Teachers' Identities in the Context of Professional Development

Abstract

In response to increased accountability measures and evaluation systems, schools adopt new approaches and innovations. Such activities often require teachers to adopt new roles and responsibilities, develop new knowledge and skill, and reconfigure their relationships with peers and administrators. As a result, teachers build new professional identities in response to the underlying question—who am I as a teacher? This dissertation describes the journey of four Midwestern educators as they participate in a two-year professional development initiative to establish Instructional Consultation Teams (IC Teams) in their schools. IC Teams (Gravois, Gickling, & Rosenfield, 2011) is a problem-solving model implemented via a two-year training model based on Joyce and Showers’ (1981) theories of professional development. The author’s position as an IC Teams trainer for the project permitted a strategic vantage point from which to conduct a critical ethnography involving the four teachers featured in the study. For the duration of the training, records were collected of training sessions, team meetings, IC Teams case management activities, as well as extensive interviews with study participants. Considered in light of Kelchtermans’ (1993) “personal interpretive framework,” study findings describe how participants struggled to make meaning of their new identities in a context riddled with competing value systems and marked by shifting allegiances among colleagues. In response, they navigated the “project of the self” by appropriating definitions of mastery from program standards while refiguring their own metrics for success. The discussion of these findings lends itself to a potentially new understanding of Kelchtermans’ framework in light of Giddens’ (1991) “dilemmas of the self.” Implicated in this research is the development and implementation of school improvement products and professional development activities. Said developers, alongside school leaders who adopt such programs, will want to consider the social dynamics of teacher self-definition with the same care as they do knowledge and skill acquisition. It may be that school change work proves more sustainable when teachers’ career stories inform the direction of programming and evaluation.