Teachers' Worlds and Work Understanding Complexity, Building Quality [Paperback]

Understanding what influences the quality of teachers work across a career is key to building and sustaining their on-going commitment and effectiveness. Teachers Worlds and Workprovides a new, research-informed consideration of key elements which independently and together influence teachers' work and lives: policy and workplace conditions, teacher professionalism, identity, emotions, commitment and resilience, types of professional learning and development, and the importance of the contribution to these made by high-quality leadership. In bringing these elements together, the book provides new, detailed and holistic understandings of their influence and suggests ways of building and sustaining teachers' abilities and willingness to teach to their best and well over their careers. This groundbreaking text will be essential reading for teacher educators, teachers, head teachers and academics.

Foreword 

1. Teacher professionalism in changing times 

2. Professional identities: teaching as emotional work 

3. Variations in teachers' work and lives: commitment as a key to quality 

4. A capacity for resilience 

5. Professional learning and development: combining the functional and attitudinal 

6. Learning as a school-led social endeavour 

7. The importance of high quality leadership 

8. Understanding complexity, building quality

Early in this volume Chris Day writes: We now live in a climate in which many teachers struggle to teach to their best and well. For me, the book is a deeply committed investigation of why this is and how teachers in the contemporary world, both through their own determination and through the creation of the right conditions in their schools and classrooms, can challenge this climate. The vision is both realló!