Patterns in teacher learning in different phases of the professional career

Abstract

This paper reviews recent research on learning patterns of student teachers and experienced teachers, mostly in the context of educational innovation and teachers' professional development. The discussion is structured along a model of teacher learning patterns comprising learning activities, regulation of learning, beliefs on own learning about teaching, motivations to learn about teaching, learning outcomes, and personal and contextual factors. A learning pattern is conceived as a coherent whole of learning activities that learners usually employ, their beliefs about own learning and their learning motivation; a whole that is characteristic of them in a certain period. Patterns in teacher learning across studies are identified and problematic aspects of teacher learning are discussed. It is concluded that teachers differ in the learning patterns they adopt, and that these patterns differ with regard to the quality of teacher learning and professional development in the context of adaptation to educational change and innovations. Implications for fostering teacher learning are derived.

Introduction

It is not easy to be a contemporary teacher. Students have become more mature and their backgrounds are more diverse than ever. Through the internet, information is readily available and teachers no longer know everything better than students. Perspectives on good teaching and good education are shifting. School and university boards want to create a distinct profile for their institute with new educational concepts. For many disciplines, new teaching methods are being developed in line with new pedagogies. Parents and students have become critical educational consumers. Too many students are not reached by regular education and drop out without any qualifications. Teachers are expected to keep up with all these developments and respond to them in their teaching. In order to do this they need to keep on learning themselves throughout their professional career (Beijaard et al., 2007, Borko, 2004, Lieberman and Pointer Mace, 2008).

The aim of this paper is to review the existing literature on how teachers learn in different phases of their professional career. We will do this from a certain perspective, concentrating on the learning activities teachers employ. This means that we deviate in at least two respects from existing literature: (1) in most of the literature on teacher learning and workplace learning, ‘learning activities’ are conceptualised as observable, overt activities, like reading, taking part in professional development activities, working together, etc.; and (2) most of the literature on teacher learning and workplace learning is prescriptive, in the sense that models are presented about how teachers should learn best (Clarke and Hollingsworth, 2002, Hodkinson and Hodkinson, 2005, Rathgen, 2006). In this paper, we adopt an approach developed in our research on student learning: we include covert (mental) as well as overt activities, aiming to understand how teachers learn in more or less natural settings before we intervene with prescriptive advice. In our view theories about how to promote teacher learning should be based on sound scientific knowledge and models about how teachers learn naturally. By connecting the research field on teacher learning with that on student learning, we hope to bridge two research fields that, surprisingly, have not been firmly linked so far.

Research into student learning over the last decades has repeatedly shown the existence of qualitatively different patterns in the way students learn (Entwistle and McCune, 2004, Lonka et al., 2004, Richardson, 2000). Reproduction-directed learning means that students try to remember subject matter thoroughly and in detail, so they will be able to reproduce it in an exam. In meaning-directed learning, students adopt a deep approach: they try to discover relationships within the subject matter, to get an overview, to be critical and to understand the meaning of what they read, see and hear as much as possible. Students who learn in an application-directed way try to imagine the subject matter concretely and think about how it can be used in practice. Undirected learning means that students do not know how to learn appropriately for the studies they are doing (see, for example, Vermunt & Vermetten, 2004).

These student learning patterns are characterised by strong relationships between learning behaviour, knowledge and beliefs about learning, and learning motivation. In general, we conceive a learning pattern as a coherent whole of learning activities that learners usually employ, their beliefs about own learning and their learning motivation; a whole that is characteristic of them in a certain period. A learning pattern is thus a coordinating concept, in which the interrelationships between cognitive, affective and regulative learning activities, beliefs about learning and learning motivations are united (Vermunt, 1996, Vermunt, 1998). In our earlier studies, we called these patterns ‘learning styles’. The disadvantage of the term ‘style’ was that many people associated it with unchangeability, an invariant personal attribute, deeply rooted in personality. Since our research group conceived learning style definitely not as an unchangeable personality attribute, but as the result of the interplay between personal and contextual influences (Vermunt, 1996, p. 29), from 2003 onwards we have been using the more neutral term learning ‘pattern’ for the same phenomenon we used to describe with learning ‘style’ before. Consequently, in this paper we will use the term ‘pattern’ in the meaning as described previously, both for students' learning as well as for teachers' learning.

A common feature of many contemporary educational innovations is that they concern the introduction of teaching-learning methods trying to promote active, meaning-directed, application-directed, self-regulated, and collaborative student learning. These kinds of innovations are supposed to foster knowledge acquisition in the sense of better recall, understanding, and application of knowledge, and to foster lifelong learning in the sense of going on with learning after formal schooling has come to an end. In many places such new forms of learning and teaching are introduced in secondary and higher education; for example, assignment-based teaching, problem-based learning, project-centred teaching, competency-based teaching, etc. (Vermunt, 2007). Important questions addressed in this paper are, among others: what does this evolution mean for the teachers who are supposed to put those teaching-learning methods into practice, and how do teachers differ in their handling of these educational reforms?

The roles that teachers are expected to fulfil in these diverse teaching-learning methods may vary considerably. In traditional teaching, teachers primarily have to be able to explain the subject matter well, regulate the learning of their students, and motivate students to learn. In assignment-based teaching, teaching skills include designing good assignments, giving feedback, coaching students, and getting students to work actively. In problem-based learning, the teacher fulfils roles as varied as tutor, skills trainer and assessor, problem designer, and block coordinator. Project-centred teaching presupposes that a teacher can supervise and guide project groups, encourage collaboration within groups, and make sure that all students contribute equally to the group products. In competency-based teaching, the teachers have to become career advisers, competency assessors, professional growth consultants and the like, whereas dual learning programmes call for teacher roles like mentor, portfolio adviser, authentic test designer, and the ability to clarify and guide student concerns. In all student-oriented forms of teaching, teachers should be able to act as diagnostician, challenger, model, activator, monitor, reflector and evaluator of students' learning processes (Vermunt & Verloop, 1999). In addition to all these roles, there may still be more, such as, for example, that of educational developer or e-learning consultant.

What student teachers should learn during teacher education is therefore dependent on the type of teaching-learning methods we educate them for. Educating teachers for competency-based teaching is different from educating them for traditional didactic teaching, although in both types of teaching teachers should, for example, be able to build up good interpersonal relationships with students (Den Brok, Brekelmans, & Wubbels, 2004). When experienced teachers are confronted with a change of the pedagogy of their institute, they are expected to change their way of teaching accordingly. They have to learn and develop on all components of the model of teaching that Shulman and Shulman (2004) developed: they have to develop a new view on teaching and student learning, be motivated to learn about the new ways of teaching, understand the concepts and principles on which the innovation is based, develop skills to translate the new way of teaching into practice, reflect on their experiments with the new pedagogy in order to learn, and form part of a community of teachers who are all learning new things.

There are many pedagogical approaches prescribing how teachers should learn. Empirical evidence of the effectiveness of these models is, however, scarce (Grossman, 2005). We believe that intervention models meant to foster teacher learning should be based on knowledge about how teachers learn in more or less natural settings. Therefore, in the next section we will review empirical studies on the issue of how teachers learn.