Supporting New Teachers as Designers of Learning

The aim of this study was to examine a professional learning intervention designed to support new teachers with implementing professional practice competencies. Partners from a school authority joined researcher-practitioners from a university to engage in designing a professional learning series for new teachers. A design-based research approach using quantitative (pre- and post-surveys) and qualitative data (artifacts of learning, field notes, classroom observations) were analyzed over one year. There were over 450 participants involved in the professional learning series. The findings indicated the professional learning intervention positioned new teachers as designers of learning engaging in continuous cycles of design–enactment–reflection and strengthened their pedagogical capacity to interconnect professional practice competencies with support from a community of learners. The findings from this study have implications for supporting new teachers during a period of induction and demonstrate one way to provide new teachers with the foundation for continual growth throughout their career.

Transforming Teacher Education Thinking: Complexity and Relational Ways of Knowing

In order that teacher education programs can act as significant scaffolds in supporting new teachers to become informed, creative and innovative members of a highly complex and valuable profession, we need to re-imagine ways in which teacher education programs operate. We need to re-imagine how courses are conceptualized and connected, how learning is shared and how knowledge, not just “professional”, but embedded knowledge in authentic contexts of teaching and learning is understood, shaped and re-applied. Drawing on our study of a locally developed program in secondary teacher education called Transformative University of Victoria (TRUVIC), we offer a relational approach to knowing as an alternative to more mechanistic explanations that limit teacher growth and development. To ground our interpretation, we draw on complexity theory as a theory of change and emergence that supports learning as distributed, relational, adaptive and emerging.