A execución do proxecto de electrificación da liña de Porta Real

Participants recalled, in their interviews, many different opportunities and experiences for professional learning. These professional learning experiences included workshops, observations, professional learning communities, research, mentoring and reviewing student progress, study days, collaboration, teacher inquiries, and moderation of assessments. A summary of these opportunities and experiences, ranging from formal to informal experiences and opportunities, are listed in Table 5.

Table 5

Case A: Professional Learning Activity Summary

Type of PL Activity Teacher

Participants (n=5) Teacher-in- charge Principal Formal Informal PD Course (includes workshops, seminars, clusters, teacher-only-days) 2 √ √ Conference 2 √

Tertiary Study (includes study supported by study awards)

3 √ √

Research 2 √

Reading (includes personal and more formal instigated by TiC)

3 √

Teacher Inquiry 2 √ √

Reflection 3 √

Networks (includes online) 4 √ √

Observation 1

Modelling 1 √

Professional learning community (includes school- wide PL learning)

3 √

Talking with colleagues (includes collaboration at staff meetings)

5 √ √

Learning on-the-job 4 √ √

While, formal opportunities included best practice workshops, seminars, PD courses, cluster meetings, conferences, and the Schooling Improvement Project, participants considered their professional learning opportunities to be primarily informal. In some cases, an informal professional learning activity could be made more formal if there was a requirement for them to report back to others—a specific example of this was professional reading. The TiC took an active role in identifying research readings that might be of use to, not just the whole staff, but individuals. If there was something specific she would talk to the individual teacher; otherwise she included time in staff meetings for staff to discuss readings and identify the key messages and implications

for their teaching practice.

Within the range of available professional learning experiences and opportunities, a few are highlighted to reflect the propensity of informal opportunities participants engaged with. These are (a) informal conversations (b) networking, and (c) learning on- the-job.

4.4.1 Informal conversations

All participants identified professional learning as something that occurred all the time. Most notably, there was a keenness within the interviews to stress the importance of professional learning conversations that took place with colleagues within the unit. Teacher E said that discussion took place in the staffroom, while Teacher D said she sought out staff to discuss ways in which they ran their programmes. For her, the “heaps” of discussion with all staff, including the administrator, contributed to her learning and “development of my understanding” of the TPU context.

Long-serving teachers also noted that professional conversations were ongoing. They identified several examples of such ‘hallway’ (Dixon, 1997) conversations:

• We’ll just talk at lunchtime or you know whenever we can sit down together. [Teacher C]

• Every morning tea or lunchtime we talk, and we talk about what’s happening in our classrooms. What worked? What hasn’t worked and why? [Teacher B]

These informal conversations were valuable, as noted by Teacher B, because they were “from within an environment, it’s very environment specific, so it’s tailored to our needs at this school and not to only our general needs as teachers but also the specific needs of our learners.”

4.4.2 Networking

Networks outside of the TPU was another valued experience that encompassed talking informally with colleagues. Teacher A identified that as the sole teacher of a subject within the unit she needed networks to not only ensure she was assessing at the right

curriculum level but to also provide up-to-date subject knowledge and opportunities to bounce ideas off other practitioners. For her, accessed networks included online forums, local subject association, subject area conferences, and teachers from high schools in her wider community. Teacher C and the TiC also used subject associations to support their practice as well as national associations specific to their areas of responsibility—for Teacher C, this was the National Careers Association and for the TiC the Association for Teen Parent Educators of New Zealand (ATPENZ). Teachers D and E, who were new to the unit, thought that networks for moderation of assessment and subject support could be useful as an external view to benchmark oneself and one’s practice. However, at the time of interviewing they had not yet accessed these networks.

4.4.3 Learning on-the-job

Four of the participants talked about the importance of learning on-the-job. Teacher A described the opportunity to find her own way of teaching in the TPU as “learning by doing”. Teacher D gave the example of how her experience of teaching one student a particular standard had increased her understanding and practice of differentiated learning. However, participants noted that learning subject knowledge on-the-job was challenging to learn on-the-job, for example, Teacher B expressed that one had to have “top notch” subject knowledge, when teaching in a TPU.

You haven’t got time to learn on-the-job in terms of your content knowledge and you need to be able to step outside of the actual subject and really dissect it and scaffold it in a way and teach it in multiple different ways to cope with the different brains you’ve got in your room.

While learning on-the-job was primarily informal in nature, professional learning through teacher inquiry was an example of a more formal learning experience. The expectation that staff conduct their own teacher inquiry as part of their appraisal process formalises naturally occurring reflective practices (Benade, 2015). Evidence of teacher inquiry was found in unit documents such as staff meeting notes, letters of support for study grants, and community newsletters. While newer staff had not yet started their teacher inquiry, both Teacher A and Teacher B discussed their inquiries in

some detail. Both teachers were also involved with tertiary study which they noted supported their inquiries by providing background research literature that prompted them to think more deeply about their teaching practice. Teacher A, describing how her use of digital tools to support student learning had changed, noted that she was continually “revisiting things” and refining them because of her own learning and personal confidence. Likewise, Teacher B noted she was refining her ‘Facebook Maths’ to enable student access to the digital learning.

These teachers exhibit what Timperley et al. (2014) call ‘a spiral of inquiry’. The ongoing, cyclical nature of teaching as inquiry that sometimes takes teachers in a new direction but can also loop back to the original. In this context, several teachers attributed the leadership of the TiC as an enabler of their learning, for example, Teacher B described how the topics and discussions in staff meetings enabled her to focus her inquiry in a way that supported more productive engagement of each of the students discussed in her subject areas.