Individual, School, and National Factors Impacting Teachers' Workplace Learning

By drawing on observation and detailed discourse analysis from interviews with teachers in Lithuanian and North American schools, this text identifies individual, school-specific, and national factors which impact teachers' informal professional learning.
Addressing multiple layers of teacher learning, this text illustrates how factors including socio-economic status, individual learning style, cultural attitudes to education, and political histories support or impede workplace learning. Drawing on three fields of research-teacher education, cultural anthropology, and comparative international-the book posits teacher learning as a multidimensional socio-cultural process. Finally combining a typology of informal learners with other policy-driven factors, the text indicates how practices at school, district, and national levels might stimulate workplace learning.
Offering methodological innovations including unique research design and creative ways of using discourse analysis, this book will be of particular use to researchers and doctoral students in education, organizational and educational psychology, cultural anthropology, management, and beyond.

Elena Jurasaite-O'Keefe is Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at St John's University, New York, USA.

Part I: Multiple Layers of Workplace Learning 1. The Complexity of Teacher Learning 2. Researching Informal Teacher Learning 3. Portraits of Teachers Part II: Teachers as Learners 4. Dispositions: Opportunistic-Proactive Learners' Continuum 5. Sources of Learning: Individual-Social Leaners' Continuum 6. Reactions to Dilemmas: Emotional-Cognitive Learners' Continuum 7. Orientation to Problems for Learning: Self-Teaching-Oriented Problems 8. Engagement in Learning Process: Spontaneous-Deliberate Part III: School Cultures as Contexts for Informal Workplace Learning 9. A Midwestern Elementary School in the USA 10. A Lithuanian School with Instruction in Russian Language 11. A Lithuanian School with Instruction in Lithuanian Language Part IV: National Educational Cultures and Teacher Informal Workplace Learning 12. Centralization versus decentralization in educational systems 13. Teaching children versus teaching curriculum 14. Market-driven structure of professional development and evaluation versus structures motivating teachers' professional growth 15. Teacher identities in a culture that is relatively stable versus a culture that has undergone a radical change 16. Final Thoughts