ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I explain how “development” entered the research vocabulary of universities. By appending the occupation of teaching to that story, we will understand where research devoted to the development of teachers came from. We will see what its intended, unspoken assumptions are. Part I outlined the rationale, the institutional dynamics, and the problems that produced a research context for teacher development. Problematic environmental conditions, primarily economic ones, created the rationale for improving schools as mechanisms to address and solve these problems. As Waller identified, schools are always saddled with this responsibility. He believed that schools had an internal culture that had to be understood if we wanted to recreate them into more adaptive places. But focusing on teachers as the root of the problem is especially relevant. Jackson examines closely the internal dynamics of classrooms and, in doing so, introduces teachers’ thought processes as especially relevant to their continuing education. Lortie revives Waller’s sociological perspective with an intense investigation of teachers as knowledge-workers. In general, these studies provide the basis for a field of study and curriculum problem: society and economy are experiencing serious challenges; schools are to prepare the young to meet and overcome those challenges. However, teachers in schools are not adequate to prepare children to meet and overcome these challenges. Basically, schoolteachers need to be corrected, and working in schools is not helping because these places are not learning environments for them. Even the candidates who choose teaching as a career aren’t the right kinds of people that we need there. And if different kinds of candidates were chosen for the job, then the work itself impedes them from growing. They need to be developed into professionals who approach their work entirely differently. If this problem isn’t solved, then elementary schools are going to become increasingly ineffective as preparatory institutions. Teachers are assumed to be the problem, therefore, and studying “teacher development” should provide theories, methods, and the policies to correct this essential problem.
