Thirty years into teaching: professional development, exhaustion and rejuvenation

Female primary school teachers are usually absent from debates about literacy theory and practice, teachers’ professional development, significant policy changes and school reform. Typically they are positioned as the silent workers who passively translate the latest and of course best theory into practice, whatever that might be and despite what years of experience might tell them. Their accumulated knowledges and critical analysis, developed across careers, remain an untapped resource for the profession. In this paper five literacy educators, three primary school teachers and two university educators, all of whom have been teaching around thirty years, reflect on what constitutes professional development. The teachers examine their experiences of professional development in their particular school contexts – the problems with top-down, mandated professional development which has a managerial rather than educative function, the frustrations of trying to implement the experts’ ideas without the resources, and the effects of devolved school management on teachers’ work and learning. In contrast, they also explore their positive experiences of professional learning through being positioned as teacher researchers in a network of early and later career teachers engaged in a three-year research project investigating unequal literacy outcomes.