ABSTRACT
In this chapter we are back with a small-scale, illustrative piece of action research, this time by a lecturer in mathematics education who had been, until very recently, an advisory teacher in the county of Avon. Jan’s concern was to evaluate the long-term effects of an in-service course she had run, over four years, in the hope of identifying some of the ‘active ingredients’ within the model on which the course had been designed. The course consisted of three elements: sessions in the teachers’ centre, led by the advisory teachers; regular visits by an advisory teacher to each participant’s school; and visits by participants to each others’ schools. Somewhat to her surprise, the follow-up interviews clearly identified the peer visits and peer discussions as having been of most value. Here we have a clear example of a professional educator putting her implicit theory of learning to the reflective test, and finding it wanting. Collaborative learning, as Marilyn Osborn discovered in Chapter 5, turns out to be more powerful and more preferred than the gentle supportive advice of an adviser. The chapter casts light on Mike Wallace’s contention, in Chapter 2, that it is reflective work on the job that counts: it is, but peers seem to be of more value than advisers, perhaps because the presence of the latter in a classroom, however friendly, still raises performance anxiety, and fears of being judged, in ways that the peers do not.
