Chapter 6 : Teacher Learning and the Acquisition of Professional Knowledge: An Examination of Research on Contemporary Professlonal Development

In the past 10 years, the calls for a commitment to teacher learning have increased exponentially, most likely from a confluence of forces. The standards movement is one such force. Calls for higher standards for teachers inevitably erupted alongside calls for higher standards for students. If students needed their education served up differently in order to meet new assessments and standards, it followed that teachers would need something new as well (e.g., Cohen & Ball, 1990). Reformers began to note that changed curriculum and testing would not directly lead to changed teaching practices. New measures of student performance would entail new ways of teaching. Professional development was touted as the ticket to reform. Mounting efforts to increase the professionalization of teaching constitutes yet another force. Groups such as the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (1989, 1991), the National Council of Teachers of English (1996), the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (1989), and the Interstate Consortium of Chief State School Officers (Council of Chief State School Officers, n.d.-a, n.d.b) have authored mission statements and subsequent standards for professional teachers and teaching. Professional teachers require professional development. Concurrent with this call for more professional development has been a call for more research on teacher learning. Yet, what the field ' 'knows'' about teacher learning is rather puzzling. In part, this is due to the scattered and serendipitous nature of teachers' learning. Beginning teachers take methods and foundations courses in education departments and subject matter courses in discipline departments. Sometimes they work in the field, sometimes in the university. And every school experience, whether it be in elementary or middle or high school, in a college or university, has the potential for teaching them lessons about what school is, what teachers do, and how people learn. Lortie's [1975] characterization of this curriculum as the "apprenticeship of observation" has been a major