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.

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