Module 4 Assignment 4.2: Write a Annotated Bibliography

Standards or communities of practice?

Competing models of workplace

learning and development

John Yandell *

and Anne Turvey Institute of Education, University of London, UK

(Submitted 28 January 2005; resubmitted 20 June 2005; re-resubmitted 31 October 2005;

accepted 4 November 2005)

Drawing on interview data derived from two case studies of teachers in their first year in the

profession, this article examines the difficulties that confront new teachers as they move from a

Postgraduate Certificate in Education course into their first teaching post. It questions the value of

those discursive practices, promulgated by the Teacher Training Agency through Qualifying to

teach, that construct teaching as a set of discrete competences or standards, and argues that Lave

and Wenger’s (1991) concepts of legitimate peripheral participation and communities of practice

are useful tools with which to analyse the sociocultural complexity of the new teachers’

experiences.

In this article, we use a case study approach to investigate the workplace-based

learning and development of newly qualified teachers. We consider the experiences

of two teachers in the context of national government policy. We counterpose the

standards model that this policy has enforced, in a way that has parallels in Australia,

Portugal, Thailand, Brazil and China as well as the United States (Beyer, 2002),

with the sociocultural, situated model of workplace learning proposed by Lave and

Wenger (1991).

In England, the training and induction of new teachers falls under the aegis of the

Teacher Training Agency (TTA). Established in 1994, the TTA has responsibility

not only for regulating the supply of new teachers but also for the oversight of both

initial and continuing professional development. Rebranded as the Training and

Development Agency, its role has been enlarged to encompass the training and

accreditation of the growing army of teaching assistants who have become a

significant part of the school landscape in the UK the past decade.

*Corresponding author. School of Culture, Language and Communication, Institute of

Education, University of London, 20 Bedford Way, London, WC1H 0AL, UK. Email:

[email protected]

British Educational Research Journal

Vol. 33, No. 4, August 2007, pp. 533–550

ISSN 0141-1926 (print)/ISSN 1469-3518 (online)/07/040533-18

# 2007 British Educational Research Association

DOI: 10.1080/01411920701434052

Central to the TTA’s intervention as gatekeeper to the teaching profession has

been the establishment of published, explicit, statutorily enforced standards. The

role of the teacher has thus been conceptualised as a list of competences: this model

informs Qualifying to teach, the document published jointly by the Department for

Education and Skills and the Teacher Training Agency, which sets out the standards

‘which must be met by trainee teachers before they can be awarded Qualified

Teacher Status (QTS)’ (DfES/TTA, 2003). Qualifying to teach encourages the view

that the acquisition of professional and pedagogical knowledge and expertise is

reducible to a set of separate—or at least separable—standards: ‘Only those trainee

teachers who have met all the Standards will be awarded QTS’ (DfES/TTA, 2003).

It is emphasised that the Standards ‘apply to all trainee teachers’ and that they ‘are a

rigorous set of expectations and set out the minimum legal requirement’ (DfES/

TTA, 2003, p. 4). Such statements have been influential in determining the ways in

which the Standards have been interpreted and mediated by initial teacher education

(ITE) institutions and other providers, whose concern to demonstrate compliance

has tended to lead to a mechanistic assessment of trainees against each individual

Standard.

A similar model informs the use of a Career Entry and Development Profile (TTA,

2003), the portfolio that newly qualified teachers carry with them from their initial

training to their first teaching post:

During the induction period, newly qualified teachers can build on the strengths

identified in their initial teacher training (ITT), and work on the areas which they and

those working with them have highlighted as priorities for future professional

development. (DfES/TTA, 2003, p. 3)

The profile of the new teacher is one of context-independent strengths and

weaknesses. Development is thus to be seen in relation to the absolute scale of the

Standards and is primarily the responsibility of the individual teacher. The new

teacher’s professional identity, then, is conceptualised as being both as stable and as

portable as the portfolio that they carry with them to their first teaching post.

The model of teachers’ professionality as a set of isolable individual attributes,

measurable against a fixed scale of competences or standards, is one that has gained

considerable currency in the discursive arena of education policy. Yinger and

Hendricks-Lee argue for ‘standards as a powerful tool in the development of

teaching as a profession,’ see virtue in their expression of ‘simple, desirable

statements of goals and outcomes,’ and celebrate the ‘abstract, decontextualized,

almost inarguable nature of standards’ (Yinger & Hendricks-Lee, 2000, pp. 94, 95,

99). For Wise and Leibbrand, the standards agenda in the USA offers the

opportunity to align accreditation with results—‘results that demonstrate that the

teacher candidate knows the subject matter and can teach it effectively so that

students learn’ (Wise & Leibbrand, 2001, p. 249).

The standards model has also attracted a great deal of critical analysis. Cochran-

Smith (2004) cautions against the easy equation of what is taught with what is

learned and against a narrowing conception of the teacher’s role. Beyer (2002) casts

doubt on the ‘technical-rational-behaviorist approach’ on which standards-based

534 J. Yandell and A. Turvey

teacher education is premised, while Delandshere and Petrosky challenge ‘the

assumption that knowledge is a commodity that can be objectified, represented in

the form of standards, and measured in terms of immediately visible outcomes

(2004, p. 5). Both Korthagen (2004) and Bullough et al. (2003) voice similar

concerns that ‘Complexity in the education of teachers is denied in an ill-fated quest

for certainty and uniformity of outcomes’ (Bullough et al., 2003, p. 49), while Blake

and Lansdell argue that ‘The ‘‘standards’’ may be too discrete, losing sight of the

wholeness of teaching performance’ (Blake & Lansdell, 2000, p. 64).

