Lecture-14: developing professional competence of the teacher

Access to research and teachers’ professional competence:

A theory of action Brown (2017) cites Earl and Timperley (2015), who define a theory of action (ToA) as:
‘an organisation’s “theory”, or story of how it will make change in the world. A theory is an explanation of why certain things happen’.
As such, Brown argues a theory of action can be usefully viewed as a ‘route map’ that helps educators to work out what needs to happen if the innovation or intervention – in this case access to research – is to make a difference. Brown goes on to identify six elements of a ToA: first, an understanding of the context; second, what problem they are faced with; third, how this problem is going to be attended to and why; fourth, what learning is expected to take place; fifth, what the expected changes in behaviours are; and finally, what changes in outcomes are expected. How these elements of a ToA come together is illustrated in Figure 2, ‘An outline model of a theory of action’.

So, using Brown’s model, let’s see how we can integrate it with the work of Guerriero and Revai (2017) to come up with a ToA linking increased teacher access to research with changes in pupil outcomes.
Context – pressures on schools and teachers to improve.
Problem – due to publisher pay walls, teachers and school leaders have (in the past) found it difficult to access the latest educational research.
Innovation – the Chartered College of Teaching is providing its members with access to over 2000, research publications.
Learning – access to research. Journals now provides teachers with opportunities to develop general pedagogical knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge.
Changes in behaviour – this learning will impact upon teacher motivation and influence teachers’ professional judgement, teachers’ choice of teaching and learning strategies and how teachers conduct themselves in the classroom and other settings.