Professional Development, Reflection and Enquiry

Christine Forde, Margery McMahon, Alastair D McPhee, Fiona Patrick

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781446234679
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

?Wow, this book has some inspiring ideas... It comes at a perfect time as schools try to mesh school improvement with performance management, new standards for various career stages and staff development... Well written, with an attractive layout and a consistently clear voice, it draws on wide and up-to-date research and writing from all parts of the United Kingdom... There are no easy answers in this book, but plenty of powerful ideas that might help us ask useful questions about how CPD encourages a commitment to professional and personal growth, and increases self-confidence, job satisfaction and enthusiasm for working with children and colleagues. This is what being a professional is all about? - Times Educational Supplement, Book of the Week

Teaching professionals need to be able to successfully respond to change, and when necessary drive change within schools. To accomplish this, teachers need to be secure in their understanding of their place within the profession and their teaching identity. The focus of this book is upon enabling teachers to explore new ways of working with children, with colleagues and with communities.

This book provides teachers working towards Advanced Skills Teacher or Chartered Teacher status, and those on other Continuing Professional Development courses, with an essential text to assist in this process of personal and professional reflection and development planning. The authors focus upon the social, cultural and political aspects of professional development, and explore issues of professional identity.

SECTION B

EXERCISES OF PROFESSIONALISM

3	Forming identity: listening to beginning teachers

Chapter outline

This chapter discusses research on beginning teachers’ views about their professional identity. It links the concept of professional identity to the role of emotions and the need to feel valued and part of a professional community. It also discusses the importance of these aspects to teachers’ confidence, well-being and commitment to practice. The chapter ends by arguing that by supporting teachers to form a robust sense of professional identity and a strong sense of self-efficacy, we may protect them against some of the challenges that arise within a particularly stressful occupation.

Keywords

• Professional identity
• Emotion
• Self-efficacy

■ Introduction

In discussing professional identity it is important to listen to teachers’ personal perspectives. In this chapter we discuss the findings of our study on how student teachers perceive their professional identity, how they think they have developed that identity and how they conduct themselves within their professional role. We have already said that developing a professional identity is crucial to how we think and act as teachers. Work on reflective practice and teacher development should take account of the complex nature of professional identity and the psychological and emotional nature of the construct. We look, then, at issues of identity, emotion and professional development by listening to the voices of beginning teachers, and to the perspectives of those who educate them.

For this study it was decided to focus on secondary teaching, first, because there has already been significant work done on primary teachers’ professionalism (see Forrester, 2000; Menter et al., 1997; Nias, 1989) and, secondly, because there is a need to address this area, especially in Scotland. Questionnaires were issued to a year cohort of beginning (secondary) teachers in one teacher education institution (TEI), and to their lecturers. Interviews were conducted with focus groups of student teachers and with individual lecturers in two TEIs in order to better understand their perspectives on professional development and identity formation. Anonymity has been protected by the use of pseudonyms. Data from professional studies¹ seminars over three years are also included to more fully incorporate students’ ideas on the nature of the teacher’s role.

■ Teacher development: a personal and emotional journey

Hargreaves (2000) notes that education policy and administration tends to pay little attention to emotions. So, too, does teacher education, particularly in the climate of standards and performance management that characterizes teacher education and development in the early twenty-first century. Hargreaves (2000: 812) states that while teaching and learning might not be entirely emotional processes, ‘they are always irretrievably emotional in character, in a good way or a bad way, by design or default’ (original emphasis). Performance management, an emphasis on competence, and a standards agenda, all tend to assume that teaching is a primarily rational enterprise: the role of emotions in teaching and learning is therefore diluted and the role of the teacher becomes bounded within narrow performance parameters.

However, the ways in which teachers undertake their professional roles goes beyond performance. How they perceive their identity (and the ways in which they respond intellectually and emotionally to their work) has consequences not just for their daily teaching performance, but for decisions about their CPD needs. Beijaard et al. (2000: 750) argue that teachers’ perceptions of their professional identity ‘affect their efficacy and professional development as well as their ability and willingness to cope with educational change and to implement innovations in their own teaching practice’.