All of these critiques of standards-based approaches focus attention on what tends

to become prioritised and what becomes marginalised—on the redefinition of what is

involved in the business of teaching, as it were. A second strand of analysis has

directed attention towards the abstracting, decontextualising effect of the standards.

Apple expresses concern at ‘the dismissal of any types of situation-specific and

qualitative understanding that is grounded in the lived experience of teachers in real

schools (Apple, 2001, p. 188). Furlong et al. make a similar point:

in real life a competence can be applied only within specific contexts. These will vary

considerably according to circumstances, and in order to perform successfully a

practitioner needs to be able to respond to new situations in a way that goes beyond a

decontextualised set of practised procedures. (2000, p. 108)

At the same time that the competences or standards model has attained a dominant

position within official, policy-oriented discourse, there has been sustained interest

in accounts of work-related training and workplace-based learning that have

emphasised the situated, context-specific nature of development. Lave and Wenger’s

(1991, 1998) work has been influential in this respect, particularly in their

articulation of three key interlinked concepts: situated learning, legitimate peripheral

participation, and communities of practice (for evidence of Lave and Wenger’s

influence within the field of teacher education, see, for example, Banks et al., 1999;

Drever & Cope, 1999; Fox, 2000; Maynard, 2001; Fuller et al., 2005). Apprentices

or newcomers are positioned as legitimate peripheral participants in communities of

practice: they work alongside, and learn from, their more experienced colleagues, the

‘old timers’. In Lave and Wenger’s accounts of workplace learning, attention is paid

to the importance of learning by doing, of embedded, context-specific knowledge

and of narrative as a significant means whereby knowledge is socially distributed.

There is a recognition, too, of the fact that communities of practice may be more or

less stable, more or less resistant to change, and that the relationship between ‘old

timers’ and newcomers may be more or less dialectical. The model of learning that

Lave and Wenger developed is explicitly counterposed to practices of explicit

instruction within formal educational contexts; more than this, though, as Fuller

et al. (2005, p. 50) acknowledge, their intention was to develop a fully social, situated

theory of learning in opposition to theories which located learning in the individual

and which conceptualised the process of learning as the individual’s acquisition of

context-free knowledge. It is this sociocultural perspective on learning which

encouraged us to make use of Lave and Wenger’s model in our own research on the

development of professional knowledge among new teachers.

Standards or communities of practice? 535

The research project

Together with two other colleagues who teach with us on the English and English

with Drama Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) course at the Institute of

Education, we have been engaged in a small-scale research project, funded by the

TTA, to investigate the development of teachers’ professional knowledge in their

first years in teaching. 1

The research was conducted through a series of semi-structured interviews with

English teachers in their first two years of teaching, together with lesson

observations. Reference was also made to some of the writing that had been done

by the teachers in our sample during their PGCE year. Each of the teachers was

interviewed twice, once near the start and then again towards the end of the school

year. After the first round of interviews, full transcripts were read and discussed by

the four researchers. Common themes and further questions were identified, which

were then pursued in the second round of interviews. This process enabled us to

produce a series of case studies generated by the specific, subjective narratives of the

new teachers, accounts that were analysed and interpreted by a group of researchers,

all of whom had a long-standing interest in the development of teachers’ professional

knowledge.

To represent the research in this way is, however, to misrepresent it: what is left

out of the picture is the extent to which the researchers were implicated in the

development of the six teachers in our sample. All the new teachers had completed

their PGCE at the Institute; all had taken jobs in partnership schools—that is,

schools where PGCE students were placed on periods of practical teaching

experience (teaching practice). At the time the project data were being gathered,

one member of the research team (John Yandell) was working part-time in the same

school as one of the new teachers in the sample (Jude). 2

One obvious and marked

effect of this was that the research was informed by a great deal of local knowledge:

knowledge of the particular institutions in which the new teachers were working, and

knowledge of their colleagues. More specifically, the fact that the new teachers

already knew their interviewers and had already established other professional

relationships with them inevitably affected the dynamic of the interviews, and the

content and shaping of the interview material. We return to the relationship of

interviewer and interviewee later in this article; for the moment, though, it is

important, particularly given our interest in a model of situated, context-specific

learning, to register the multiple nature of our connections with the teachers and

school settings that were the immediate focus of our research.

The case study methodology that we have adopted is one that, following Freebody

(2003), entails a recognition that:

teachers are always teaching some subject matter, with some particular learners, in

particular places and under conditions that significantly shape and temper teaching and

learning practices. These conditions are not taken to be ‘background’ variables, but rather

lived dimensions that are indigenous to each teaching–learning event. In that important

respect, case studies show a strong sense of time and place; they represent a commitment

to the overwhelming significance of localized experience. (Freebody, 2003, p. 81)

536 J. Yandell and A. Turvey

In this article, we want to focus on two of the teachers, Sarah and Jude. Both women

were in their first year of teaching at the time when the research was undertaken.

