It’s About Time: Productive Pedagogues and Professional Learning Communities

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ABSTRACT: The role of teachers as pedagogues is examined with a view to teachers producing their own learning in professional learning communities. As professionals learning together in community, it is time for teachers to emerge as productive pedagogues who can reshape their own as well as students’ learning outcomes.

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This exploratory paper presents a challenge for teachers and for pedagogy. Following studies that indicate a need for teachers to use more productive pedagogies to improve student learning, it is here proposed that teachers need to be more radical still to be effective. They need as well to consider how they might be producers of their own acts of learning within professional learning communities. The paper begins by reporting briefly on the out-of-step nature of teaching and education in these postmodern times. It moves on to examine the changing notions of pedagogy over time, and advocates the emergence of teachers as productive pedagogues to better meet their own learning needs and those of students and society. The paper then proceeds to outline how teachers as producers might learn their way into being productive pedagogues through becoming professionals who make the time to learn in community. Finally, it looks at how professional learning communities can support teachers in producing learning, and how productive pedagogues in professional learning communities can be leaders within the act of learning.

Being out of step with the times, and with students’ needs, characterizes education, and with it, teachers. A recent report by the Ministerial Advisory Committee for Education Renewal (2004, p. 7) to the Department of Education and the Arts in the state of Queensland, Australia, stated with regard to education that “the system itself is progressively out of synch with social developments around it.” It also noted that educational policy literature showed “the institution of school itself has remained largely unchanged in its bureaucratic structures and modus operandi since the late 1800s” (p. 7), and added that “teachers are still organized along industrial lines” (p. 9). Further afield, a report by the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (2004) to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) indicated that “efforts to implement change in the name of ‘educational improvement’ have aimed mainly to raise the effectiveness of the system at the margin without trying to move the system into a new era” (p. 7), and that teachers “do not fit the template of modern knowledge-based communities, even though they make intensive use of knowledge” (p. 23). Locally and globally, the conclusion is that education systems and schools are out of step with society, and that teachers do not walk the walk that is needed of pedagogues today. Together, they still linger in the modern era while the world has moved on. It’s about time this changed.


To make a beginning in moving teachers on, a stroll through history will indicate how teachers as pedagogues have evolved, and need to evolve further in these changing times. The pedagogues of ancient times led their young charges to learning. They walked with the youngsters to whom they were assigned, answering questions and making sure that conditions were optimal to make the most of the learning experiences deemed educational at school (Davis, 2003). The pedagogues of modern times, in comparison, stood in front of their charges, delivering what was unquestionably considered to be the optimal learnings for the educated to possess. The ancient pedagogues were anticipative and facilitative, coming just before the students’ acts of learning. The modern pedagogues came after the acts of learning, passing on to students what was prescribed as necessary and useful after the event. However, for the postmodern pedagogues teaching in today’s schools, it is here proposed that being involved with students before and after acts of learning is not enough to meet the social and economic needs of education. To be in step with the world, today’s teachers need to operate within the act of learning.

Being within the act of learning implies that teachers as well as students are actively and reflectively engaged as participants in learning processes. In other words, teachers today need to be learners themselves. Being on the side or out in front, neither ancient nor modern pedagogues were intimately involved in learning, but now teachers need to be in there--involved in the messy complexities of change--to learn constantly about themselves and their teaching to enable students to learn better. The report of a major Australian study into the relationship between how schools and teachers worked and what outcomes students achieved, the Queensland School Reform Longitudinal Study (QSRLS) (Lingard et al., 2001), indicated that investment in teachers’ intellectual and social capital, in combination with an enabling school leadership, supported improved pedagogy and student outcomes. A recommendation was that teachers be encouraged and supported in forming professional learning communities to cooperatively, reflectively, and publicly learn about their teaching practices and how to develop them towards better student learning. Being based on Newmann and Associates’ (1996) work on authentic student achievement and authentic pedagogy through the Center on the Organization and Restructuring of Schools (CORS), the QSRLS also pressed for an enhancement of the intellectual demand of pedagogy in schools, and elucidated a range of productive pedagogies over four areas: intellectual quality, connectedness, supportive classroom environment, and recognition of difference, which could be applied to improving learning outcomes for students. The connection made was that teachers could learn within professional communities to develop more effective teaching practices. It is argued here that this is still not enough for the needs of education today. Critically examining practices and adopting more productive pedagogies speaks about what teachers need to do, but says little about who they have to be in order to enable these actions. To be a teacher who is a learner within the act of learning requires another conception of the term teacher to that which modern society accepted. The postmodern teacher who engages in professional communities and productive pedagogies as a learner is someone else altogether. Upon reflection on changing who they personally are as well as of what they professionally do, teachers need to perceive themselves as productive pedagogues, or teachers who produce learning.

