Teachers' Professional Learning: Influences of their Actions to Change

Abstract

In this study, I explored two things: (1) influences on primary school principals and teachers in the Queensland education sector intending to integrate information and communication technologies (ICT) into teaching practice, and (2) influences on primary school teachers’ collaborative work within a community of learners and in classrooms to generate knowledge of multiliterate practices for the teaching of reading. To do this, I used action research and case study methodologies to detail understandings of how the participants in my study integrated ICT and multiliterate reading practices. This investigation used a multi-method approach that incorporated multiple quantitative and qualitative grounded theory techniques to triangulate data. The study had three contexts and phases. In Phase 1, through quantitative and qualitative survey data, I captured a snapshot of influences acting on principals and teachers to integrate ICT in a broad selection of primary school classrooms. This phase used ordinal scales of measurement, descriptive statistics, and Optimal Scaling analysis of the data obtained in the surveys to contextualise the findings of the action research project. In Phases 2 and 3, I investigated how a specific cohort of teachers from schools in one district participated in an action research project to explore the teaching of reading using a multiliteracies approach. I worked as a facilitator and action researcher in this project. Qualitative methods were used predominantly to analyse data. This included abstracting and examining critical incidents from project meeting and presentation transcripts, concept maps, and reflective journals using Fletcher’s (2004, 2008) action theory for change model. This provided a means to examine how the community of learners worked collaboratively to generate knowledge and transform teaching practices using action research cycles. It also allowed me to analyse how teachers’ espoused theories translated into theories-in-use and to identify changes in single-loop to double-loop learning as described by Argyris & Schon (1974).