Both were working in co-educational, ethnically diverse comprehensive schools in

inner London. What emerged in the course of the research project was just how

different were the two teachers’ conceptions of teaching, of their role and identity as

teachers—and how different their experiences as newly qualified teachers were. In

juxtaposing the two case studies, we hope that the contrasts between them will help

to illuminate what is peculiar to each, while also suggesting something of the

spectrum of possible experiences and responses to those experiences that might be

taken to be characteristic of new teachers more generally. In exploring aspects of

these two case studies, we want to draw attention to what seems to us to be most

problematic about the model of development promoted by the standards/

competence approach of the TTA, which we contrast with Lave and Wenger’s

model of situated learning in communities of practice.

In adopting this approach, we would want to recall Kathy Carter’s advocacy of

narrative as a research method, particularly in relation to the study of teachers and

their development:

Stories became a way … of capturing the complexity, specificity, and interconnected-

ness of the phenomenon with which we deal and, thus, redressed the deficiencies of the

traditional atomistic and positivistic approaches in which teaching was decomposed into

discrete variables and indicators of effectiveness. (Carter, 1993, p. 6)

Our case studies are not narratives, in any straightforward sense, although the

interviews can be seen as containing narratives contextualised in conversation. But

we are also mindful of Carter’s comments (1993, p. 10) on the unequal power

relationships of research, of the issues of who gets to tell the story, and of the

inevitability of acts of interpretation of the complex phenomena that are the stuff of

the interviews we conducted.

Two case studies: Sarah and Jude

Interviewed at the end of her first half-term at Albion School, Sarah was clearly

preoccupied with issues of classroom management. Such concerns, it would be

reasonable to assume, are common to many new teachers (see, for example, Revell,

2005). The problem for Sarah is that these issues loom so large that they blot out any

other focus for reflection. More than this, though, the concentration on classroom

management entails a deficit view of Sarah’s role and her place within the

school: these are the things she cannot do, or at least cannot do as proficiently as

her colleagues. Sarah compares herself unfavourably with the more experienced

Lynn:

One teacher I observed at the end of last term is Lynn and she’s amazing. She seems to

have good discipline and they get on with the work.

But this observation does not help Sarah; rather, it enforces a sense of her own

inadequacy. The opportunity to observe a more experienced colleague merely

Standards or communities of practice? 537

emphasises the difference between Lynn’s practice and Sarah’s own: amazement,

rather than imitation, is the product. It is not so much that she is left without models

or advice, but turning the advice into successful strategies is problematic:

Shereen’s been quite good about trying to pass on to me her systems … A kid swore at

me and Shereen said just get him straight out but you try and do that! You say, ‘Right

get out of my classroom.’ ‘No,’ and you put him in detention and he doesn’t turn up

and you’re made to look a fool … There is a problem with the top-down system that

works here.

The ‘top-down system’ enforces Sarah’s place at the bottom of the hierarchical

organisation of the school. When those in positions of greater authority intervene,

the effect is, at best, a temporary amelioration—but one that is bought at the cost of

emphasising even more clearly Sarah’s own powerlessness:

Sarah: … but with this class I can’t have them in groups ... it doesn’t work in groups.

There’s just absolutely no way you can have group work. I tried, really: I mixed up the

groups. I let them choose who they worked with. I numbered them off—1, 2, 3, 4 and

nothing really worked. I had pair work and—

AT: Was that better?

Sarah: Well, it was better—well, no, it wasn’t. It lasted for a double and by the end they

hadn’t really done anything much. So the year head read the riot act to them and all that

shit and we did a bit of work in the last 10 minutes of the lesson. It’s just … I don’t know

… There’s just no expectation that they should work in English. No expectation that

they should sit where I ask or that I’m even there some days.

What the preoccupation with behaviour also does is to alter Sarah’s sense of the

students whom she teaches. Like her, they become defined by deficit, by the respect

they fail to show, by the expectations they fail to live up to:

I’ve asked myself, what have I have done wrong and what is fundamentally wrong with

the class. … I don’t feel, I don’t feel I have a relationship with them. I totally agree that

you don’t want children to like you … but I do want there to be … ultimately, I want

there to be a culture of respect and understanding.

It is worth teasing out some of the tensions that are embedded in Sarah’s language

here. Is her concern about the students’ lack of respect for their own learning, for the

subject that she is teaching them—or for her as their teacher? The ambiguity might

be taken to indicate the degree to which Sarah has identified herself with her subject:

an attack on one involves an attack on the other, as school subject and teacher’s

subjectivity merge into one. On the other hand, Sarah’s sense of being on the outside

is communicated in the use of pronouns when she talks about the systems of

support:

They ARE a team. They do support what you do. You’re never criticised for what

you’ve done as a teacher in terms of your sanctions. You are backed up.

The systems of support are real, but their effect is not what is intended. Sarah

conceptualises the school as other—not a community of which she might be a part.

Even very specific pieces of advice don’t seem to work:

538 J. Yandell and A. Turvey

One thing [Lynn] advised me to do is to follow everything up: if you say you’re going to

do something, like phone home, you have to do it. So they know, if you do this, this will

happen; if you do this and so on. It’s clear. So there’s been a lot of advice from teachers

about picking everything up. But I’ve found it’s virtually impossible to follow everything

up because … well, there’s just so much! And for me it’s incredibly difficult, this fairness

thing, on the board, say. … The names you are gonna put on the board are those six

kids who are disrupting everything and they’re the ones in the school who have all this

attitude talk-back problem like: ‘Oh miss that’s not fair! They were talking and you

haven’t put their names on the board. Not fair. Racist, racist, racist; sexist, sexist,

sexist!’ and then you’ve just started something else!

