Drawing upon data from an Australian study, this book gives voice to beginning teachers navigating their way through their first year of teaching and discovering what it means to be professional learners. The chapters within provide rich insights into the ways in which beginning teachers make sense of the new and challenging experiences they face during the first year of teaching, and how these influence the development of their learner identities at this formative time of their careers. Professional learning, in response to teacher standards and associated accountability measures, often fails to acknowledge the importance of internal motivation and attitude to beginning teachers’ sense of a professional learner identity. This book offers policy makers, teacher educators, school leaders, mentors and teachers a way of thinking about how beginning teachers can be supported to grow professionally and construct their identities as professional learners.

This book examines the impact of internationalization, student mobility and transnational workforce mobility on the changing nature of teacher work and teacher professional learning in the Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector. Derived from a three-year project funded by the Australian Research Council across more than 30 VET and HE institutions, this is the first book that explores teacher professional learning in international education. The authors address how teachers position their professional responsibilities and learning in relation to the institutional structure, internationalization agenda and policy fields in which their profession is embedded by drawing on both empirical evidence and key concepts and models of teacher professional learning. This pioneering text provides international education and VET policy makers, practitioners, educators and researchers with unique insights and practical implications for enhancing teacher professional learning and capabilities in international education.

It's time to say goodbye to "sit-and-get, one-size-fits-all" PD sessions and embrace professional learning that meets the needs of all teachers. Allison Rodman's Personalized Professional Learning provides district and school administrators with a roadmap for transforming existing professional development programs into more effective and innovative learning experiences that elevate onsite expertise while still aligning with school and district priorities. This book is a step-by-step guide for diagnosing, planning, executing, evaluating, and refining teachers' professional learning. Supported by research and informed by the experiences of educators across the United States, it distills best practices for adult learning into clear advice and ready-to-use tools. Curious about what it looks like to commit to a personalized approach that prioritizes teacher voice and provides meaningful opportunities for co-creation, social construction, and self-discovery? Rodman provides answers and a clear way forward.

If the quality of an education system can never exceed the quality of its teachers, then countries need to do all they can to build a high-quality teaching force.

Teachers Leading Educational Reform explores the ways in which teachers across the world are currently working together in professional learning communities (PLCs) to generate meaningful change and innovation in order to transform pedagogy and practice. By discussing how teachers can work collectively and collaboratively on the issues of learning and teaching that matter to them, it argues that through collective action and collaborative agency, teachers are leading educational reform. By offering contemporary examples and perspectives on the practice, impact and sustainability of PLCs, this book takes a global, comparative view showing categorically that those educational systems that are performing well, and seek to perform well, are using PLCs as the infrastructure to support teacher-led improvement. Split into three sections that look at the macro, meso and micro aspects of how far professional collaboration is building the capacity and capability for school and system improvement, this text asks the questions: Is the PLC work authentic? Is the PLC work being implemented at a superficial or deep level? Is there evidence of a positive impact on students/teachers at the school/district/system level? Is provision in place for sustaining the PLC work? Teachers Leading Educational Reform illustrates how focused and purposeful professional collaboration is contributing to change and reform across the globe. It reinforces why teachers must be at the heart of the school reform processes as the drivers and architects of school transformation and change.

This book redefines teacher in-service education as being less about participation in a program and more about the opportunity for teachers to experience a process of learning that is personally meaningful and contextually relevant to their own teaching practice. The research presented here reveals that teachers have the capacity to think and work differently, yet are rarely provided with opportunities to exercise active decision-making about their personal learning needs. Creating and implementing such an approach involves reimagining all aspects of the learning experience so that teachers are free to articulate their own learning needs and actively work to determine what matters most for their professional practice. The book breaks new ground by drawing from research related to an in-service program where teachers, their experience and professional thinking were deliberately positioned at the centre of the learning experience. Using this evidenced-based approach, it focuses not only on the learning achieved, but also the conditions that enabled teachers to undertake such learning.

Teacher Professional Learning in an Age of Compliance: Mind the Gap examines ways in which practice-based inquiry in educational settings, in a number of different countries and contexts, can transcend current ways of working and thinking such that authentic professional learning is the result. The authors contend that education policy, under pressure from a number of quarters, is retreating into a standardized, audited, and backward-looking arena, with the advances of more progressive educational philosophy being rolled back. In an age where practitioner inquiry and action research have often been ‘hijacked’ for the purposes of broad-based policy implementation, this book offers a rationale for reclaiming the critical edge so fundamental to inquiry-based professional learning. It examines the potential of inquiry-based forms of teacher professional learning to contribute to the growth of professional knowledge for and about teachers’ work. The authors intend that the book will assist in building new forms of professional knowledge that go beyond the current compliance model – engineered from less enduring materials – to inform a new model with its foundations in a strong ethical and moral framework. They also believe that this new model, if implemented, will help to reverse today’s conservative educational trends and make teacher professional development a force for genuine progress once again. They have consciously moved away from the celebratory tone of much of the academic reporting of teacher professional learning, adopting instead a genuinely critical edge. In covering a wide range of policies and practices from across the international spectrum, they have allowed themselves the freedom to engage in serious epistemological arguments about the nature of professional knowledge, as well as how it is constructed and employed.