Characterising situated professional learning in schools: Contexts, approaches and perspectives
Project ID: OER 01/22 LSS
Subject area: Professional Learning
Principal Investigator: Dr Lee Shu Shing
Email: shushing.lee@nie.edu.sg
About the project
Teacher professional learning is critical for education systems to adapt to 21st century changes. Professional learning is key to build teachers’ capacities to teach diverse students, become competent in teaching complex academic knowledge and skilful in the craft of teaching. There is a reconceptualization of teacher learning from professional development to situated professional learning to acknowledge teachers’ autonomy and motivation to consciously collaborate with colleagues, inquire about practice, and learn from their work.
Situated professional learning recognises professional learning as part of teachers’ everyday work; situated within their practice and school contexts. It has theoretical foundations in situated cognition, cognitive apprenticeship and sociocultural theories of learning. There are existing debates on key characteristics of situated professional learning, the collaborations and partnerships with stakeholders, and the tensions between teacher autonomy and conformity to education reforms, and school contexts that drive the process, preferences and perspectives of situated professional learning. Multiple factors, relating to policies, schools, and teachers, illustrate the complexities of understanding situated profession learning.
The literature highlights the importance of understanding contextual differences and teacher diversity, which creates the impetus to study situated professional learning in Singapore schools. Most education systems are either centralised or decentralised but Singapore schools exists in a paradoxical, centralised decentralisation context. The Ministry of Education, Singapore, provides leadership in curriculum standards and reforms, with schools increasingly given autonomy to make pedagogical and professional learning decisions for local needs. Schools make sense of and align top-down directives with bottom-up contextualised school policies for curriculum and professional learning. School leadership shapes the ways schools navigate the contextual intricacies of system and local needs to establish coherence and continuity of situated professional learning.
As schools face different contextual challenges, they adopt different approaches to and perspectives of situated professional learning. It is, thus, important to investigate the contextual nuances underlying existing perspectives and approaches by examining these research questions: (1) what and how do contextual factors ( for example, at system and school level) shape situated professional learning in schools?; (2) what are the approaches (for example, structures and processes) to implementing situated professional learning in schools?; and (3) what are teachers’ perspectives (for example, preferences, beliefs, and constraints) of situated professional learning in schools?
The study employs the multiple-case study design and adopts a participatory research approach to investigate the socio-cultural nuances within and across each case. Four typical schools are purposively selected, 1 in each school zone. Observations are conducted to establish a broad understanding of teachers’ situated professional contexts. Interviews are conducted with school leaders, key personnel and teachers to unpack their descriptions of contextual factors, approaches, and perspectives that shape situated professional learning. Within and across case analysis are done through the constant comparative method. Thematic analyses and codes are informed by literature on situated professional learning to characterise the nature of situated professional learning that is shaped by socio-cultural factors relating to teachers, schools, and policies. Our findings will advance understanding of situated professional learning, describe the contextual intricacies of how schools navigate system and local needs, and inform the perspectives of and approaches to situated professional learning in Singapore schools.
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