Following everything up only works strategically: in other words, it only works if you

are well established, already confident enough of your place in the community of

practice to decide which things you are really going to follow up. And if you are

already perceived by the students to be a part of the school community—an effective

or respected part—then following things up will confirm this impression of you. By

taking the advice literally, Sarah makes it unworkable (and creates far more work—

and more demoralising work—for herself). Because she cannot follow everything up,

she confirms—to herself and to the students—the sense that she doesn’t (yet)

belong.

In the course of this first interview, Sarah provides a highly significant insight into

where things went wrong. She has, in a sense, been guided—and even, perhaps, led

astray—by that way of looking at a teacher’s role that conceptualises it as a list of

competences.

Within the Standards as outlined in Qualifying to teach, there is a section on

‘Teaching and class management.’ Standard S3.3.3 outlines the expectation that

those awarded QTS must demonstrate that:

They teach clearly-structured lessons or sequences of work which interest and motivate

pupils … (DfES/TTA, 2003, p. 13)

Standard 3.3.9 addresses another aspect, namely, the requirement that:

They [those awarded QTS] set high expectations for pupils’ behaviour and establish a

clear framework for classroom discipline to anticipate and manage pupils’ behaviour

constructively, and promote self-control and independence. (DfES/TTA, 2003, p. 13).

For newly qualified teachers, the TTA provides a further set of standards, the

Induction Standards, which elaborate on the standards required for the award of

qualified teacher status. Although the guidance on ‘Teaching: securing appropriate

behaviour’ provided by the TTA stresses that teachers ‘will already recognise the

need to address these issues through your planning and teaching as a whole rather

than as a discrete area of practice’, the sectionalisation of the Induction Standards

militates against any such holistic approach. Indeed, the questions that the TTA

addresses to new teachers encourage a highly segmented view of their progress:

When thinking about your progress, and planning for development, you might want to

use the following prompts.

This is not an exhaustive list and you may wish to add your own questions.

Standards or communities of practice? 539

N How well do you know and understand the school’s behaviour policy? What is your role within it? How confident are you about your ability to implement this policy?

N How have you found out about the particular behaviour issues that you may need to address in this school or in the class(es) for which you are responsible? From whom

have you sought advice?

N How confident are you that you are achieving your teaching and learning objectives? What changes in behaviour or classroom organisation and management might

improve this? How might these changes be achieved?

N What attitudes do pupils demonstrate in your class(es)? How have you sought to establish constructive relationships with your pupils? What do you do to promote

positive behaviour in your classroom?

N How do you respond to inappropriate behaviour in your classroom? What strategies have you used in order to pre-empt such behaviour? When have you asked for help in

dealing with inappropriate behaviour? (TTA, 2004)

Even from the parts of the interview transcript quoted above, it is clear that Sarah

has addressed questions in each of these bullet points: in writing the names of

disruptive students on the board, she has attempted to implement aspects of the

school’s behaviour policy; she has sought advice from colleagues; she has

experimented with different forms of pupil grouping; she is painfully aware of

students’ attitudes as these have been demonstrated in her class; she has responded

to inappropriate behaviour and has sought help.

As Alex Moore has argued:

The typically list-like nature of competences—particularly those emanating from official

sources in which a high degree of universality is implicit—along with the perceived need

to ‘leave nothing out’ for fear of implying that some areas of competence are more or

less important than others, gives teachers and teacher educators a very clear impression

that identified competences do, indeed, provide ‘the entire syllabus’, that the skills

listed are indeed ‘discrete’, and that the lists are, indeed, intended as finite

representations of essential truths. (Moore, 2004, p. 82)

This approach to specifying a teacher’s role and responsibilities is reflected in the

priorities which Sarah set for herself. When she realised that there were departmental

schemes of work which she could use off the peg, as it were, she assumed that this

meant that planning had been taken care of:

Sarah: I wouldn’t say I’m actually really concentrating on my teaching, not really.

AT: That’s interesting. Go on about that. What do you mean?

Sarah: I feel like … I feel … well, with these schemes … it’s really brilliant that they’re

all in place … And so you think, well, I’ll just sort out all the behaviour problems after

the lesson and then the scheme is there and you open it up and think ‘this is what I’ll do

next lesson’ … but … you don’t necessarily think, ‘Will this work with my class?’ You

don’t necessarily think, ‘Will so-and-so be able to cope with it?’

… So you haven’t thought, what do I want to get out of this lesson?

… I took all the schemes of work and all the resources and everything home over the

summer and read them all and I thought. ‘Gosh they’ve done them all for me. OK, so,

540 J. Yandell and A. Turvey

I’m not gonna know what I need until I teach it.’ Obviously I could’ve rewritten the

whole Animal Farm scheme of work but you’re not going to do that … it’s not going to

be your priority to rewrite a scheme of work when you’ve got all this other stuff to do.

