Professional Life Phase Models as Lens to Understand Teachers' Professional Learning: Using a Card-Sorting Task

• In Event: Professional Lives and Career Challenges for Teachers and Teacher Educators: An International Perspective

Abstract

Models of professional life phases integrate teachers’ professional, personal and contextual lives to understand teachers’ development (Day, Sammons, Stobart, Kington & Gu, 2007; Fessler & Christensen, 1992; Huberman, 1993). Teachers in different phases of their career can vary in their approach to choosing their learning goals (Feiman-Nemser, 2001). In this study we explored the professional concerns underlying teacher's learning goals in order to understand variations in professional learning over a teacher’s career. Professional concerns reflect themes that matter most to teachers in their professional lives. We used models of professional life phases to identify themes teachers might be concerned with in light of their professional learning. Our research question was: How can teachers’ learning goals be understood from their current professional concerns?

The first author spent four months in one Dutch secondary school to become acquainted with the school context and teachers’ day-to-day working lives. During this time, she observed lessons of 30 teachers and had informal conversations in the staff room. Of these 30 teachers, 15 teachers, varying in teaching experience (1 to 34 years), were invited to participate in an interview study. The study consisted of two interviews; one semi-structured interview about their learning goals and one interview using a card-sorting task. On the basis of three professional life phase models with different aims and backgrounds (Day et al., 2007; Fessler & Christensen, 1992; Huberman, 1993), phases of concerns (Fuller, 1969) and a model of teacher expertise (Berliner, 2001), we elicited 33 themes, which were printed on cards to be used in the card-sorting task (Author, 2017). These themes were selected on the basis of our expectation that teachers would react differently to them in different phases of their professional lives and hence their response to these cards would reflect their professional concerns. Example themes included; focus on self during teaching (Berliner, 2001; Fuller, 1969), changes in tasks and responsibilities (Day et al., 2007), and searching for new challenges (Huberman, 1993). For data analysis we paired teacher’s top-five card selection with their professional learning goals to understand how their current professional concerns were related to their professional learning.

The findings show that teachers’ learning goals can be understood from professional concerns through three different ways: a) learning something that is always important to teachers and closely related to their deep intrinsic values, b) learning for personal growth and improvement of current (teaching) skills, and c) managing work practices. We labelled these continuous, growth and improvement, and work-management pairs, respectively. Especially teachers’ continuous pairs (mainly among mid- and late-career teachers) seem to be the drivers of their permanent investment in improving their teaching.

In the presentation the authors will highlight findings from the card-sorting interview where teachers’ responses to four professional life phase themes (‘cards’) varied greatly for teachers with varying teaching experience. These four themes were ‘workload’, ‘commitment to school’, ‘teacher identity’ and ‘school innovation’. These themes will be discussed through combining teachers’ personal, contextual and professional lives.

Author

• Monika Leonie Louws, Utrecht University