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Using story to promotecontinuing professionaldevelopment for teachersMoyra Evans aa Denbigh School , United KingdomPublished online: 20 Dec 2006.

To cite this article: Moyra Evans (1998) Using story to promote continuing professionaldevelopment for teachers, Journal of In-Service Education, 24:1, 47-55, DOI:10.1080/13674589800200028

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Using Story to Promote ContinuingProfessional Development for Teachers

MOYRA EVANSDenbigh School, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom

ABSTRACT The author is a deputy headteacher in a large mixedcomprehensive school. Her responsibilities include ‘continuingprofessional development’, and she began an action research project onhow she could develop not only her role in becoming more reflective inher daily practice, but also, how she could develop opportunities forteachers to take time to reflect on and improve pedagogical practices.She worked with a department for some time and collected data abouttheir activities. She used ‘story’ to put together pieces of this data and toenable her to interpret her experiences. This paper records a story shewrote which helped her to understand better the process of staffdevelopment. As a result of reflecting on the story and on conversationswhich followed writing it, she realised the need for teachers to be ingreater control of their own learning and to start from where they arenow, rather than from where the staff development co-ordinator thinksthey might or ought to be.

Richard Winter has used story to order qualitative data, as in ‘theinterviews project’ (1991, pp. 252-262). He constructed a story – selectivelyincluding some of the data collected – and then gave his story to others toread, concluding the process by reflecting on the themes which thesereaders raised. Winter stressed the importance of ‘theorising’, saying that“the term is used to emphasise that ‘theory’ cannot simply be derivedfrom data, but is always the outcome of a process in which researchersmust explore, organise, and integrate their own and other’s theoreticalresources as an interpretive response to data” (Winter, 1991, p. 261).

In a 4-year action research study, 1991-95, for the award of PhD atKingston University, I developed the use of story, in a variety of ways andfor a number of purposes (Evans, 1995). My study was undertaken as aDeputy Headteacher in a large comprehensive school, exploring reflectionin action (Schön, 1983) in my role, and gradually developing my practicefrom a traditionalist perspective on leadership to that of a facilitator of

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Journal of In-service Education, Vol. 24, No. 1, 1998

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teachers’ learning. It is my intention in this paper to show how I used storyto come to know more about my learning experiences as I supportedteachers in developing their classroom practice.

Eloise’s Tale

Eloise – the main character.Amanda – head of department.Martin, Alistair – members of the department.Kate – staff development co-ordinator.I knew that they wanted me even though I had trained as long ago as 1962.It seemed a long time ago that I was in the classroom – before I had thechildren and when Marcel had been earning such a lot of money. I shouldhave been pleased that the good times lasted while the children weregrowing up, but times change, and I needed to contribute to the householdaccounts now!

The children at school seemed different somehow. They were morelively than I remembered from before and asked questions such as

“Why do we have to do this, Miss?”“Miss! Miss! You do not call me Miss! I have a husband and children. I

could not be a Miss could I?”“Eh? What’s she on about?”“I am surprised that you call into question my morals – that’s what I

am on about!” I said, but they did not seem to understand my point.Amanda went through what I should do with my groups and I

thought I could adapt my previous materials for them. However, sheshowed me the sort of resources she used with her classes. I could not seehow I could use these but I didn’t like to tell her so. I asked her for somebooks, but all the other teachers said that the books were out of date, andthat I shouldn’t use them. I said, “what should I do then?” Martin wentthrough some ideas with me. I tried them out, but they did not work.

I said to him, “Your ideas do not work! What am I supposed to do?”He asked how I had used his ideas. when I told him, he said that I

couldn’t have listened to his advice, because he had told me somethingdifferent from what I had done. I was most offended. I always listen topeople, especially when I have asked them for advice. I know other peoplemight not listen, but I always do.

I was annoyed so I went to Kate and told her.I said, “No-one will help me!” Kate listened to me, and then said she

would talk to Amanda about it and had the in-service sessions been of anyhelp?

“Oh yes,” I said, “They have helped a little. But you must rememberthat I am an old hand. I know how to teach. If the children would let me geton with the teaching, I would be happy’ and I would not need anyin-service sessions or to come to you complaining.”

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There was more talking. They were trying to help me I know, but allto no avail. The children did not get better – yes, one or two were removedfor a while from my classes, but that is no lasting solution, is it?

We had an in-service session. I think I would be better off getting onwith my marking! Kate had given us something to read this time. It wascalled ‘the evidence of learning’ – I found it hard reading! I was surprisedAlistair got so interested. It seemed to me to be just the same old things.

