Promoting professional inquiry for improved outcomes for students in New Zealand

Increasing attention is being paid to professional development as a way to improve outcomes for students but its promise has not always been realised. Broadly speaking, approaches to professional development have either focused on developing better prescriptions for teaching practice or on collaborative reflective inquiry into practice. Neither approach has been particularly effective in achieving substantive improvement in student outcomes. In this paper, a third approach is described, one associated with substantive gains in student achievement on reading comprehension and the deeper features of writing in New Zealand. In essence, teachers are supported to identify their professional learning needs through an analysis of their students’ learning needs, to build their pedagogical content knowledge in sufficient depth to address their students’ learning needs and then to check both formally and informally whether their changed teaching practices are having the desired impact.

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