And you don’t really engage with the material beforehand, and you do fall back on

handing these questions out, and you’re in the classroom and … I just don’t think I’ve

processed it. (Sarah, first interview)

Sarah describes a process of compartmentalisation, a bifurcation between behaviour

management and lesson planning, as if the two occupied separate worlds—precisely

as they occupy separate sections in Qualifying to teach. 3

In articulating this in the

interview, Sarah acknowledges her mistake: her approach has meant that the

schemes of work, the lesson plans, the materials are not hers. She has not taken

ownership of them, nor has she spent time working out how the existing plans might

be best adapted to meet the needs of the students in the classes she teaches. It is

possible, of course, to represent this as a failure to meet the Standards for ‘Planning,

expectations and targets’ (DfES/TTA, 2003, S3.1), and specifically those that relate

to taking account of ‘pupils’ varying needs’ (S3.1.2). But Sarah’s insight here seems

to us to be of central importance in reaching an understanding of just how unhelpful

the Standards have been in developing Sarah’s conception of the role of the teacher.

Her point about planning is also of much more general significance—gesturing as it

does at the dangers that are attendant on the notion that planning can happen at

several removes from the activities of teaching and learning—a notion that can be

fostered by the existence of downloadable schemes of work and learning materials on

websites, as if one size might somehow fit all.

There is, at the end of this piece of searching self-examination, a moment of

optimism. ‘Next year,’ Sarah announces, ‘I’m really going to do some things

differently.’ Her resolve here can be seen to spring not merely from her analysis of

what has been amiss in her approach, but also out of her experience of what has

worked well. There is another part of the interview when she talks about the best

moment she has had with her Year 7 class:

I did this thing where you bring in an object which is special to you and you have to

talk about it. And they loved it that I brought in this old recipe book that was given to

me. And we drew time lines and I worked it into the scheme of work. (Sarah, first

interview)

It is easy to see why this should have been so successful: the subjectivities of both

Sarah and her students have been allowed into the lesson, rather than it being a

lesson delivered from on high. The advice that Sarah should ‘be herself’ would,

doubtless, have been no more helpful than the advice to follow everything up. Here

she is, though, allowing herself an identity more complicated, more historied, than

that of some idealised teacher—and simultaneously developing a relationship with

her students that is not defined by issues of management. Here, too, one is struck by

the pronouns used (‘we drew time lines’).

The issue of planning, how it is done, who owns it and the extent to which the

process is articulated with reference to the learning needs of specific students, is a

dominant motif running through all the interviews we conducted. Jude, interviewed

Standards or communities of practice? 541

towards the end of her first year as a teacher, provides a strong example of planning

for a particular class:

I think Maria was one of the reasons I tried to do a lot of drama work when we were

reading Frankenstein—just so everyone could be involved—and also it was good to do

some drama when we were reading a play! Because it brings out all sorts of things that

just sitting and reading it doesn’t. (Jude, second interview)

Maria was at that stage a newly-arrived student from Cabo Verde, literate in

Portuguese, highly motivated, but with very little English. 4

Jude’s planning took

account of Maria’s learning needs, the opportunities for development provided by

the existing scheme of work—and the social dynamic of the class.

This leads on to another salient feature of the case studies as snapshots of the

development of new teachers. In the same interview from which we have quoted

above, Sarah tells of a moment of unexpected warmth:

Charles and Mark stayed behind in English detention. I asked them ‘Would you like to

help me tidy my classroom?’ And for some reason, Mark started to tidy up the

classroom. I do this with all of them when I keep them behind. And normally they might

pick up a newspaper and say, ‘Not mine, Miss.’ But he picked up the piece of paper and

then proceeded to tidy up everything. ‘Wonderful!’ I said, ‘I’ll give you two merits if you

finish the whole classroom.’ So Charles says, ‘If I tidy it up, can I have a merit?’ I said,

‘Of course you can. There’s always merits going.’ So they tidied it up, chatting away,

and I kept them in twenty minutes. And I said, ‘Thanks very much boys. That’s really

lovely. Why aren’t you like this in my lesson?’ And we had a bit of a chat and it was

really really good. And I tried to … I have all these thoughts: Imagine what English is for

them with all this other stuff going on in their lives. (Sarah, first interview)

When we first read this, we were reminded of our own beginning teachers’ case

studies, tasks completed during the first term of the PGCE course, in which the

trainees are asked to write about the learning and progress of an individual school

student. In many of these case studies, there were moments outside the classroom,

epiphanies almost, when the beginning teacher had suddenly become aware of

aspects of the student who was the focus of their writing—and through this had

come to glimpse their lives beyond their English lessons, beyond even the school

gates. In this context, it is illuminating to contrast Sarah’s attitude to the students,

her understanding of them and the way she is placed, and places herself, with Jude’s

positioning of herself. From Jude’s arrival at Wheatsheaf School, there was a sense

that the relationships that she established in the classroom were part of a nexus of

wider social and cultural relationships and understandings:

I am in a strange position in this school because I live … in a council flat, my kids go to

the local school … I’ve known these kids since they were little—I feel very much not

necessarily part of this community but there are kids who go here who are related to

people … and my son plays football with [a child in Jude’s Year 7 class], so I probably

don’t feel like other teachers might feel, like I feel very connected within Camden to the

community and also all my son’s friends are like from other countries … and the school

my kids go to is one where the majority are Muslim, and no one is making cakes or

having discos, my child is in a minority … so I’m used to making contact with the

Bangladeshi mums, and being aware that the dads won’t want to talk to you, so I

suppose I’m more culturally aware because of where I live … (Jude, first interview)

542 J. Yandell and A. Turvey

Once again, the sense of wider relationships—and of the importance of the

extracurricular interactions in developing those relationships—is there in the

significance that Jude affords to her trip to the cinema with Maria’s class.