Then Alistair started talking about seeing each lesson as a fresh start– not going in crossly because the children had been badly behaved in thelast lesson. Of course, I always treat each lesson as a new start. I thoughteveryone would, after all, one cannot remain cross for days! However, Katequeried this when I agreed with Alistair.

“Of course,” I replied, “there is always hope, there is always faith, onecan always pray for a miracle that these children will behave themselves.”Kate said, “Is it just a matter of praying then? Don’t some skills come intoit somewhere?”

They all started talking about these skills! I thought, I know all of this.I said, “Yes, I know all that – I have done all this already’.” Martin said Ihadn’t because I hadn’t listened to any of their advice. I told him, thereand then, I said, “You! What can you tell me about teaching – I wasteaching when you were still a baby!”

❇❇❇

I have made little improvements – I have been using some of the ideas inour meetings and I was surprised when one really worked. I said I woulduse it again. It was a game and I let the children make up their own rules.

I said to them “You see, you can work well when you choose to. Youhave been very original. You have come up with lots of different ideas andI am very pleased with you”.

“Well you let us work it out for ourselves,” they said.“Yes, but even so, you have done well.” I was not sure what they

meant – were they saying I should have taught them properly?Anyway; I was so pleased that the game worked that I gave it to them

again, but they weren’t so good this time.I told the team about my success. They were very interested.

Someone asked why I thought it had been successful. I said, “Well theywere probably in the mood, you know, sometimes they are and sometimesthey are not.” I do not know why it worked – I am only happy that it did.

Alistair tried it too. He said it was successful because the childrenare competitive and wanted to win. Amanda asked whether the interest inthe game could also have to do with the children being in control of whatthey were doing, instead of being told by me. I do not know whether this isthe case. I have not thought about it, except that they should be told byme what to do. After all I am the teacher – but then, it’s a topsy-turveyworld since I started teaching. I think this is what the Government calls‘left wing ideologies’. Alistair; Martin, the others – they must all have been

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taught this way at College – give up your responsibility; the children willknow what they want to do!

However, I have missed out on the discussion. I think they are talkingnow about if they can start at the point of the children’s previousknowledge. I don’t understand this – if I did that with my groups, we wouldnever get anywhere – no, perhaps, I haven ‘t heard properly. I am tired oftrying to work it all out. I shall go back to my garden – I do not have tothink about how my plants will grow, they just do, if I put the fertiliser onthem and water them. Conditions for growth! Yes! That would make a goodtitle for an in-service discussion, but with plants, it could be over in 5minutes, and then we could get on with the gardening. With children – itcould go on for hours and I can’t say that I am very keen to rush off intothe classroom. It is a pity. Maybe I have learned a little, maybe I havechanged a little this year, but I am sorry that I have had to change. At leastthe left wing ideologies will not have penetrated into my garden. My lupinswill look lovely and I shall not have the need to tell them off. I am lookingforward to going.

Making Sense of the Story, the Discussion, the Literature and My Reflections

I had been working with a department for a year, running in-servicesessions together with the Head of Department, Amanda, which aimed tosupport the teachers in developing their classroom practice.

I wrote Eloise’s story (Evans, 1995, pp. 126-133), because I was tryingto work out why the sessions we had undertaken together had not beeneffective in enabling Eloise to benefit from them. I wrote the story basedon little pieces of data which I had collected rigorously as the yearprogressed. I offered the story to various people to read. As a result of ourconversations about the story, I came to understand more about ourlearning experiences.

It was important that the conversations were all about the story, andnot about the events or people upon which the story was based. As I tookpart in the discussions, considered the comments made and read moreabout teachers developing their understanding of teaching, I was able tomerge the ideas arising from the story with my reflections on what we hadexperienced over the last year.

George was one of my close colleagues. After reading the story hecommented about the in-service programme:

George: it’s a bit ad hoc- it’s just when somebody offers them a bitof advice. It sounds as if Martin would have given her a few 10 to15 minutes when it was spare, and that was it, and probably(Martin) assumed an awful lot – there was the bit about she(Eloise) couldn’t understand why something had worked – so thatlittle bit would have just been floating around without structure topin it to without any real level of understanding to link it with...

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Me: ...not being able to pin that to anything meant that shetherefore couldn’t use it.

The discussion on being able to make learning meaningful reminded me ofthe concept of authentic knowledge (Polanyi, 1958; Kemmis & Carr, 1983).In pursuing this concept, Groundwater Smith & Nias (1988, p. 256) claimedthat knowledge is a ‘personal invention’ – that for a person to come toknow something, he or she has to do more than simply assimilate theinformation offered. She said:

A positive act of construction is required whereby the knower teststhe information against the yardstick of personal experience. Thequality of the emerging understanding is dependent upon theability of the knower to evaluate the information in a prudent andexhaustive fashion. Each person’s knowledge is the next person’sinformation. In transmitting information, we should not bepersuaded that we are fabricating identical forms of knowledge.

