Transforming Identities: Understanding Teachers Across Professional Development and Classroom Practice (Report)
By Teacher Education Quarterly
- Release Date: 2008-06-22
- Genre: Education
Description
Despite the prevalence of professional development in schools and the variability in its implementation, little research has been conducted on how professional development makes its way into the classroom (Wilson & Berne, 1999). Even when teachers participate in high-quality professional development, there remains a large and often undocumented variability in how teachers make use of ideas learned (Enyedy, Goldberg, & Muir, in press; Kazemi, 2004; Franke, Carpenter, Levi & Fennema, 2000). Therefore, educational researchers and professional developers need to better understand the dilemmas and choices teachers face in making use of learned practices. We have recently turned to identity as a way to help us document, analyze, and understand teacher learning and classroom practice. "We take identity to be a central means by which selves and the sets of actions they organize form and re-form over personal lifetimes and in the histories of social collectives" (Holland, 2001, p. 270). Focusing on identity as a part of learning has enabled us to see teacher learning as both situated in practice and as an integrated, complex system embedded in the structures, histories, and cultures of schools. We use identity to differentiate how teachers participate in and make sense of professional development in practice. The construct of identity allows us to begin to understand why professional development can look very different as teachers take new ideas and put them into classroom practice.