To return to ancient times, a productive pedagogy, then, was to ensure that students were prepared, and that learning would happen. The pedagogue walked alongside to get his charge to learning, but to be learning himself as the journey went along would have shown negligence of his duty. In contrast, a productive pedagogy for modern times was to ensure that learning had happened, as reflected in there being a reproducible body of knowledge that students acquired and could be tested on. The pedagogue had learnt all there was to know, and passed all the tests in her own education so she could authoritatively judge her students. To be still involved in learning herself would have demonstrated incompetence. What then might a productive pedagogy be like in these postmodern times when it is impossible to prepare students beforehand for participation in a world that constantly changes or to give them tried and true knowledge when there is no longer certainty in what people know? The world today is more about abduction than the reduction of the positivist modern age. It is a process of life unfolding (Bohm, 1987) in often unanticipated patterns-that-connect (Bateson, 1988). It is a time and space where knowledge and meaning are continually made and recreated through Vygotskian constructivism (Jaramillo, 1996), and more recently, through digital connectivism (Siemens, 2005). Pedagogues in today’s mutable world need to be able to change--and change again and again. They need to produce learning in themselves and to apply productive pedagogies (Lingard et al., 2001) to themselves to foster learning-for-teaching that is appropriate for postmodern times. They need to attend to the four areas of productive pedagogies outlined by Lingard et al: to the intellectual quality of their learning instead of professing expertise; to its connectedness to their students and the world instead of its separation; to a supportive environment for collegiality instead of private and autonomous practice; and to a recognition of difference and the strength that diversity brings to communal action. Indeed, to not be learning in such ways might be seen as indicative of negligence and of incompetence for teaching students today.

In suggesting that teachers operate within the act of learning, that is, being and doing with their students in the moment of change that is learning, the case is thus put that a productive pedagogy for today is for teachers to envision and enact themselves as productive pedagogues. In being literally in the act, teachers become producers of learning, both for themselves and for their students. Learning--and knowledge production for innovation--is the basis of today’s social and economic infrastructures (Centre for Educational Research and Innovation, 2004). In a world that is continually being born in the now, there are few reliable precedents after the act of learning, and the future is forever before the act. The way to move forward is to learn in the act; to consciously learn in the now to make changes that will create a world of active and intentional choice rather than of fate. In short, the production of learning is world-making, and as such, teachers as productive pedagogues are here seen as world-makers. To be a producer--a maker--is a new role for pedagogues and how teachers might begin to approach this is explored below.


In considering teachers as productive pedagogues, caution is needed. In the language of the modern era, being productive meant being ostensibly busy in the manufacture of goods and services. Thus, in the industrial model of education, teachers took the raw materials of students, and gave the product of an education by filling learners up with static knowledge via a production line that stretched over years of schooling. Considering teachers today as producers of learning provides a different concept. The product is change; change in the being and doing of learners. Change as an ongoing production in education is less tangible and more fleeting than an education that could be banked and drawn on throughout life (Freire, 1972), but in being more participative for both teachers and students, it is more useful in today’s world because it is the one constant in lives that are lived in the moment. To be au fait (in touch or expert) with change could be considered a basic skill and disposition in the educated. In life-long educating, to learn now means to change; and to change is to create. In producing learning, teachers as pedagogues are involved in walking the walk with their students in creating something new; something that might be unexpected; something that shifts the pattern of reality and in effect, changes the world. Ambitious as such a statement may seem, it is nevertheless what stakeholders in education are keenly interested in pursuing. Although their agendas may differ, in common they seek the changing of the course of humanity’s future, as the following will show.