When Jude was interviewed for a second time, towards the end of her first year at

Wheatsheaf School, she was asked about significant moments in the development of

her relationship with particular classes and groups of students. Jude recalled:

going to Lord of the Rings with them and sitting next to Jose and Maria and Jose was just

going ‘Urrh! the baddies! the goodies!’ and just being able to walk along the street and

talk to them and make them realise that you—because with someone like Jose it’s really

important that he knows that you like him, that you’re nice … and he’s going to feel

comfortable then coming into your class—oh, and I know, the defining moment for the

whole class was when the fire alarm went off … (Jude, second interview)

Jude’s sense of a particular student, her awareness of the needs of individuals and

groups of students in planning and in evaluating her own teaching, is much more

apparent in the interview that took place towards the end of her first year of teaching

than in our first interview, conducted after her first half-term at Wheatsheaf. By the

time of the second interview, Jude talks about the performance and progress of

individual, named students in her classes. The conversation happens in Jude’s

classroom: as we talk, it is clear that in her mind’s eye she is placing each student in

their seat, their presence a vivid reality in the room:

I find Jose [a newish arrival from Angola] difficult but then the other day when he was

sat at that table and he was just talking to me—and I know he gets embarrassed because

he’s difficult to understand and he doesn’t speak brilliant English at all, but just the fact

that at one time he used to just stand in the corner and refuse to come in the room and

now he’s on the middle table trying to work with someone—I mean that’s the first time

he’s tried to work with anyone—that was quite amazing. (Jude, second interview)

What Jude has to say about the changes in Jose’s attitude to learning is, of course,

germane to the TTA’s Induction Standard, ‘Teaching: securing appropriate

behaviour’, from which we quoted earlier. Jude’s understanding of the social,

cultural and linguistic factors that lie at the root of Jose’s changed behaviour is,

however, too layered, too complicated, to be meaningfully assessed by reference to

the TTA’s checklist of standards. Her account emphasises the social interactions

through which learning occurs, in the classroom or beyond it; she shows an

empathetic awareness of Jose’s awkwardness and frustration; she understands the

relationship between the social space of the classroom and the social relationships of

the class—between students and teacher and among the students themselves.

As Jude has become more confident of her relationship with her students, she has

taken ownership, one might say, of the physical space of the classroom. The

connection between these aspects of her development is rendered explicit in the

same interview:

I had put people in rows because I had gone to a meeting and they had said, ‘Well, you

need to have everyone in rows’—it was about 7A—‘Do you have them lining up

outside?’ ‘Yes, I line them up outside?’ ‘Have you got them in rows?’ ‘No.’ So then I

decided to try these rows. And then it was like, the behaviour’s worse, I’m really

unhappy, the classroom looks awful, you can’t do any group work—and then the lining

Standards or communities of practice? 543

up outside—I mean 7A are never going to line up outside and be quiet and all stand in a

line, so why am I bothering? Why not have a pleasant start to lessons where I am happily

greeting them—so just don’t listen, it doesn’t matter if they all line up in silence, that is

not anything—so actually having the confidence to say I want people to do group work,

I think it’s really important that people speak to each other in English and do tasks

together, specially for people who are learning English—so just putting my tables back

this way offered so much more opportunity and so much more freedom of space, so that

was a defining moment. (Jude, second interview)

Procedures, such as those for managing students’ entry into the classroom or seating

arrangements, are appraised in the light of Jude’s knowledge of, and developing

relationship with, particular groups of students. She is able to take responsibility for

decisions which go counter to the advice she has been given because of her

confidence in the centrality of collaborative oral work to the business of English

lessons, and because of her preparedness to prioritise—to live with imperfection and

not to allow boisterousness in the corridor to preoccupy her unduly. It is worth

referring back to the checklist from the TTA Induction Standards, ‘Teaching:

securing appropriate behaviour,’ which we quoted above. What Jude does is to

consult other colleagues, to refer to whole-school policy, just as the Induction

Standards recommend—but then to evaluate the effects of specific practices in the

context of her overarching aim, which is to do with learning, and in relation to the

social model of learning that she articulates as central to her practice. Jude is able to

take risks and to take responsibility for what happens in her classroom because, for

all her status as a newcomer, she has confidence in, and the confidence of, the

department in which she works. This seems to us to be precisely the model of

‘transformative practice of a learning community’ that offers ‘an ideal context for

developing new understandings because the community sustains change as part of

an identity of participation’ (Wenger, 1998, p. 215).

Problems in the definition of peripherality and communities of practice

We started by looking at Sarah and behaviour. We suggested that the support that

Sarah had been offered had not, finally, been helpful because it did not address where

she was situated in the school community of practice. What she is experiencing, in an

acute but by no means unique form, is, we think, the difficulty of the transition from

the PGCE year to the first full year of teaching. There is much about the PGCE year

that can be accommodated within the model of legitimate peripheral participation

developed by Lave and Wenger (1991). Beginning teachers are introduced gradually

to the activities that constitute a teacher’s role; they are encouraged—and expected—

to do some things (starter activities, for example) without taking full responsibility for

the whole product (the lesson, the scheme of work, the class); there are plentiful

opportunities for peer support and for the exchange of narratives that shape

the beginning teacher’s understanding of teaching. There is a validity, too, to the

description of beginning teachers as those who are placed on the periphery of the

community of practice that is a school. On the periphery, they are allowed to maintain

a distance—to participate but also to draw back, to act but also to look on.

