Research conducted by Henk van den Hurk shows that teachers’ knowledge of effective instructional behaviour is of limited influence on their actual performance in daily teaching. Observing teachers within their own educational practice and the subsequent feedback in teacher training college, however, has shown to be effective in improving teacher instructional practice. Van den Hurk studied the effects of the application of a cyclic model for data-feedback in initial teacher training as well as in a master course for teachers. In the applied model, teachers are observed with standardised observational instruments, while teaching their own classes. Back in teacher training college they are supported in formulating specific points of improvement for their own instructional behaviour. Subsequently, in their own classroom, the students practice the skills they further have to develop. After a short while another classroom observation is scheduled. The use of this model has proven to lead to a substantial improvement of teacher instructional behaviour. It is remarkable that advances in the quality of teacher instructional behaviour are reached in a limited time-span of only several weeks.
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Deze publicatie gaat over het leiderschap van leraren, internationaal aangeduid als ‘teacher leadership’. Leraren kunnen veel verschillende vormen van leiderschap uitoefenen. Persoonlijk leiderschap heeft bijvoorbeeldbetrekking op de mate waarin leraren regie over hun eigen werk en eigen ontwikkeling voeren. Pedagogisch leiderschap is de wijze waarop leraren in hun klas leiderschap richting hun leerlingen tonen en invloed uitoefenen op de leerprocessen van leerlingen. In voorliggende publicatie bedoelen we met ‘leiderschap van leraren’ of ‘teacher leadership’ de invloed die leraren uitoefenen op zaken die hun eigen klas of hun eigen vak overstijgen. Met dat leiderschap beïnvloeden ze collega’s, leidinggevenden en anderen binnen de school. Die invloed kan betrekking hebben op het curriculum, het handelen van collega’s, het pedagogisch klimaat binnen de school, het beleid en de organisatie vanzaken binnen en buiten de school, etc. Dat kan door ideeën te opperen, te ontwikkelen, te ondersteunen, te adviseren, te inspireren, rolmodel te zijn en nog op tal van andere manieren.In Nederland wordt in toenemende mate verwacht dat leraren de verantwoordelijkheid en leiding krijgen en nemen ten aanzien van cruciale aspecten van het onderwijs binnen scholen. Leraren moeten dan wel de mogelijkheden hebben om deze rol op zich te kunnen nemen (NRO, 2017). Dit was aanleiding voor het Nationaal Regieorgaan Onderwijsonderzoek om opdracht te geven tot het schrijven van een overzichtsartikel rond de vraag:Op welke manier(en) kan bereikt worden dat leraren een leidende rol kunnen spelen in individuele scholen (in alle onderwijssectoren), in samenwerkingsverbanden tussen scholen en op landelijk niveau?Voor het beantwoorden van deze vraag zijn we uitgegaan van vier deelvragen:1. Waarom is er in toenemende mate aandacht voor teacher leadership?2. Wat is teacher leadership precies?3. Wat is er uit onderzoek bekend over de effecten van en condities voor teacherleadership?4. Welke vormen van teacher leadership zijn er in de Nederlandse context reedszichtbaar?Op basis hiervan beantwoorden we de hoofdvraag:Hoe kan het leiderschap van leraren in scholen versterkt worden?Voor het beantwoorden van deze vijf vragen hebben we geput uit nationale en internationale praktijk- en beleidspublicaties, gebruik gemaakt van diverse overzichtsstudies en een systematische analyse gedaan van 44 onderzoekspublicaties over teacher leadership die tussen 2014 en 2017 zijn verschenen.
