makeup of the local communities which schools serve become more diversified
(OECD 2010 ). Couplled with this change in student populations are the broader,
more explicitly articulated social and societal responsibilities that schools are
expected to have in supporting their communities, other schools and other public
services (OECD 2008 ). In many countries, also, schools are expected to manage a
concurrent movement towards the decentralisation offinancial management and
quality control functions to schools (OECD 2008 , 2010 ). Thus, to be successful in
these testing times, teachers and their schools need to be forward thinking, outward
looking, optimistic, hopeful and above all, resilient.
This chapter will examine what it is that enables teachers to sustain the quality of
their passion and commitment through good times and bad and what might prevent
them from doing so over the course of their professional lives. Evidence shows that
teachers do not necessarily learn through experience, that expertise is not acquired
in an even, incremental way and that they are at greater risk of being less effective
in later phases of their professional lives. Variations in professional, personal and
workplace conditions in different professional life phases affect these. Moreover,
the contexts for teacher’professional learning and development are, by definition,
different from those who do not work in human service organisations, since teachers
are essentially engaged in work which has fundamental moral and ethical as well as
instrumental purposes. Their capacity to exercise these effectively relates to their
ability to manage positive and negative‘scenarios’in different professional life
phases. It suggests, therefore, that to be effective, professional learning opportu-
nities must be designed which take account of the personal, workplace and external
scenarios which challenge their commitment to these core purposes.
3.2 Variations in the Conditions for Teachers’
Professional Learning
Previous studies on teachers’professional learning and development tend to focus
on one particular aspect of learning and development, such as teacher knowledge
construction (Shulman 1987 ) or the development of teacher identity through par-
ticipation in a learning community (Lave and Wenger 1991 ), and thus they have
failed to address the complexity of the conditions in which teachers’professional
learning and development take place which enhances their commitment and
effectiveness.
The VITAE research (Day et al. 2007 ) investigated teachers’work, lives and
effectiveness from a holistic perspective. This holistic perspective provided richer
insights into the complex and dynamic nature of the conditions for teachers’
learning and development throughout their professional lives than previous
research. The research revealed the tensions for professional learning and devel-
opment caused by workplace conditions and interactions between these and per-
sonal and professional scenarios experienced by teachers in different professional
38 Q. Gu