In an increasingly competitive economic sphere, the pressure is on to harness teachers’ work to the market place (Robertson, 1996). Guskey (2003), for example, in analyzing the effectiveness of professional development programs for teachers did so in terms of organization, structure, and purpose guided by clear goals of student learning improvement. Also on professional development, Kelleher (2003, para.4) noted that in measuring outcomes for investment in teacher learning, “The issue is not the educators’ happiness quotient--how satisfied teachers are with a particular workshop--but rather what effect professional development will have on student learning.” One apparent premise for this emphasis on learning improvement is that students who learn more will be more productive, and thus have greater capacity to contribute in the workplace. In this scenario, the teacher is accountable to the economy via the performance of the student-cum-worker. The ultimate result of improved students’ learning--of the new and unexpected--is the next product or service to blitz the competition. The shifting reality is in effect a grooming of consumer desire to an endless commodity supply (Bauman, 2003). To thus see students’ learning as itself a commodity, however, removes from change the moral dimensions of personal and social responsibility in decision making, and therefore abrogates a future of public and conscious choice (Sytsma, 2004).

Juxtaposed to this position, Robertson (1996, p. 50) advocated that a learner-centred pedagogy should be critical, and focused on building “upon a relationship of trust and a genuine interest in the child as citizen.” Another premise for improving learning is thus that students who are active and caring citizens can contribute creatively to public rather than privatized knowledge (Centre for Educational Research and Innovation, 2004) and to social development. Teachers producing learning for change that creates citizens of the world offers more than economic potentials. As socially responsible and future oriented learners, the new and unexpected outcomes are alternative ways of thinking and feeling about humanity’s relationship with the world. Learning for change in this case means designing and enacting initiatives and innovations that address global issues, shifting reality towards sustainable and peaceful learning communities. Together, the teacher and student accept individual and shared responsibility to work towards a better life for all.

In both scenarios, there is a push for teachers to produce more productive learners, that is, to raise the standard and quality of students’ learning outcomes. Whatever the ethos and motivations behind the push, teachers are seen as making a critical difference in what and how students learn (Hawley & Valli, 1999). If teachers are themselves to step up to a higher standard in producing student learning, DuFour and Eaker (1998) have suggested that the industrial model on which schools were based must be broken and replaced by the model of a learning organization within which teachers form professional communities of learners. The implication is that only as teachers become learners – and changers – within themselves and as a group, can they become more creative producers of learning in students. In stakeholders in education expecting greater productivity in teachers in response to their push, productive pedagogies in teaching are seen as the great hope for pulling schooling and learners into the future. The pressure is on for teachers, as productive pedagogues in learning communities, to become “energy and knowledge creators” (Fullan, 2001, p. 270) and thus reality shapers and world makers.

Teachers have a steep learning curve before them. For example, to balance the demands of society and economy and to participate in creating critical citizenship, as in the scenarios above, requires that teachers are intimately caught in the act of learning – their own learning and that of their students. Of course, teachers cannot produce a proverbial brave new world on their own, but the focus here is on their learning more than on the structural and cultural systems in which they operate. Numerous researchers (DuFour, 2004; Eaker, DuFour, & Burnette, 2002; Fullan, 2001; Horde, 1997; Huffman & Hipp, 2003; Langford, 2003; Louis, Kruse, & Marks, 1996; Newmann & Wehlage, 1996) are aligned with DuFour and Eaker’s (1998) call for teachers to participate in professional learning communities as a means of improving student learning outcomes. The fabric of the term professional learning community will be teased apart below, and the three threads of teacher professionalism, teachers as learners, and teachers in community will be examined to elicit the shape and form of the empowered productive pedagogue learning within.

