• Engaging teachers in collaborative long-term inquiries into teaching practice
and student learning.
• Situating these inquiries into problem-based contexts that place content as
central and integrated with pedagogical issues.
• Enabling teachers to see such issues as embedded in real classroom contexts
through reflections and discussions of each others' teaching and/or
examination of students' work.
• Focusing on the specific content or curriculum teachers will be implementing
such that teachers are given time to work out what and how they need to adapt
what they already do.
Effective professional development needs to provide an opportunity for teacher
reflection and learning about how new practices can be evolved or shaped from
existing classroom practice. This is not a simple task in that it requires teachers to re-
examine what they do and how they might do it differently. In addition, the attainment
of complex learning goals in science by students, such as the ones targeted in the
domains of the present project, demand significant change in teachers’ roles.
The CPD programmes developed in this project employ an "evidence-based"
approach to support collaborative inquiries in the teachers’ own classrooms. By the
term "evidence" we mean a collection of artefacts in a particular science learning
domain that show teacher's work and students' learning, combined with written
commentaries that explain the role of the artefacts within the learning context. Ball
(2004) refers to “harnessing” recorded teachers' experience as a means for teachers'
learning individually and collectively and creating shared professional knowledge.
Such records of practice (evidence) enable teachers to examine their own instructional
strategies and students' learning alongside their previous practice and those of their
colleagues. The preparation of the evidence, and the reflection that follows it, can help
teachers gain insights, evaluate goals, better understand the relationship between
components of practice or events, and view them within a broader cultural, moral, and
professional perspectives. Namely, the evidence and the activities associated with
its processing foster the creation of a community of practice (Lave and Wenger,
1991). The process of collecting and explaining and justifying these evidence sources
therefore helps in enhancing teachers' development towards accomplishment in their
practice.
Accomplished Teaching
Schulman & Schulman (2004, pp.259) stipulate that “ an accomplished teacher is a
member of a professional community who is ready, willing, and able to learn from his
or her teaching experiences”. They go on to argue that the features of teacher
development and so a necessary part of what a CPD programme should provide are
Vision, Motivation, Understanding, Practice, Reflection and Community. While we
whole-heartedly agreed that these were necessary aspects to aid teacher learning, our
feeling was that the evidence-based approach would provide the means by which the
focus, practice and reflection could drive the understanding through the professional
dialogue that it engendered within the CPD Teacher Meetings. In other words, the
evidence-based approach formed the catalyst for high levels of socio-cultural