Teachers are responsible for learning; they inspire, teach, support and assess their students on a daily basis while also being subject to numerous expectations from parents, society, employers, government and their students. To engage with these challenges, teachers need to be enabled and motivated to continue to learn while operating within busy workplaces and a culture of performativity, and in the context of politicised and volatile teacher ‘training’ spaces. In this lecture, I will draw on my research in the contexts of both initial and continuing teacher professional learning and practice development, exploring potential lessons for school leaders, training providers, policymakers and teachers themselves. The research that informs my lecture represents a variety of lived experiences of educational practice – either my own or teachers’. My research does not neatly fit into one paradigm or another; sometimes I adopt an interpretive paradigm and at other times an action research paradigm. I will reflect on research-based evidence of teacher learning, both to illustrate and to analyse professional practices from which knowledge can be gained. My research reveals the tensions for teacher educators, mentors, coaches, school leaders and teachers at all stages of their careers. Their professional and personal need for learning and development coincides with a time when schools are dealing with ever-increasing demands to ‘perform’ in relation to pupil attainment, and a growing sense that they are covering cracks in a period of austerity. This backdrop creates new dependencies; for example, raising the demands on those within and joining the teaching profession to create a ‘self-improving school-led system’. It opens up opportunities for professional learning but also creates contradictions as activity systems collide. I can’t do all of these themes full justice in the time that I have but I do hope to help you to engage with them
