of the students, would provide rich and versatile information regarding the dynamics
and constraints of the model. The collaboration also encouraged the CPD developers
to clarify and explain the reasoning behind their decisions and actions within the
individual CPD programmes with colleagues who were familiar with the research
literature and confident in their own domain, but unfamiliar with the ways teaching
ideas were interpreted and implemented in the other country. This helped us question
the status quo and seek new possibilities and alternative solutions instead of simply
accepting what was already in place or follow trends that had previously directed
particular teaching and CPD approaches. It also provided us with a broader and richer
base on which to focus development of the evidence-based aspect of the CPD work
within the context of our specific domains. The cross-country liaison encouraged us to
question more carefully each aspect of the CPD programme. The culture of CPD and
teacher learning was different in the two countries and so selection of approaches,
which we might have previously made unthinkingly, now had to be explained to our
counterpart developers. This caused us to reflect more thoroughly than we might have
done if the project had only been placed in one country. Equally, new ideas from the
other country provided us with a greater choice of possibilities for the CPD design at
all stages in the research programme.
This collaborative approach helped both with the pragmatics of the developmental
part of the work while informing the theoretical thinking underpinning the project.
For example, one Israeli researcher and one UK researcher worked together to review
the research on accomplished practice and produce a working paper to support the
other domains. Another pair from the two countries exchanged ideas about the
preparation and use of the portfolio, which helped all six domains find better ways of
supporting their teachers in preparing the portfolios. A further pair of researchers,
from Israel and the UK, compared the response by their teachers to the first few CPD
sessions and their findings influenced the other domains in the design of their CPD
programmes.
This set of papers describes and offers insights into the CPD programmes that have
been developed in these science learning domains. The papers report on selected
aspects of research on the implementation process and the professional development
and practice of teachers. They provide an opening into investigating the role of
professional dialogue and the development of teacher learning communities within the
CPD arena and draw on an extensive research base (Shulman (1992), Bell & Gilbert
(1996), Hoban (2002), Loucks-Horsley et al (2003) which puts teacher learning at the
centre of the CPD agenda.
Within a large project, where researchers have specific foci for their research, it is not
unusual to have central tenets for research which become moulded and adapted within
the smaller units of the research. For example, the paper by Shirley Simon and Susan
Johnson focuses on how the final portfolios demonstrate teachers’ progression
towards accomplishment, while that by the Knowledge Integration team, led by Bat-
Sheva Eylon, centres on the changing categories of teacher talk in the early teacher
meetings compared to later ones. For this reason, we lay out the main areas of the
research programme below, while recognizing that there is variation of these in some