Teachers - Teaching and Learning Research Programme

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While not disagreeing with the kinds of analysis offered by the likes of McLauglin and
Fullan (1994; 1999), it is a characteristic of this approach that it seeks to create
‘professional communities of practice’ based on the belief that in the right conditions all
teachers will participate in reform. This view has been challenged by Goodson (2000)
who, in the face of similar evidence as that provided by Woods et al (1997) argues many
teachers now sustain their creativity by engaging in activities unrelated to teaching or
education. Although Fullan (1999: 4-6) argues that change is both complex and
evolutionary, neither he nor Mclaughlin have much to say about the processes by which
individual teachers move from mere awareness of reform to a point where they are
willing to forgo additional resources and work without the active support of colleagues in
their own school. In our work on clustering in small rural schools (Galton and
Hargreaves 1995) where some teachers, including headteachers, were reluctant to
collaborate for fear of losing autonomy in matters of resourcing and staffing, committed
teachers in the cluster initially formed the ‘community of practice’. Other teachers,
standing on the periphery of the reform, made decisions on the basis of their own selfinterests.
They viewed after school cluster planning meetings as a drain of their valuable
time and refused to attend. The bulk of teachers, in accepting there might be benefits in
clustering chose to concentrate on the practical problems of working together on common
curriculum tasks without being over-concerned with the consequences for pupil learning.
Only the committed teachers viewed the reform as an opportunity to promote pupils’
cognitive development. As Fullan (1999:47) observes, ‘the intellectual burgeoning of the
quality and depth of pedagogical knowledge and means of enhancing learning for all has
barely touched schools’. Moving teachers along the continuum that begins with ‘thinking
about self’ and moves through ‘thinking about tasks’ to ‘thinking about the child’ (Fuller
and Brown 1975) appears to be central to the creation of communities of practice capable
of sustaining change. As yet we know little of this developmental process.
Finally, I want to look at three projects which are part of the TLRP to explore how far
they incorporate the criteria set out by McLaughlin. A summary is presented in Table 2.
The first of these projects is the one in which I am involved with Peter Blatchford and
Peter Kutnick. It is called the SPRING (Social Pedagogy Research into Grouping)
Project and seeks to explore ways of making classroom groups more effective to enhance