Situated learning plays a key role in internships and other practice-based learning settings in teacher education. The dominant assumption for a long time has been that the development of teaching competency is advanced most through practical teaching experience and post-lesson conferences between mentor and student teachers. It is through the reflection of teaching and classroom processes that student teachers are believed to develop their professional knowledge. The assistance of such reflection draws on mentor teachers’ teaching expertise. Mentor teachers, however, rarely explicate practical and theory-based knowledge underlying their practice and student teachers are not inclined to search for their mentor teacher’s underlying knowledge. As a consequence, the knowledge underlying effective teaching often remains implicit. The symposium brings together three novel approaches to assist teacher learning, which aim to make knowledge of teaching explicit. To bridge the gap between mentor and student teachers’ instructional concepts, the method of videobased tagging as a pre-requisite to initiate and structure professional dialogue is suggested and researched by van den Bogert, Crasborn, Bruggen and Eindhoven in The Netherlands. The second study by Staub, Waldis, Schatzmann and Futter investigates effects of an intervention with mentor teachers in Switzerland, suggesting the enactment of pre-lesson conferences and/or the use of a core concepts for lesson planning and reflection. A third study involving Germany and Switzerland by Kreis, Schnebel, Wyss, Wagner and Deiringer researches student teachers’ knowledge, beliefs and experiences related to collaborative lesson planning with peers. The shared assumption is that all three approaches enhance explicit communication on teaching and encourage professional dialogues that contribute to teacher learning in significant ways. Eliciting mentor and pre-service teachers’ practical knowledge using teacher-tagged classroom situations Bogert van den, Crasborn, Bruggen van & Jochems) Objectives The present study has a twofold objective. First, elicitation of mentor and pre-service teachers’ conceptualizations of videotaped classroom situations to clarify similarities and differences between practical knowledge of experienced and novice teachers. Second, exploration of ‘collaborative tagging’ as a new method to access mentors and pre-service teachers’ practical knowledge. Theoretical framework Teachers’ practical knowledge underlies overt teaching behavior, and is personal, unique, often tacit, and intertwined with teaching actions (Meijer, Verloop, & Beijaard, 2002). The ability to notice and interpret what is happening in a classroom is a basic aspect of teachers’ practical knowledge (Goodwin, 1994). Experienced teachers are more proficient in this essential perceptional process than novice teachers (Berliner, 2001; Sabers, Cushing, & Berliner, 1991). Consequently, proficient teachers may facilitate the professional development of novices. However, mentor teachers rarely explicate practical knowledge underlying their teaching practice (Edwards & Protheroe, 2004), and most pre-service teachers are not inclined to search for their mentor teacher’s practical knowledge (Penny, Harley, & Jessop, 1996). Hence, in this study we explored ‘collaborative tagging’ (Mika, 2005): a method where many people independently attach keywords called tags to e.g. videos, for categorization and fast future retrieval. Collaborative tagging has gained popularity since 2004 (Hammond, Hannay, Lund, & Scott, 2005), indicating the willingness and ease with which this activity is undertaken. In other studies (Cattuto, Benz, Hotho, & Stumme, 2008; Mika, 2005) network analysis of the co-occurrence of tags revealed the semantic relationships between the tags; a bottom-up taxonomy, or a so called folksonomy (Vander Wal, 2004). In this study, collaborative tagging was applied to explore the structure of teachers’ knowledge and compare conscious aspects of mentor and pre-service teachers’ practical knowledge. The main research questions were: • Which concepts do mentor- and pre-service teachers use to tag videotaped classroom situations? • To what extent do the generated tags and the relations between them differ between mentor- and pre-service teachers? • To what extent is collaborative tagging is helpful in gaining access to conscious aspects of mentors and pre-service teachers’ practical knowledge? Method Participants were 100 mentor-teachers and 100 pre-service teachers. The participants each ‘tagged” five video-fragments of different classroom situations. Data were analyzed with UCINET software as proposed by Mika (2005). Co-occurrences of tags were computed. Familiar measures of social network analysis (e.g. clustering coefficients, and (local) betweenness centrality) were used to describe each folksonomy, and to compare pre-service and mentor teachers’ networks of tags. Results and significance The study established that tagging is a promising new method to elicit teachers’ practical knowledge. The resulting folksonomies clarified similarities and differences between mentors’ and pre-service teachers’ practical knowledge. Results indicate that experienced teachers use more detailed and specific tags than pre-service teachers. This method makes a significant contribution to the methodology of the study of teachers’ practical knowledge. Folksonomies not only elicit individual teachers’ practical knowledge but enable researchers to discern common element’s in teachers’ practical knowledge. Moreover, in teacher education, folksonomies are helpful to initiate and structure professional dialogue between pre-service and mentor teachers.
