ABSTRACT
As Goethe wrote, “knowing is not enough; we must apply” (Goethe, 1858, p 225), and yet the space between learning and doing is often wide. The challenge of moving from professional learning to professional action has often thwarted efforts at professional development and self-directed learning among professionals. In some ways, it is the classic problem of transferring new knowledge, skills, or dispositions into new domains: from collegial discussions to personal and collective action. Research on teacher professional development has often emphasized the need for professional learning to be collaborative, embedded, and aligned with other goals in order to address this problem of transfer from learning to action (Darling-Hammond & Richardson, 2009; Garet, Porter, Desimone, Birman, & Yoon, 2001), but the challenge for teacher educators is perhaps amplified by the solitary nature of our teaching endeavors. Although we have much in common as learners, scholars, and professionals, our sense of subject and disciplinary differences, combined with the ever-increasing demands on the profession, have often led us to walk different paths between what we learn together and what we do with that learning in our classes.