544 J. Yandell and A. Turvey

There is a sharp contrast with the expectations that meet a newly qualified

teacher. Suddenly, nothing less than full participation will do. The new teacher has

his her own classes, for whom they (alone) are responsible. And any shortcoming,

any participation that is inadequate, places a burden on other full participants.

In Sarah’s second interview, conducted towards the end of her year at Albion

School, she reaches an understanding of how things might be, or might have been,

different, had there been space within the department for the kind of learning-

focused conversations in which Sarah’s participation would not have been defined by

deficit, or incompetence, but rather by a more equal and enthusiastic collabora-

tion—the legitimate peripheral participation that would, with time, have blossomed

into full participation:

… it needs a lot of discussion—as a department, I mean—about the particular classes

across Year 7 and what you would do with the poetry to make those aims mean anything

and we just don’t have those discussions. …

I don’t feel like anyone really values my opinion, or says, ‘Wow what a good idea, I’d

love to try that’, so I’m not going to suddenly say, ‘I had this really good lesson. Do you

want to hear about it?’

…

To be honest with you, I don’t think [Sarah’s head of department] does know how to

value someone or credit them, or show that she knows you’re really thinking through

your teaching and want to get the best out of the kids. You need to feel you matter …

intellectually if you know what I mean. And when you’re really struggling with the

discipline which I am, you have to feel your brain is still working, that maybe you still

know what a poem is or whatever.

…well, to have [head of department] say something like, ‘Sarah, I know you have some

really difficult classes and you have had a bit of a bum deal. Let’s talk about how we can

support you’. I’m not saying I’ve got the worst deal: lots of people have difficult classes;

but it would have meant a lot to me to have her say that or something like it. Maybe

more observations would help and definitely more talk about the problems. Whenever

[head of department] removes a kid from my class I feel as if I’m burdening her or

someone in the department so badly that containment is easier.

…

I feel the discipline stuff is just taking over! Look how much of my teaching that I’ve

been talking about to you is about problems I’m having in the classroom! It really gets

me down.

… if we looked at poetry … and we really talked about how the ideas I put forward

could work with a mixed-ability class and I could hear other people’s ideas, I don’t think

I would get so down or so … obsessed with classroom management stuff … or so critical

of everything all the time. (Sarah, second interview)

Enmeshed in this reflection is both a sense of unsatisfactory social/work relations—

the difficulties of working in a department which, for Sarah, is not functioning

Standards or communities of practice? 545

effectively as a community of practice, in which resources and ideas might be shared,

and in which there might be a recognition of different members’ expertise—and also

Sarah’s sense of her dislocation from a wider community of practice—the

community of English studies, as it were. Feeling isolated—peripheral—in relation

both to the department and to a wider intellectual world, she still must shoulder the

burden of her work as a classroom teacher, work which becomes defined by

behaviour management—and any peripherality in this aspect of her work, any failure

to ‘contain’ the students, would merely increase the load on her colleagues. Learning

communities, as Wenger (1998) argues, need to ‘make trajectories possible … offer a

past and a future that can be experienced as a personal trajectory’ (p. 215). This is

precisely what Sarah is not experiencing: she does not feel she is contributing to a

‘valued future.’

We have described the case studies of these new teachers as snapshots. The

metaphor does not quite encapsulate what was going on in the interviews: to be

frank, it understates the extent to which the interviews were interventions in the

development of these teachers. The interviews with Sarah provide Sarah with the

space to reflect on what is happening to her in the school, a chance to gain some

distance—a sense of critical (self-critical) perspective. For Sarah, in other words,

Anne Turvey’s continuing dialogic presence provides a partial surrogate for the

departmental conversations that she feels she lacks. In a different way, Jude uses the

interview to articulate—and develop—a sense of the teacher she wants to be/become:

I know that I don’t really want to be a big shouter. I know that I want to have a bit of a

sense of humour. I know that I want my classroom to be a relaxed place where people

learn rather than work, where people bring what they’ve got to the classroom as well,

and that I respect that, where we find different ways of doing things, or I find different

ways that are going to help everyone rather than just the same people achieving all the

time and not other people ever getting a sense of achievement. (Jude, second interview)

Lave and Wenger recognise that there is a deal of elasticity in their notion of a

community of practice. The possibility of tensions and contradictions—and even of

change—is admitted:

In our view, participation at multiple levels is entailed in membership in a community of

practice. Nor does the term community imply necessarily co-presence, a well-defined,

identifiable group, or socially visible boundaries. It does imply participation in an

activity system about which participants share understandings concerning what they are

doing and what that means in their lives and for their communities. (1991, p. 98)

It might, perhaps, be instructive to compare how the term might be applied to the

experiences of new teachers at different stages of their development—and at

different historical moments.

While Jude and Sarah were PGCE students at the Institute of Education, it would

seem reasonable to construe the community of practice to which they were

contributing (as legitimate peripheral participants) as one that encompassed not only

the Institute but also the hundred or so departments in schools across and beyond

London where all our other PGCE English students were placed. It does not

seem entirely fanciful to make a connection between the inescapable diversity of so

546 J. Yandell and A. Turvey

far-flung, heterogeneous and disparate a community of practice and Jude’s

commitment to cater for the diversity within her classroom. But when beginning

teachers become (newly qualified) teachers, there is a real danger that the

community of practice suddenly shrinks to the size of a single department in a

single school. Twenty years ago, when we were teachers in London schools, this

parochialism was counteracted, at the very least, by the London-wide structures of

support and accountability: by weekly in-service training sessions organised across

schools, by the interventions of the Inner London Education Authority’s advisory

service—and also by the widely disseminated, teacher-led curriculum development

work of ILEA’s English Centre. Now, as Sarah’s story suggests, it can be harder for a

new teacher to maintain a perspective beyond the confines of her school, to continue

the open, collaborative dialogues of the PGCE year.

