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Professional Learning

 

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_ English Teachers: a diverse community of learners Negotiating the sameness and the tensions Connections between professional and student learning communities What are pre-service teachers learning and how are they learning? Teachers learning how to know their students? Professional learning: obligation or accomplishment? school (university) stuff’ and ‘practical stuff’ Writing critically reflexive narratives as a focus for professional learning Critical inquiry as professional learning _ Page 11 _
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professional learning

connections between professional and student learning communities

Certainly, in any community of professional or pre-service English teachers, like any social group, this dynamic movement, this movement to and from sameness or diversity, is always present. An awareness of this dynamic might help to explain how any individual teacher or pre-service teacher responds to a professional learning situation. 

Here is one teacher’s explanation of these sorts of tensions in her own professional learning group:

We all had different degrees of strength [in our subject area]. But we had to get comfortable with each other and really put it on the line. Hey, we don’t really all know everything here. We are all going to approach these problems differently. And recognise that there is a parallel to what our kids are going through.

quoted in Teachers caught in the action: Professional development that matters,

(2001, p. 39)

 

As this teacher suggests, English and literacy teachers’ critical awareness of this in their own professional learning can have powerful benefits in the way they understand and deal with these tensions in the groups of students they teach.

 

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_ English Teachers: a diverse community of learners Negotiating the sameness and the tensions Connections between professional and student learning communities What are pre-service teachers learning and how are they learning? Teachers learning how to know their students? Professional learning: obligation or accomplishment? school (university) stuff’ and ‘practical stuff’ Writing critically reflexive narratives as a focus for professional learning Critical inquiry as professional learning _ Page 11 _
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