Professional Learning as Relational Practice

Professional Learning as Relational Practice PDF Author: Jenny Reeves
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9048187397
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Given the emphasis on transforming professional work through the adoption of enquiry-based and trans-disciplinary approaches to service development, there is an urgent need for those involved in professional education to develop a robust understanding of how changes in practice occur. A more inclusive approach to the analysis of the processes involved across the varied and interrelated contexts in which they occur is thus very timely. In this book, Jenny Reeves sets out to explore the gap between the experience of professional learning as an interactive, dynamic and socially contextualised process, and descriptions that are often individualistic, overly linear and largely context-free. She makes the claim that this disjuncture is the outcome of modes of enquiry that concentrate on limited selections of the available data. Adopting a relational approach to describing practice-based professional development, including graphical means for exploring the spaces produced by the activity, provides a very different picture. It creates a basis for representing the complex movements, relationships and interactions between people and things that occur during professional learning. It also provides a productive approach to describing the exchange and creation of professional knowledge across different contexts over time. By building a picture of the ephemeral spaces and connections that educating activities produce, mapping relational space allows those engaged in professional education to think rather differently about how professional learning and changes in knowledge and practice may be understood, supported and developed.

Professional Learning as Relational Practice

Professional Learning as Relational Practice PDF Author: Jenny Reeves
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9048187397
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Get Book Here

Book Description
Given the emphasis on transforming professional work through the adoption of enquiry-based and trans-disciplinary approaches to service development, there is an urgent need for those involved in professional education to develop a robust understanding of how changes in practice occur. A more inclusive approach to the analysis of the processes involved across the varied and interrelated contexts in which they occur is thus very timely. In this book, Jenny Reeves sets out to explore the gap between the experience of professional learning as an interactive, dynamic and socially contextualised process, and descriptions that are often individualistic, overly linear and largely context-free. She makes the claim that this disjuncture is the outcome of modes of enquiry that concentrate on limited selections of the available data. Adopting a relational approach to describing practice-based professional development, including graphical means for exploring the spaces produced by the activity, provides a very different picture. It creates a basis for representing the complex movements, relationships and interactions between people and things that occur during professional learning. It also provides a productive approach to describing the exchange and creation of professional knowledge across different contexts over time. By building a picture of the ephemeral spaces and connections that educating activities produce, mapping relational space allows those engaged in professional education to think rather differently about how professional learning and changes in knowledge and practice may be understood, supported and developed.

Beyond the Tyranny of Testing

Beyond the Tyranny of Testing PDF Author: Kenneth J. Gergen
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190872764
Category : Educational tests and measurements
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Providing detailed illustrations using cases from pioneering schools around the globe at both the primary and secondary level, this book demonstrates how a relational orientation to evaluation in education can enhance learning processes, foster students' engagement and vitality relationships, and elevate the evaluation of teaching and the school as a whole.

Exploring Relational Professionalism in Schools

Exploring Relational Professionalism in Schools PDF Author: Anneli Frelin
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9462092486
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
How is it that some teachers have just “got it”? They walk into a room and the atmosphere changes. They get through to students in a way that no-one else can. The author has sought answers to this question by observing and interviewing teachers from preschool to upper secondary school levels. Having intensively studied the highly influential but underestimated relational dimension of teaching, her contention is that these teachers successfully use relational practices to build educational relationships with their students and educational communities among them. Moreover, she finds that what may come across as a teacher’s personal traits is actually a sensible professional approach. These teachers haven’t “got it” - they “get it”. This book explains how teachers carry out their relational practices, and contains an abundance of everyday examples from all stages of education. The deep theoretical reasoning departs from these examples to create a compelling argument for a teacher’s relational professionality that is possible to learn and teach. New relational perspectives and concepts are introduced for the purpose of facilitating professional conversations about the profound dimension of relationships in education.

Professional Development in Relational Learning Communities

Professional Development in Relational Learning Communities PDF Author: Miriam B. Raider-Roth
Publisher: Teachers College Press
ISBN: 0807758159
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
In this book, Raider-Roth offers an innovative approach to teacher professional development that builds on the intellectual strength and practical wisdom of practitioners. Focusing on nurturing relationships between and among participants, facilitators, subject matter, texts, and the school environment, this book helps educators create a repertoire of teaching approaches founded on sustained, deep, democratic, local, and active learning. The author demonstrates that, within the context of trustworthy relationships, teachers can better connect with all that they know about teaching, learning, and their own identities. This, in turn, enables them to act on what they know in the best interest of their students and leads to the kinds of lasting change and commitment that can move the teaching profession beyond training for a particular skill set. Book Features: Examples showing how the work of relational learning communities can improve teachers’ practice. A focus on the cultural dimension in professional development for teachers. A view of teaching and learning as deeply relational and transformative. Strategies to help facilitators and participants create processes to best support a fertile learning environment.

