Jurasaite-Harbison, Elena

Abstract: Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore informal contexts of teachers' workplace professional learning and inform educational researchers, teacher educators, administrators and teachers about ways in which teachers learn to improve their practice. By questioning how teachers learn on-the-job to be better teachers and how school cultures position them as learners, this study seeks to generates hypotheses about relationships between the nature of workplace professional learning and its content and informal contexts. Design/methodology/approach: An ethnographic design based on a grounded theory generates analytic categories from interviews, participants' reflective journals and field notes through comparison of learning environments in three contrasting schools in two countries--Lithuania and the USA. Discourse analysis is employed to analyze three cases of the schools' informal learning contexts in order to better understand how teachers learned through everyday interactions. Findings: Within each case, the findings illuminate three facets of school culture that provide or fail to provide opportunities for teacher learning in informal contexts: school leadership, teachers' professional relationships, and their individual stances as learners. Research limitations/implications: The limitations of the paper derive from its focus on school cultures as learning organizations producing detailed thick descriptions, which are culturally specific and may not necessarily be transferable to other schools. Practical implications: The implications underline that teachers and teacher educators could enhance teachers' professional learning by contributing to building and sustaining the opportunities necessary to maintain professional growth at teachers' workplaces. Originality/value: The value of the paper is in: defining specific cultural features in schools that create or fail to create opportunities for teachers to learn informally; showing how teachers use these opportunities for their learning; calling for re-evaluation of professional development systems to include informal learning as an important path for professional growth.

总结：

1、通过询问老师如何在职得到更好的学习，教师和学校如何培养他们的位置，本研究旨在生成有关职场专业学习的性质和它的内容和非正式上下文之间的关系的假说。

2、设计方式：立陶宛和美国基于扎根理论的人种学设计，通过学习环境三个截然不同的学校比较两个国家产生的采访，参加者反思日志和田野笔记解析类。话语分析是用来分析三种情况下学校的正规学习环境，以便更好地了解教师如何通过日常互动的经验教训。结论：在每一种情况下，研究结果阐明学校文化提供或未能提供教师学习的非正式环境中的机会。

3、本文的价值在于：定义在创建或无法创建教师学习机会的非正式学校特有的文化特色;展示教师如何使用他们的学习机会;要求专业开发系统重新评估，以包括非正规学习作为专业成长的重要途径。

来源：Journal of Workplace Learning, v21 n4 p299-321 2009. 23 pp