Following from what we have said in Chapter 1, developing a professional identity is partly an emotional process. In addition, emotions and mood are important in terms of overall job satisfaction (see Fisher, 2000). This has repercussions for teachers in terms of their likelihood of staying in the job, and with respect to their motivation and morale. Research indicates widespread concerns across many countries about teacher morale and commitment to remain in teaching given the current socio-political climate (see Day et al., 2005). It is therefore important that we pay attention to the role of broader affective characteristics like emotion and mood in the creation and development of teachers’ professional identities, particularly at the stage of initial teacher education, if we are to support teachers to feel a sense of professional self-worth in the face of what can be a challenging form of employment.

Identifying with a professional role

Not all the beginning teachers in our study had developed a coherent professional identity by the end of their Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) year: nor would we have expected them to. What was of some surprise was the number (28 from 82) who said that they already felt like teachers, and that this feeling of professional identity dated to their earliest classroom experiences. Of course, their initial notions of identity may change with experience, and may deepen in complexity. In contrast, the majority of student respondents expected gradual growth into their teaching role and identity, with this being described more than once as an ‘ongoing process’. Many highlighted the importance to their identity of completing probation and gaining full registration, with one student commenting on the need to have freedom from assessment before she/he would feel that they were a teacher in her/his own mind. In Scotland and England, freedom from formal assessment will be gained at the end of the probationary year, during which assessment by principal teachers is formative and ongoing.

Another student commented that she/he felt like ‘some versions’ of a teacher at the end of the PGCE course, but that she/he would not feel like a ‘proper’ teacher until the probation year. This, of course, begs the question of what a proper teacher is: all the students were working with their own versions of this construct, and the questionnaire results indicate that the constructs were both variable and, understandably, not fully thought through. Marianne mentioned the importance of the personal aspects of teacher identity, and of how initial constructs of the teacher’s role come partly from our experiences of being taught:

At first when I stood in front of the class, I was very impersonal – I didn’t feel that my personality was really coming through. Because probably I came from a totally different background, my memory of teaching was back twenty years ago – I had images of teachers I liked and disliked, and when you stand in front of the class you try and fit the pieces together like a puzzle, but you’re not too sure exactly what’s in the right place. So, I think you play safe by being impersonal. Then I think in the later placements you actually find your personality as a teacher, I think your personality comes through … I didn’t have much of a clue who I was as a teacher at the beginning, I was just trying to go by the rules of what teachers do in the school, and then it’s like making a recipe where you add your own ingredients.

The importance of allowing your own personality to show seems to be part of individualizing teacher identity. While the students had some common ideas of what it meant to be a teacher, they also recognized that professional identity varied with individual characteristics and behaviours.

In terms of identifying with their professional role, only five students mentioned the importance of practical aspects such as gaining a salary. Most focused on the need to feel ownership of their classroom and the need to identify with their pupils. Again, these aspects fall into the affective domain, more so than the psychological or material need of remuneration for work done. On the importance of affective elements, Fraser et al. (1998: 62) note that ‘teachers who remain in teaching attach greater value to recognition and approval of supervisors, family and friends. Those leaving assign more importance to salary increases, job challenge and autonomy’.

■ What underpins professional identity?

On the whole, the students noted the shifting and tangible nature of professional identity. Two in particular mentioned the tension between the expectations of their role as students in university, and the expectations of them as student teachers on placement. Others stressed the importance of the nature of the school experience to their professional development (whether they had been given responsibility in the class or not, the levels of teaching skill they had developed, building their classroom contributions to a more sustained level).

The students mentioned specific things as being important to the development of teaching identity:

• individual concepts about the role (concrete aspects such as preparing for and conducting assessments, lesson planning, parents’ evenings, but also more amorphous elements such as the psychological importance of gaining full registration, being paid, being recognized as a ‘proper’ teacher as opposed to ‘the student’)
• location: identification with one school, ownership of teaching space
• professional relationships with pupils, and parents
• relationships with other staff
• being given responsibility for pupils’ learning.

Overwhelmingly they identified being valued, and feeling a sense of belonging to the profession, as being vital to fostering a sense of professional identity. Even those who felt their identity to be only partly formed or emergent could pinpoint aspects that were helping to develop some form of specific identification with their professional role. For example,

• feeling valued
• interacting with ‘like-minded’ people (on the course, in schools and within family and friends)
• the influence of individual personality
• school ethos
• sense of professional community
• feedback from pupils, teachers, principal teachers and others.

Again, it is the affective components that are striking, particularly the need to feel that they belong to a profession which values them.

