Welcome to Teacher Learning
We want to generate interest in ideas that rethink education: to show how teachers can learn to become authorities of their own practice. We must reclaim our profession!
In order to achieve this, we aim to clearly articulate ideas represented on this website from authors willing to share them and promote a disciplined and respectful discussion about them. From our many years of experience in education we also hope to show how ideas become manifest in practice itself so that the critical processes of reflection and theorising do not take place in isolation. It is only through this process that change can be enacted and understood, unintended consequences can be identified and ultimately continue our learning and development at all times.
In order to achieve this, we want to test, modify and validate ideas represented on this website; then to share them, and ultimately to help ensure that people have the best start in life, to then enjoy their lives, solve problems and contribute to society in the best ways they can. We want to work at very least on an individual level. If we can work at a national level too, that would be ideal.
Openly examine actual events from individuals, classrooms, departments, schools and at macro-policy level.
Suggest, discuss and test possible changes and reorientations that may challenge the current system and the thinking that may go with it.
We are part of a group of teachers who are keen to understand learning on a social and cultural level both at the level of the teacher’s own professional development and at the level of pupils’ learning. This necessitates changes to what we need to focus on in thinking about learning. For example, rather than exclusive recognition of learning from results or performance outcome measures, it requires us to focus much more on the activity pupils participate in and what they learn from it, which will almost always be a combination of what the teacher intends and other unintentional learning. It also requires us to consider what pupils learn tacitly and collectively as a result of activity rather than an exclusive focus on what is learned individually and explicitly.
We aim therefore to explore common dilemmas, theory and research, approaches to teaching, classroom encounters, and policy decisions at whatever level and highlight their actual effects, for good or ill, in schools and classrooms; and provide from this valuable learning for teachers to develop and reinvigorate their practice.
Meet the founding contributors
Both moderators have taught secondary school subjects in comprehensive schools in the NW of England and Wales.
Mike Bird
Over the 25 years of his career in education, Mike's experience has been varied and diverse, having been gained from a number of different national contexts, educational age-phases, and from a variety of roles. This includes working in schools in Germany, and Japan as well as in England. Developing his understanding of and expertise within each of these contexts has required him to be adaptable and enabled him to appreciate the complex and situated nature of teachers’ professional learning. Reflective interplay between practice, theory and research has been a vital underpinning feature of his own professional transformation and given him a high level of insight into both how individual practitioners learn and how educational institutions become learning organisations.
Nick McDonald
Nick worked in manufacturing industry where he discovered that learning and understanding of processes were critical to making the right decisions and achieving goals. He sought the opportunity to make an earlier and bigger impact earlier in people's lives - by teaching in secondary schools, through the medium of mathematics. He studied the processes of teaching and learning, with a group of like-minded colleagues who all wanted to improve their practice - necessary to become professionals. He found that the same principles behind the improvement of teaching are applicable to organisational and business performance. He remains passionate about the value of education, continuing to work on educational change for the benefit of his own children, for society and to reclaim the profession.
Our collaboration originated from involvement in research and development in a school in which we were both working for a period of 5 years. We and others who were involved in this ‘R and D group’ set out to become authorities of our own practice, and more sensitive and resilient teachers. This website is a continuation of this mission and an invitation to others to get involved.