In the story, Eloise did not try to evaluate the information in an exhaustivefashion – instead she said, “I do not know why it worked – I am only happythat it did.” So she dismissed an opportunity for learning – as George said,“that little bit would have been floating about without structure to pin itto” – she did not seem to want to attach it to personal experience. Maybe,as she expected the children to learn through the transmission mode, shealso expected this of herself, which might be why she did not evaluate thelesson that had worked well for her – she would not have recognised theneed to review what had happened.

I have been searching for reasons to explain why our support wasnot appropriate for Eloise. Duigan & Macpherson (1992, p. 83), in talkingabout educational change said:

In the whole of this learning process there is a need for individualsto make personal sense of what is happening. Unless they canconnect the proposed new ideas or practice with their basicassumptions, beliefs and experiences they are likely to reject thechange outright. One of the challenges for the educative leader isto make proposed changes understandable and meaningful forthose who are expected to implement the changes.

I think we probably failed at this particular hurdle. Eloise had trainedsome time ago and had not taught for many years. The world of educationand schools had changed in that time. Her training and experience wouldnot have fitted her for the challenges of today’s classroom, and we did notrecognise this – or if we did know, we did not understand that she wouldhave the difficulties she experienced in developing her skills to fit in withcontemporary methodology. Her attitudes towards children were differentfrom those of the rest of the department, and her attitude towards how toteach and her beliefs about teaching, were different as well. It is not clearwhether anyone had helped her to understand the aims of the department– she had a staff handbook which gave a good picture of the wider ethos

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and aims of the school – but she would have needed to discuss these andthe departmental goals, with other people in order to give it meaning forherself.

In talking about teacher development, Northfield (1992, pp. 88-89)spoke about “the need (A) to assess teachers’ present strengths and findout what really happens in classrooms and (B) to utilise and build onexisting teacher strengths, extending their present skills, rather thanneglecting or undermining them”. I do not think we built on Eloise’spre-existing knowledge and skills – rather she was expected to cope withnew teaching approaches which she really didn’t understand and she wasunable to make the ‘positive act of construction’, whereby “in order toappreciate what is offered when we are told something, we have to findsomewhere to put it... Something approximating to ‘finding out forourselves’ needs, therefore to take place if we are to be successfully ‘told’”(Bullock, 1975).

Perhaps this was what George meant when he said “so that little bitwould have just been floating about without any structure to pin it to” –Eloise was unable to make sense of the activities she tried out, becauseshe had nowhere ‘to put them’; she did not have a basic understanding ofwhat she was trying to achieve and therefore could not develop herpedagogical knowledge. Martin easily tired of trying to help her because,for Eloise, learning was disjointed and made little sense. Martin wouldhave seen little progress being made. At best, using Northfleld’s analysis,Eloise might have accepted the new ideas but was unable to apply them toother situations, or at worst “the new ideas are misinterpreted to fit inwith or even support, existing ideas.” For example in relation to the part ofEloise’s story where she was successful in trying a new method, sheshowed that she didn’t understand what she had done. The activity was a‘one-off’ idea, which she didn’t think was teaching anyway – ‘were theysaying I should have taught them properly?’ – and because the childrenwere good, not because they had learnt something, she gave it to themagain. She did not appear to develop the game in any way, so she did notadapt the methodology for the next stage, to extend the children’slearning.

I think one of the reasons our programme of in-service support failedto help Eloise was because, although it arose in response to theexperiences of the department, it was a ‘mixed ability’ programme, whichtook account of the ‘mass’ in the middle, but not sufficiently of theextremities.

Polanyi (1958, p. 100) talked of the urge to understand experience:

We have seen how the urge to look out for clues and to makesense of them is ever alert in our eyes and ears, and in our fearsand desires. The urge to understand experience, together with thelanguage referring to experience, is clearly an extension of thisprimordial striving for intellectual control.

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If Eloise was unable to make sense of her experiences, she must have feltvery uncomfortable that she was not able to achieve ‘intellectual control’.In the circumstances, it is perhaps unsurprising that she responded in adefensive way, and eventually appeared to give up the battle of trying tomake sense of them.

What is the Nature of Reality in Fictional Accounts?