There are signs of increasing interest in continuing professional development, in

the establishment of structures and courses to enable teachers to develop their

practice. Such initiatives, our research would indicate, are particularly welcome

when they provide opportunities for continuing dialogue and reflective practice. 5

Fuller et al. (2005) are critical of the lacunae in Lave and Wenger, and in

particular the siting of learning within the dyadic newcomer–old timer relationship.

They observe that their school-based research has produced ‘clear examples of

experienced teachers learning from one another through their normal work

practices’ (2005, p. 60) and suggest that such learning is not easily assimilable

within the framework of legitimate peripheral participation. Our own research with

newly qualified teachers has led us, too, to question the universal applicability of the

model of legitimate peripheral participation (LPP). There is a world of difference

between the roles occupied by student teachers—roles that can readily be seen in

LPP terms—and what is expected of even the newest of newly qualified teachers,

who are expected to participate fully in the practice of the school and the department

from the first day of their employment: they have their own timetable, their own

classes, their own workload that is, at the least, 90% of that of more experienced

colleagues. But Fuller et al. seem not to recognise quite how problematic the model

of LPP might be in a school context, in that assumptions are made about the (easy)

transferability of knowledge of how to teach from one school to another. In our

research, the provision of clear and detailed documentation has not always been so

straightforwardly helpful to new members of a department. Their account treats as

unproblematic what it is to be a good (or a better) teacher, just as it glosses over the

‘good reputation’ of the department. We are acutely conscious of the sharp

differences in judgements that have had a profound—and often profoundly

damaging—impact on colleagues, departments and schools, where, for example,

the Office for Standards in Education’s notions of worth and of standards have

collided with the values and practices of the teachers whom they have been

inspecting (on which see, for example, Yandell, 2000).

There is a difficulty, too, in Fuller et al. ’s use of the concept of marginality. It

would appear that the primary meaning of marginality for them is to do with the

distribution of power within a subject department. In Lave and Wenger, the move

Standards or communities of practice? 547

from peripheral to full participation is a move that entails both a shift in power

relations and in responsibility for work/production: the alteration in power is

implicated in the move to full participation in the productive processes of the

community of practice. Within the secondary school, though, a teacher’s margin-

alisation, however real in terms of the relationships within the department, is

unlikely to entail a similar shift to peripherality in the work of teaching. And this

leads us to another and rather large problem with Fuller et al. ’s approach to schools

as workplaces and departments as communities of practice. Somehow the account

manages to obscure the presence in these workplaces of rather large numbers of

other actors—the school students.

The agency of school students remained a salient feature of the ways in which the

teachers with whom we talked conceptualised their work. The development of

professional knowledge involved, for them, the reworking of subject knowledge in a

dialectical relationship with social interactions of the classroom.

Abigail, another of the new teachers in our study, observed how the experience of

reading Arthur Miller’s A view from the bridge with a class had changed the play for

her (see Turvey, 2005). In reflecting on this experience, Abigail arrived at an

understanding of the embedded nature of any reading of the text, the extent to which

its meanings would be inflected by the contexts and histories of the readers. It is this

sense of the dissolution of the boundaries between notions of subject knowledge and

the embedded, sociocultural knowledge of school students that also characterises

Jude’s positioning of herself as an English teacher. In her first interview she reflected

on her own formation:

I love the diversity of the subject, I love the fact that you can bring in history … I think

English should be renamed communication, I think it should be about how people

communicate … (Jude, first interview)

With so ecumenical a definition of the subject comes a practice that remains open

to contributions from far beyond the academy—a community of practice that is

a broad church indeed. Perhaps also, lurking in so richly hi/storied a conception of

the practice lies a justification for the methods we have adopted in this research

project. We referred earlier to Freebody’s conception of the case study as

representing a ‘commitment to the overwhelming significance of localized

experience.’ What also emerges strongly from our case studies, though, is the

significance of the subjectivity of the teacher, her values, interests and sense of

herself. We hope that what we have begun to suggest in this article is something of

the complex, dialectical interplay between such subjectivities and the larger power

structures of school and society.

Notes

1. TTA Initial Teacher Training Research and Development Awards (2003): To investigate the

development of English teachers’ professional knowledge in the early years of teaching.

2. Names of schools, teachers and school students have been changed.

3. Edwards and Protheroe (2003) observe, in discussing the evidence from their study of 125

student teachers on two training programmes: ‘it would seem that student teachers, operating

548 J. Yandell and A. Turvey

in relative isolation as quasi teachers, are more likely to close down on complexity than

independently seek it when interpreting classroom life’ (p. 231).

4. At the time when this research was being conducted, John Yandell split his time between

teaching on the PGCE course at the Institute of Education and working as a language support

teacher in the school where Jude was teaching: hence his knowledge of Maria’s background.

5. Particularly interesting here is the analysis of online discussion groups within the Master of

Teaching course at the Institute of Education: see Pachler and Daly (2004).

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