Journal of In-service Education, Volume 30, Number 2, 2004

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Editorial

The Journal continues to attract perspectives and insights on continuing professional development from a range of cultural and professional contexts. This issue is no exception. It offers articles that locate their research and analyses in teacher education, the armed forces, schooling, business and medicine. In addition, we have articles that are set in Scotland, Australia, Israel and England. This cross-professional and cross-cultural dimension allows an opportunity to consider abiding themes in professional learning in a variety of contexts. There are common connections across the articles related to partnership; the centrality of human communication and relationships in learning; sustainability of professional learning; and commitment to improvement in a rapidly changing political and technological world.

Scotland’s new approach to the induction of teachers is a timely and serious attempt to deal, at one and the same time, with issues of teacher retention and entitlement to good quality continuing professional development. Draper, O’Brien & Christie map out the background to the development of this new, much improved scheme, showing how lessons have been learned from previous research and applied to new practices. A stable year-long post is now guaranteed in Scotland for new entrants alongside a reduced teaching load and significant time entitlement for further learning. The research looks at the several dimensions of support for new entrants within the school and outside. There is a pleasing overall sense of satisfaction with provision but there are also areas that need further work. Whilst multiple agency support is helpful, for example, this raises problems with communication and coherence. Only time will tell whether or not these improved teacher induction arrangements in Scotland will lead to more effective teaching and enhanced retention in the profession. The research, meanwhile, is a valuable resource for others in Scotland and elsewhere to consider in approaching these challenges themselves.

Toomey et al outline one aspect of a broader project which is researching the implementation of lifelong learning principles in teacher education in Australia. This part of the project looks at the assessment practices being employed in this context and finds wide variation, including a range of summative and formative methods. There are, the authors point out, distinct relationships between forms of assessment and broader philosophies of the nature and purposes of lifelong learning.

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Their research identified disjunctions between the two, though there are also examples of synergy where teacher educators are developing creative and innovative methods with student teachers. Teachers, they point out, are key in the development of good lifelong learning attitudes and programmes. Their roles need to be shaped accordingly. It seems clear, therefore, that the assessment experience must be a consistent and integrated part of that development. In outlining the several issues, the article makes a useful contribution to the wider debate, offering valuable insights into developments in the Australian context.

There is nothing more important in our age than the development of educational experiences that successfully cultivate understanding, peace and tolerance between people and nations. These aspirations lie at the heart of a project being established by Elbaz-Luwisch & Kalekin-Fishman with colleagues at the University of Haifa. Through narrating and sharing personal stories, the project aims to develop the ‘capacity to listen across cultures’, working, in the process, towards a shared ‘culture of peace’. The work is rooted in theories of teaching, change, the foundations of hostility and misunderstanding. It aims to support educators in a range of contexts where conflict exists or may arise. The article reports on the theorising and planning stage of the project. We hope that the authors may be able to offer insights in the future into the practices and effects of the programme once it is under way.

Good working relationships are important to effective school–university research partnerships, according to McLaughlin & Black-Hawkins. There are, they suggest, many qualities that contribute to effectiveness, but relationships are central. Their research describes and analyses their experiences of working with others from the academy and schools to foster research cultures that contribute to improvements in teachers’ work. The article identifies six ‘models’ of partnership, though the authors recognise these are not pure in their application. Rather, ways of working are more complex than the ‘pure’ models suggest and, in reality, there is ‘no single shared understanding of the concept of a research partnership’. The article implicitly paints a picture of complexity in a project that embraces eight schools and one academic institution. In the network this has created, the development of shared understandings and shared language is problematic. Nevertheless, the authors offer exciting evidence about the effectiveness of the partnership in promoting a research-based approach to teachers’ work when the work is rooted in teachers’ own ways of thinking and knowing.

It is leadership, the current United Kingdom Government believes, that will make a difference to the quality of services provided for citizens. Alexandrou & Davies outline the challenge that has been posed by government to leadership development and training in the armed forces. They point out that this challenge parallels that made by government to schools and head teachers through the work of the National College for

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School Leadership. The challenge is part of the Government’s commitment to ‘modernising’ public services. Yet there could, the authors argue, be a real tension between models of effectiveness in leadership that are rooted in economic and political considerations and models that are rooted in the armed forces traditional commitment to a ‘public sector ethos’. The authors argue strongly for the latter. Meeting the Government’s challenge, therefore, requires a firm commitment to the values underpinning a public service ethos whilst rising to the challenges of the ‘modernisation’ agenda.

Does the article by Hoban & Erickson contain a theoretical key to helping us plan for sustained professional learning? The authors revisit a variety of theories of learning from Dewey onwards, comparing and contrasting them and offering illustrative cases of practice. From these analytical comparisons they identify three components of the learning experience that, they claim, can contribute to sustained development and practice improvement. These embrace opportunities for rooting one’s learning in one’s personal experience (the personal dimension); opportunities for learning from each other (the sociocultural dimension); and opportunities to learn in a context that orientates one’s learning towards professional action (action setting). They argue that some forms of professional learning will not be effective because they do not incorporate these three dimensions. To ensure that professionals are not left behind by the rapid change we are experiencing, providers, they imply, need to consider these three dimensions and how they interact in a structured learning process.

This issue of the journal, therefore, ends on a theoretically well-argued and somewhat optimistic note about the long-term potential of professional learning to make a difference. Together, the articles outline some of the complexity of values, strategies and pedagogies being applied to continuing professional development in different political contexts, whilst highlighting dilemmas and difficulties that have the tendency to block progress. In their totality, the articles imply that effective and sustained learning can be achieved when we work from a theoretical, empirical and values base, learning from past experience and orientating our aspirations towards a vision of possibility in a world that is fraught with uncertainty and unpredictable change.

The Editors

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