Reframing Teacher Professional Learning: An Alternative Policy Approach to Strengthening Valued Outcomes for Diverse Learners

This chapter engages in the debate about what counts as professional knowledge from the perspective of improving outcomes for diverse learners. We begin by highlighting the importance of assumptions about appropriate roles for teachers and how those assumptions have shaped the debate about what teachers need to know. Then we consider some myths and evidence about teacher agency that have contributed to a recent international shift in policy attention to the importance of teacher knowledge and, more particularly, how to develop teacher agency and capability. The main focus of the chapter is on a policy approach to building a multidisciplinary evidence base in education that both identifies the kinds of teacher knowledge that has a positive impact on a range of student outcomes and, at the same time, develops that knowledge through a national collaborative knowledge-building and knowledge-use strategy. The approach described is the New Zealand Iterative Best Evidence Synthesis (BES) Programme, which deliberately and systematically draws on and develops a rich multidisciplinary knowledge base in education. We situate our account of this program within (a) a comparison of a range of international policy approaches to strengthening the evidence base informing what teachers need to know, (b) a vision of the role of teaching as responsive to diverse learners and the evolving challenges of the 21st century, and (c) a touchstone of effectiveness as defined by impacts on a range of valued learner outcomes. We present the findings of a new synthesis of the evidence from 97 empirical studies that identify the development of the kinds of teacher knowledge that have a demonstrated positive impact on outcomes for diverse learners. The findings of the synthesis are exemplified through an in-depth case study of effective professional development designed to support student learning, teacher learning, teacher-educator research, and policy learning.