Continuing professional development: nurturing the expert within

Abstract

Major educational reform initiatives in England since 1988 have been based on a technicist view of curriculum and teaching which assumes that change can be ‘delivered’ in a linear way from the ‘centre’ to teachers for implementation in classrooms. ‘Expertise’ in judgement and decision-making is seen to reside outside schools, to be conferred in a hierarchical way to those inside schools. There is no account in such models of teachers' own expertise, understanding and judgement at the heart of reform or ‘good practice’. Will current initiatives from the Teacher Training Agency on a national framework for continuing professional development address this anomaly? This paper critiques the notion of ‘delivery’ or ‘teacher as technician’ as a deficient and dangerous model for educational reform. It argues for a model of continuing professional development which attends to the development of teachers' understanding of learning, to their sense of voice, their judgement and their confidence to cultivate inner expertise as a basis for teaching and for judging outsider initiatives. In particular, it argues that the expertise of the well-educated teacher must lie at the heart of continuing professional development if the best of educational reform initiatives are to be implemented in the pursuit of educational improvement and social justice. The paper draws upon material from case stories of teachers undergoing profound changes of understanding as a result of enquiry-based continuing professional development.