Illuminating Teachers’ Informal Learning: Shaping Professional Development and Schooling Reform

The first is to describe an ongoing empirical research study (one subsection of the Work and Lifelong Learning—WALL network) designed to examine the ways in which elementary and secondary school teachers engage in their own professional learning “on the job” - both in formal contexts, but also importantly in their day-to-day “informal learning.” The first section of this paper describes and contex. [...] Focus on the interview data As stated above, most of the interviewees emphasized the importance of informal learning as an indispensable and an ongoing part of the work of teaching. [...] While the interviewer drew out this connection for some of the groups in the context of the obstacles to the teacher’s learning, the teachers seemed little interested in this “survival” aspect of learning across the wider dimensions of their work, 13 quickly refocusing their discussion to what they perceived as the needs of the classroom. [...] In the next sections the focus group interviews are scrutinized to attempt to make some generalized statements about the kinds of informal learning teachers are involved in, and value, in the context of professional development. [...] There is a wide spectrum of literature in the area 10 An absence for these researchers is the teacher-teacher dynamic (albeit embedded in the school culture) surfacing only obliquely in a few coded comments or in the body language of one teacher in listening to another in the interview sessions.