But whose reality is a story? When people read something, they’re actuallyreconstructing and re-interpreting reality and alternatives from their ownperspectives, so there is no ultimate reality for the story, and therefore,perhaps, it does not belong to the characters. I was reminded that Winter(1988, p.236), in discussing ‘reality’ in story, talked of the “plurality ofvoices” – the characters m the story, different voices within thecharacters, and “various levels of authorial comment (implicit andexplicit)” – all interacting, to offer the reader the opportunity to interpretthe text according to his or her own experiences, values, attitudes andpredilections. Not just to interpret, but to ask questions of thecontradictions which arise from the story – “to make dialectics a source ofenjoyment” (Brecht, 1974, p. 277).

Winter went on to say that “a fictional text is not to be taken asimparting knowledge about reality but as raising questions about reality,through the unresolved plurality of its meanings” (see also, Belsey, 1980,pp. 91-92) . He talked further about writing being a form of self exploration– “that what it ‘means’ is not known beforehand and ‘put into’ the text,rather it is discovered by being written” (Winter 1988 , p. 237). Writing, hesaid “is never simply about the external world, but always (implicitly atleast) also about the writer, and about the writer’s attempt to write. Theact of writing is always self exploratory i.e. reflexive.”

So in writing stories there is a plurality of voices and a form of selfexploration, but there is also the part played by the reader to beconsidered. Winter claimed that the reader was an active participant ininterpreting the story, because he or she, in spotting the contradictions orinconsistencies in it, must make an intentional move to fill in the meaning,and he or she would do this by referring to his or her own experiences.Winter called this a reformulation of the self, similar to the memory workof Haug et al, (1987), Crawford et al (1992) and Schratz & Schratz-Hadwich(1995), which leads to a social reconstruction of meaning (see also Lomax& Evans 1996). Iser (1974, pp. 132-133) talked of gaps in the flow of the textwhich “force readers to collaborate in maintaining its meaning, byattempting to remedy the gaps and apparent inconsistencies from theirown experience.” He said, “we have the apparently paradoxical situation inwhich the reader is forced to reveal aspects of himself in order toexperience a reality which is different from his own”. This “dialectics ofreading compels us to conduct a creative examination not only of the text,but also of ourselves” (Iser, 1974, p. 145).

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I wonder if this “creative examination of...ourselves” might arouseanger at the writer who has put into words her perceptions of events,because whoever reads it, in order to make sense of the contradictionsand gaps in continuity, has to confront their thoughts about their ownpractices and experiences? Whether one is on the inside or outside of thestory, if one is faced with reformulating one’s view of oneself, one mayexperience discomfort in the process. Could it be that anger is directed atthe writer to compensate for feelings of insecurity or annoyance whicharise as a result of confronting oneself, or even that by transferring theemotion of anger onto the writer, the reader does not have to deal withthe ‘creative examination, not only of the text, but also, of ourselves’?

In struggling to understand the ethical dilemmas, mainly ofanonymisation, that I experienced in writing stories, I would want to stressthat I viewed my interpretation of the situation as being only one of manydifferent ways of seeing things. This is why it was so important to offer thestory to other people – so that they could bring their own knowledge,experiences, interests, concerns, beliefs and so on to bear on it, and toopen my eyes to different interpretations from the ones which I hadwritten into my story. In this experience of using story in an actionresearch cycle, I found that the story enabled me to engage in reflexivityand dialectic analysis, helping me to know my practice but also raisingquestions to which I may not find answers. My view of action research isthat practice gives rise to theory and interacts with it, being always opento question and therefore to change. Winter (1989, p. 191), in talking aboutcritical analysis, said:

Theories are not, therefore, valid in themselves (as accurategeneralisations) but are merely possible strategies which will betested through practice and particularly through changes inpractice. In other words, critical analysis questions the claims of allinterpretive theories in the light of the principle that theories andpractices are part of an unending process of transforming eachother. Any ‘theory’ is therefore only a transitory moment in a cycleof alternations between practice and reflection upon practice, i.e.in the process of developmental change.

In terms of my learning, the main outcome from the story ‘Eloise’s Tale’,was that, rather than give all of one group of teachers the sameprogramme of learning, they should be encouraged to take control of theirown development, and be given opportunities, with guidance, support andcritique, to select and pursue pedagogical learning which takes them fromwhere they are now to where they would feel they were being moresuccessful. Each teacher would have a different agenda, and I think myresponsibility is to help him or her to focus on that area of concern and toplan actions which lead to improvements in teaching and learning for ourstudents.

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Correspondence

Dr M. Evans, Denbigh School, Burchard Crescent, Shenley Church End,Milton Keynes MK5 6EX, United Kingdom.

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