Feeling valued: a basic need in role fulfilment

Many respondents in our study highlighted the importance of the school context in making them feel valued or otherwise – in particular, the role of the principal teacher, Head of Department, senior management team (SMT) and teaching colleagues. Feeling valued by colleagues was as important as feeling valued by pupils and parents. To feel fulfilled in a professional role we need to feel that what we do is of importance to others as well as to ourselves. Part of developing a strong sense of self, personal identity and professional identity depends on our emotional well-being, and feeling valued seems to add to that sense of well-being. In addition, feeling valued is one of a range of positive work experiences that can help to reduce perceived feelings of stress. Cotton and Hart (2003: 118) recognize that our experiences of stress may be ‘caused more by a low level of positive work experiences and positive emotional states’ than by larger-scale stressful events in the workplace.

In terms of the importance of feeling valued, there was a difference between the 28 students in the study who already felt like teachers and the 54 who said that their professional identities were still being formed. Of the 28 who already had strong basic role identification, only two did not feel valued. The other 26 all had a firm sense of feeling valued not just by pupils and colleagues (in school and on the course) but by family, friends and even a sense of being valued by society as a whole.

Of those who had a less secure sense of professional identity, there was a more varied reaction. Many did not feel valued, and for those who did, the feeling of being valued was highly context dependent:

• Most pupils make me feel valued – adults less so – a lot of cynical views on teacher competence and professionalism (not always entirely unwarranted!).
• By school yes. By college [i.e. university], no.
• Not really. I see it as an important profession but the media seems to focus on the negatives.
• Not always. Quite often in schools I feel that I am merely the student and that teachers have to go out of their way to help.
• Valued certainly by the pupils as a whole, certainly not by the teaching staff I have worked with.
• Generally, no. Society in general and personal friends do not have the respect for the profession that they should. Ignorantly, people see teachers as getting paid for little hours and days in a year. Department and certain students do value me.

So, certain factors seem to influence the extent to which students feel valued in their professional role: support and recognition from university staff on ITE courses (some doubted the value of the PGCE course in supporting their development), support and recognition from colleagues in school (eight students did not feel valued by teachers in school), the feelings of pupils towards the student’s work, comments from friends, family and the wider public, and media perceptions.

Developing professional identity and school culture

With respect to working with teaching colleagues, students’ experiences were largely positive. The importance of workplace culture to students’ developing professional identity is noted by de Lima (2003). In looking at the development of student teachers in Portugal, he finds that there is a tradition of training teachers to be ‘isolated professionals’ (de Lima, 2003: 197). Part of the induction into teaching during their training year involves students learning how to fit into schools and departments, and in learning how to negotiate professional interactions (de Lima, 2003: 207). Successful socialization into workplace practices demands high levels of interpersonal skills and this was noted by the students in our study.

In addition, students learn to teach within what Lave and Wenger call communities of practice (see Lave and Wenger, 1991). As they work through their initial teacher education programme, students gradually move towards more complex interactions with pupils and colleagues, and fuller participation within the classroom, department and school communities (Maynard, 2001: 41). Learning to belong within these professional communities ‘involves becoming a different kind of person … it involves the construction of identities’ (Maynard, 2001: 41). Developing the skills required to integrate successfully into new communities of practice takes time, but can also demand reappraisal of professional identity.

In our study, the students appreciated certain things in terms of helping them to fit in with, and adjust to, departmental culture. Support and advice were welcomed, but also being given some measure of responsibility – and what might be termed agency – for lesson planning, pupil assessment and styles of lesson delivery. This helped them to feel that they were being treated as teachers to some extent, rather than only as ‘students’. From work with students in PGCE seminar sessions, one group identified their understanding of the complex nature of working with colleagues. While they noted few difficulties working with teaching staff on placement, they described a range of strategies they used to ‘fit in’ with the existing teaching staff: asking advice about teaching and learning, asking advice and information about working with particular pupils, focusing on what was expected of them as students, and staying mindful of their role as students and the expectations that accompany that role.

However, as confidence grows, so does a need for some recognition of being in transition. Some students mentioned the need to be recognized by other...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the authors
• Introduction
• Abbreviations
• SECTION A TEACHER PROFESSIONALISM
• SECTION B EXERCISES OF PROFESSIONALISM
• SECTION C PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
• CONCLUSION
• Bibliography
• Index