Teachers’ Growth is More Than the Growth of Individual Teachers: The Case of Gisela

Abstract

This paper tells the story of Gisela, a mathematics teacher and vice-principal at an Austrian urban secondary school. Reflections on her pre-service teacher education and her struggle for professional growth in her teaching career will be combined with more general reflections on the interconnection between the further development of individual teachers in their own classes and the situation and the further development of their school. We see that in the case of Gisela, and more generally too, the systematic enhancement of the quality of teaching in a country (in our case taking mathematics as the example) cannot build only on the professional development of selected individual teachers (although this is very important), but must seriously take into account the involvement of as many (mathematics) teachers as possible in their schools, their regions, and so forth, as well as other relevant stakeholders such as department heads, principals, superintendents, teacher educators, parents, and students. Moreover, teacher education cannot be confined to an approach that regards only the individual as the learner, but must as well include groups of teachers, whole schools, and even the whole educational system. To touch the full complexity of teacher education, we need to build a bridge between classroom development, school development, and the development of the whole educational system. Overall, Gisela’s story is a plea for broadening our scope from an individualistic to a systemic one.