This book explores teacher workplace learning from four different perspectives: social policy, international comparators, multi-professional stances/perspectives and socio-cultural theory. First, it considers the policy and practice context of professional learning in teacher education in England, and the rest of the UK, with particular reference to professional masters level provision. The importance of teachers’ and schools’ perceptions of improvement, development and learning, and the inherent tensions between individual, school and government priorities is explored. Second, the book considers models of teacher workplace learning to be found in international research and practice to explore what perspective they can bring to understanding policy and practice relating to workplace learning in the UK. Third, it draws on cross-professional analysis to get an intellectual and theoretical purchase on workplace learning by examining how insights from across the professions can provide us with useful perspectives on policy and practice. The analysis draws particularly on insights from medicine and educational psychology. Fourth, the book cross-fertilises research and practice across the field of education by drawing on insights from perspectives such as socio-cultural and activity theory and situated learning/cognition to discover what they can offer in analysing the theoretical and pedagogic underpinnings of teacher workplace learning. In short, the book offers a number of contexts for exploring how best to conceptualise and theorise learning in the workplace in order to generate evidence to inform policy and practice and facilitates the development of a more theoretically informed and robust model of workplace learning and teaching.

The Realities of Teacher' Work: Never a Dull Moment follows the fortunes of the teachers at Hillview Primary School over ten years. It explores what it is like to be a primary or elementary school teacher in an urban school with about 200 children, mixed in social class and ethnicity, and suggests what we may learn from them for the future.Sandra Acker links her research with other literature on teachers' work, and describes the school as a workplace, focusing on four key features: the characteristics of the children, the school's physical setting, the available resources, and the ethos of the school.She successfully places us in the classroom giving vivid images of daily interactions with the children, and shows too how teaching extends far beyond the classroom door. The book explores the caring culture that has developed among the teachers and helps them to cope with the difficulties they encounter. It also considers the school as located in the wider community by looking at changes in teachers' careers over time and the effects on Hillview of recent educational reform.This book shows us how and why we need to revise our assumptions about schools and teachers and see them not as isolated individuals in closed classrooms and self-contained schools, but as an integral part of a much broader community. Above all, it shows that teaching is hard, demanding work that is influenced by workplace cultures and the gendered expectations society holds about teachers.

Teacher professionalism in changing times -- Professional identities : teaching as emotional work -- Commitment as a key to quality : variations in teachers' work and lives -- A capacity for resilience -- Teachers' professional learning and development : combining the functional and attitudinal -- Learning as a school-led social endeavour -- The importance of high quality leadership -- Understanding complexity, building quality

This book advances an alternative reading of the social, political and cultural issues surrounding schools and technology and develops a comprehensive overview of the interplay between policy, practice and identity in school workplaces. It explores how digital technologies have become an integral element of the politics and socially negotiated practices of school workplaces as school campuses are now awash with digital hardware and growing amounts of school work is carried out on a 'virtual' basis.

Schools are places of learning but they are also workplaces, and teachers are employees. As such, are teachers more akin to professionals or to factory workers in the amount of control they have over their work? And what difference does it make? Drawing on large national surveys as well as wide-ranging interviews with high school teachers and administrators, Richard Ingersoll reveals the shortcomings in the two opposing viewpoints that dominate thought on this subject: that schools are too decentralized and lack adequate control and accountability; and that schools are too centralized, giving teachers too little autonomy. Both views, he shows, overlook one of the most important parts of teachers' work: schools are not simply organizations engineered to deliver academic instruction to students, as measured by test scores; schools and teachers also play a large part in the social and behavioral development of our children. As a result, both views overlook the power of implicit social controls in schools that are virtually invisible to outsiders but keenly felt by insiders. Given these blind spots, this book demonstrates that reforms from either camp begin with inaccurate premises about how schools work and so are bound not only to fail, but to exacerbate the problems they propose to solve.

