Praxis development remains invisible in many discussions of professional learning because professional educators take praxis development for granted as an indissoluble part of education and educational work. This special issue provides new insights into professional learning for praxis development, and about the conditions that enable and…

This conceptual paper discusses 'unseen observation' as an alternative model of classroom observation to support teachers' professional learning. The paper starts with a critical synopsis of how observation has been appropriated principally as a performance management tool for monitoring teacher effectiveness in the UK. It argues that the…

The dialogic teaching approach has been studied widely, both empirically and theoretically. However, despite four decades of research suggesting that dialogical interactions promote student learning, it has been very difficult to reflect this in practice. Teachers' professional development programmes oriented towards promoting dialogical…

School leaders in England have a huge task to mediate factors in a school's environment (regulatory/legal and institutional). Rapid and sometimes conflicting policy agendas for improved performance have become a main preoccupation of school leaders as they jostle to keep their jobs as they wrestle to implement the latest government mandate. As a…

Evaluations of professional development programmes often seek to represent definitive outcomes, with phenomena posited as discrete, bounded and independent entities, and researchers positioned as external actors. An alternative is to understand the complexity of these relationships as entanglements by applying Baradian concepts. The value of this…

Schools are sites of teachers' professional learning for both new entrants and experienced practitioners. In this paper, schools are conceptualised as complex, multidimensional ecologies that are constituted by the relations that exist between school leaders, teachers, mentors and all members of the school community. As relational environments,…

Much of the formal professional development teachers experience consists of short-term workshops that maintain -- rather than disrupt -- the systems of power that reproduce educational inequities. In response, some scholars have advocated critical professional development (PD) as a means of supporting teachers' interrogation of these inequities…

The current neoliberal political climate in education has narrowed the focus of teachers' professional development and reduced their work in the classroom to a simple and predictable process. In this article, we challenge this view by deploying a range of complexity thinking concepts to present an account of teachers as self-organising, inquiring,…

This article explores how ideas from complexity and ecological thinking have the potential to act as a conceptual lens to help us better understand, design and support teachers' long-term professional learning. Using primary physical education (PPE) as a curriculum context, the challenges of contemporary professional learning, particularly within…

With a continuing disconnect between structural changes to the work of teaching and the work of teachers engaged with students in classrooms, this paper addresses a growing need to attend to the way teacher professional development (TPD) is enacted in today's schools. Specifically, drawing from theories of teacher learning and numerous models of…

Since the 1980s, research about technological integration in education has relied on models that position teachers as inherently anxious and/or resistant. These models posit that the key to successful preparation and development is helping teachers accept that they must abandon their concerns and use these technologies regardless of personal and…

High-quality, evidence-based professional development is essential to ensure that teachers obtain the knowledge, strategies and skills necessary to positively impact student learning. While the primary form of professional development, training has rarely been evaluated for quality beyond the satisfaction of those being trained. The Observation…

The authors consider the recasting of teaching as leadership with reference to school principals or heads and claim that many women teachers decline such senior roles and instead prioritize an ethics of care in resistance to neoliberal performative educational cultures. A future-orientated poststructuralist version of authenticity or authentic…

Engagement in practitioner inquiry by classroom teachers is a promising mechanism for teacher professional learning. While much has been learned about the positive role inquiry can play in traditional professional development efforts, we know less about the impact of inquiry in a rapidly advancing technological age that includes the proliferation…

Teacher leadership has become an area of significant interest in research and policy terms in recent years. However, as a form of leadership it remains orthodox and conservative, rooted in largely traditional managerialist hierarchies, and disconnected from a critique of the wider policy imperatives that shape the contexts in which leadership is…