specific importance to students, teachers and tutors. A new sample associated with six teacher training institutions across the country, having shared in the common experience of assessmen~ of practical teaching using the instrument designed for Phase I, weighted the 15 sub-categories (i.e. criteria) on the instrument using a deii~ed five-point scale. The data were processed, and resulting correla-;ion matrices and results of factor analyses tabulated to assist those involved in the planning, implementation and evaluation of professional studies courses in initial teacher training programmes. The co=pu~erised results were interpreted to reveal five criteria: (i) a'Fre=.oh",ll~ , factor. (ii) a factor which emphasised the value of 'personal relationships with children'. (iii) (iv) and (v) a 'preparation and planning' factor. a factor drawing attention to the vital skills of 'organisation and teacher performance'. a 'discipline' factor. Due consideration was given to validity (content, construct, predictive and concurrent validity), and reliability of the evaluation instrument used in the experiment.