Extended critical case studies provide a tangible working expression of the labour process of teaching, showing how teachers are simultaneously experiencing significant changes to their work, as well as responding in ways that actively shape these processes. For teachers and researchers, this book shows what processes are at work in the global economy which impact on, and sometimes control, the role of the teacher. It also reveals how teachers accommodate, resist or redefine their working circumstances, and explores methods researchers might employ in order to increase our understanding and knowledge of the effect of globalization on teaching.

Teachers' Work is a highly readable, penetrating and often amusing account of the reality of teachers working lives, as relevant to the profession and its future as it was when first published in 1985. Based on the classic Australian study of the schools and homes of the wealthy and powerful and of ordinary wage-earners described in Making the Difference, Teachers' Work draws on extended interviews with teachers in elite private schools and mainstream government high schools and with the students and parents who attend and patronise them. As well as providing an absorbing account of the life and work of teachers through vivid portraits of people, classrooms and staffrooms, Teachers' Work illuminates the interaction between personal relationships in the classroom and the social structures of gender and class. In generating new ways of thinking about the character and origins of inequality in education, this book gives teachers themselves cause for reflection, offers student-teachers a picture of the real world of teaching, and provides parents with an insight into daily life behind the classroom door. At a time when the power of 'effective teaching' is being widely recognised and national debate focuses on the condition and prospcts of the teaching profession, Teachers' Work is as insightful and rewarding as ever.

Being a teacher is often thought of as an emotionally fulfilling job, with many positive experiences in watching students grow and mature. However, as Tsang’s research shows, there are plenty of negative emotional experiences in this line of work as well. Given the recent attention towards mental health and well-being, this book addresses these negative experiences and provides recommendations for dealing with them. Focusing on teachers in Hong Kong, Tsang investigates the social mechanisms that arouse such negative emotional experiences, otherwise known as caam2. He asserts that these feelings are socially constructed, and it is only by understanding the causes and feelings can we begin to improve teachers’ emotional well-being and teaching quality. Using a theoretical framework based on a critical review and synthesis of five existing perspectives, including labor process perspective, school administration perspective, emotional labor perspective, social interaction perspective, and teacher identity perspective, Tsang does precisely that, exploring the social process of these emotional experiences and the interplay between teacher agency and social structure. These findings go a long way in ameliorating teacher experiences all over the world.

In the debate regarding what constitutes teachers’ work, academics and bureaucrats continue to speak for teachers, with teachers’ voices rarely heard and not accorded equal recognition. The Role of Research in Teachers’ Work addresses this imbalance by privileging teachers’ voices as they narrate their experiences of engaging in systematic inquiry. The book embeds the teacher narratives within the scholarly debates about the nature of knowledge and the nature of professional practice. Scanlon examines the knowledge teachers create through their research and how that knowledge is perceived by others within the school community. This book can be read as a companion volume to Scanlon’s 2015 Routledge publication My School, or as a standalone exploration of teachers’ own narratives of engaging in action research. Together, these two books are unique in contemporary writing on schools, representing one of the only comprehensive longitudinal studies of a low socioeconomic secondary school from the perspective of those who learn and teach therein. This book enables teachers to be part of the scholarly conversation about their work and the place of research in that work. As such, it should be essential reading for academics, teacher educators and postgraduates in the field of education. It should also be of interest to policymakers and teachers.

This book examines teachers’ work in the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, where educators grappled with a worldwide virus that profoundly affected teaching and learning. This difficult situation allowed educators and researchers to reflect critically on the enduring labor experiences that persist through this uncertain period, some of them rooted in conditions prevalent long before the pandemic hit. Written from a perspective that cuts across labor studies and education, the book explains how cultural and legally inscribed expectations of teachers have been remarkably impermeable over time. In particular, the volume focuses on the educational transformations that have taken place worldwide since the pandemic occurred, including reduced educational resources, labor strife, and contradictory governmental directives. As the book articulates, these changes affect some of the most persistent educational topics, including student achievement, student health, and teacher satisfaction.