Lecture-14: developing professional competence of the teacher

LECTURE-14: DEVELOPING PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE OF THE TEACHER.

This theme outlines a framework of teachers’ professional competence and explores the relationship between teacher access to research and their own professional competence. It then goes onto explore the underpinning theory of action, which describes the relationship between teacher access to research and improved pupil outcomes. Finally, the RESEARCH explores the implications of the interaction between the framework of competence and theory of action for a range of different stakeholders, such as the Chartered College of Teaching, Multi-Academy Trusts, individual schools and teachers.

One of the first successes of the Chartered College of Teaching has been to allow its members access to over 2,000 educational journals, which had previously sat behind publishers’ expensive pay walls. As Dame Alison Peacock, the College’s chief executive, says:
‘Educational research can sometimes be seen as quite esoteric and separate from the realities of day-to-day teaching… We hope the knowledge and research platform we are developing will help to connect the big research ideas to classroom practice and allow our members to share their own insights on what works.’
However, teachers having access to educational research is, in itself, not enough to guarantee that ‘big research ideas’ will subsequently make it to the classroom. We need to locate the individual teacher’s access to research knowledge within a conceptual framework of teacher competence. Having done so, we will then be in a position to develop a theory of action, showing how teachers’ research knowledge can lead to changes in pupil/student learning.
To help with this task, I will draw upon the work of Guerriero and Revai (2017) who have developed a conceptual framework of teachers’ professional competence. I will then draw upon the work of Brown (2017), on theory of action, which will link teacher access to research to changes in pupil/student learning.