Trust in Schools

Trust in Schools PDF Author: Anthony Bryk
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN: 161044096X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Most Americans agree on the necessity of education reform, but there is little consensus about how this goal might be achieved. The rhetoric of standards and vouchers has occupied center stage, polarizing public opinion and affording little room for reflection on the intangible conditions that make for good schools. Trust in Schools engages this debate with a compelling examination of the importance of social relationships in the successful implementation of school reform. Over the course of three years, Bryk and Schneider, together with a diverse team of other researchers and school practitioners, studied reform in twelve Chicago elementary schools. Each school was undergoing extensive reorganization in response to the Chicago School Reform Act of 1988, which called for greater involvement of parents and local community leaders in their neighborhood schools. Drawing on years longitudinal survey and achievement data, as well as in-depth interviews with principals, teachers, parents, and local community leaders, the authors develop a thorough account of how effective social relationships—which they term relational trust—can serve as a prime resource for school improvement. Using case studies of the network of relationships that make up the school community, Bryk and Schneider examine how the myriad social exchanges that make up daily life in a school community generate, or fail to generate, a successful educational environment. The personal dynamics among teachers, students, and their parents, for example, influence whether students regularly attend school and sustain their efforts in the difficult task of learning. In schools characterized by high relational trust, educators were more likely to experiment with new practices and work together with parents to advance improvements. As a result, these schools were also more likely to demonstrate marked gains in student learning. In contrast, schools with weak trust relations saw virtually no improvement in their reading or mathematics scores. Trust in Schools demonstrates convincingly that the quality of social relationships operating in and around schools is central to their functioning, and strongly predicts positive student outcomes. This book offer insights into how trust can be built and sustained in school communities, and identifies some features of public school systems that can impede such development. Bryk and Schneider show how a broad base of trust across a school community can provide a critical resource as education professional and parents embark on major school reforms. A Volume in the American Sociological Association's Rose Series in Sociology

Different Ways of Being an Educator

Different Ways of Being an Educator PDF Author: Ann Morgan Ph.D.
Publisher: Balboa Press
ISBN: 1504312066
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
The Different Ways of Being an Educator series highlights the shifts and movements educators make in a flexi school context. Flexi schools offer programs that are responsive to the needs of young people who face complexities in their lives that have created barriers to learning in conventional schools. Not all flexi schools are the same, but they have some common features and practice frameworks. In Relational Practicethe first in a three-book seriesthe author explores an educational model for those who seek to give disenfranchised young people access to safe and dynamic learning communities. Drawing on stories from experienced practitioners working with young people in flexi schools, the author shares insights about re-engaging young people and effective ways of working with colleagues in multidisciplinary teams. The concepts are presented in easy-to-access, clearly themed vignettes from educators. Each element is accompanied by questions that guide staff to engage in critical reflection individually, within teams, and with mentors and supervisors. For educators in any context, the series offers practical strategies and relational ways for educators to support young people to remain connected and engaged in learning at school.

Dimensions of Professional Learning

Dimensions of Professional Learning PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9087901259
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
The contributors to this volume explore challenges and dilemmas around professional learning that confront educators in Australia. The book is organised around three dimensions of professional learning: professionalism, identity formation and communal sites of professional learning. It addresses important questions. In what ways do policies and practices mediate the construction of ‘a professional’ among current and future educators? How do communal spaces shape the professional learning of educators? What are the tensions that emerge in the construction of professional identity through professional learning? As a whole, all chapters provide insight into the dynamic nature of ‘professional becoming’.

Being an Expert Professional Practitioner

Being an Expert Professional Practitioner PDF Author: Anne Edwards
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9048139694
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
Professionals deal with complex problems which require working with the expertise of others, but being able to collaborate resourcefully with others is an additional form of expertise. This book draws on a series of research studies to explain what is involved in the new concept of working relationally across practices. It demonstrates how spending time building common knowledge between different professions aids collaboration. The core concept is relational agency, which can arise between practitioners who work together on a complex task: whether reconfiguring the trajectory of a vulnerable child or developing a piece of computer software. Common knowledge, which captures the motives and values of each profession, is essential for the exercise of relational agency and contributing to and working with the common knowledge of what matters for each profession is a new form of relational expertise. The book is based on a wide body of field research including the author’s own. It tackles how to research expert practices using Vygotskian perspectives, and demonstrates how Cultural Historical and Activity Theory approaches contribute to how we understand learning, practices and organisations.

Relational Leadership in Education

Relational Leadership in Education PDF Author: David L. Giles
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429819137
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
When is leadership not relational? When is education not relational? When is life not relational? Relationships always matter to our living, educating and leading. Relational Leadership in Education considers this ‘Relational Leadership’ within the context of education, critiquing the current ideological ‘context’ and contemporary understandings of its influence. Employing a phenomenological approach, this book explores the relational nature of education, Relational Leadership, and the organizational culture to provide a more sophisticated exploration of practice-based wisdom. It offers an extensive range of activities for further thinking on the experiential nature of Relational Leadership, grouped around a number of themes: Relational Leadership and sensibilities; organizational culture; professional development; curriculum, pedagogy and assessment; and the reconstruction of a postgraduate Educational Leadership and Management programme for experienced, emergent and aspiring leaders. ‘Relational Leadership’ is not about describing yet another style of leadership but rather about a relational way of being in leadership that utilizes refined relational sensibilities. ‘Relational Leadership’ is also a reminder of what is critical in a leader’s practice — leadership is always relational, and relationships are the essence of leadership.

Guiding Professional Learning Communities

Guiding Professional Learning Communities PDF Author: Shirley M. Hord
Publisher: Corwin Press
ISBN: 141297271X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
This research-based sequel to Leading Professional Learning Communities focuses on the practical process of implementing, improving, and sustaining PLCs. Appropriate for groups at all stages of PLC development, this field book helps educators improve PLC operations by facilitating individual and group development and growth. The authors provide learning opportunities that generate conversations about adult learning and contribute to supportive conditions that strengthen teacher quality and raise student outcomes.