 Teacher Professionalism

The push on teachers to reform themselves extends into the arena of professionalism. Beyond the derogatory teacher-proof curriculum that hapless teachers were required to deliver, stakeholders such as government, bureaucracies, and big business now want more (A. Hargreaves & Goodson, 1996). Beyond being the modernist technician, teachers are now required to practice as professionals whilst, in most cases, still being instruments of the fund-supplying state. This seems an oxymoron, yet it does reflect the tensions that the productive pedagogue must balance and work through. However, as activists (Sachs, 2003) who seek to lay their own path in walking the walk of professionalism, teachers should not struggle between what Hargreaves and Goodson (1996, p. 20) referred to as the “self-serving status enhancement” of classical professionalism and “matters of technical competence and personal, practical reflection” as in practical professionalism. Neither should they allow themselves to be moulded or dictated to by the state or other stakeholders. Rather, teacher professionalism should be transformative (Sachs, 2003) in being “guided by moral and socio-political visions of the purpose which teacher professionalism should serve within actively caring communities and vigorous social democracies” (A. Hargreaves & Goodson, 1996, p. 20).

Hargreaves and Goodson (1996) listed seven characteristics (indicated by italics in what follows) of teacher professionalism that they believe are appropriate for these postmodern times. Teacher professionalism should feature opportunities and responsibilities for teachers to exercise discretionary judgment. Rather than being seen as social or economic instruments, teachers need to assert themselves as full stakeholders in education. In this, they also need to engage with the moral and social purposes of what they do as educators. Professional teachers need, therefore, to commit to collaborative cultures for their own purposes of addressing issues in practice rather than at the mandate of others. Teachers’ personal autonomy needs to be replaced with group heteronomy where they work authoritatively yet openly with other stakeholders. In moving out of the classroom and into community, teachers need to be more than just service providers, and require a commitment of active care for their students and co-learners. In participating in continuous learning of their own initiation, rather than being compliant respondents to imposed change, teachers need to acknowledge the complexity of their work and demand appropriate recognition. In walking their own walk as professionals and in being more closely in touch with their students and their communities, teachers can find dignity and empowerment in their practice.

In choosing to assert professionalism as described, and thus to develop a knowledge base and standards of practice (Talbert & McLaughlin, 1996) on their own terms, the productive pedagogue as an identity (Talbert & McLaughlin, 1996) emerges in a resilience to walk with confidence and positive influence in an uncertain world where there will be those who would seek to highjack teacher professionalism to exploit teachers (A. Hargreaves & Goodson, 1996). In producing learning in themselves and thereby creating professional knowledge (Burney, 2004; Sergiovanni, 2000), teachers can be, as Hargreaves (2003) put it, catalysts, counterpoints, and casualties in education. In emerging as learners and creators and sharers, teachers are themselves producing the knowledge society. Hargreaves (2003) has described teachers, in collectively deepening their learning and increasing their intelligence, as catalysts of today’s world as they and their students grow knowledge--and hopefully it would be public knowledge rather than privatized knowledge-for-sale. Still on a positive spin, he also viewed teachers as counterpoints of today’s society whereby they work to counter and balance the de-humanizing aspects of a knowledge economy. In developing both personally and professionally, the productive pedagogue is closely involved in fostering community and developing significant relationships to maintain culture, identity, and trust amidst the endless change. In contrast, if teachers allow their production and art to be taken over, and themselves to be exploited for others’ gains, the pedagogue veers off the productive path and becomes a casualty of the knowledge society. Instead of producing learning, teachers become factory workers and victims of systems no better than those of the industrial revolution. Hargreaves (2003) has painted a harsh picture of teachers working harder instead of smarter, teaching as they are told, complying with imposed change, and perhaps worst of all, coaching students to memorize standardized learning. The potential for becoming casualties exists in the knowledge economy; harassed teachers goading students in some form or another to reach set benchmarks because their jobs depend on it is not an unrealistic scenario. However, it is an unlikely one if teachers recognize and learn their way into being truly professional productive pedagogues, and as a coherent and vocal body learn to provide checks and balances against the excesses of the marketplace. Clearly, for teachers to become effective professionals, teacher learning is essential.

Teachers as learners

Being within the act of professional practice requires an acutely sensitive awareness of the now that ancient and modern pedagogues would never have dreamed of. For them, time was linear and bound, but today’s productive pedagogue must develop a new sense of time as the past and the future exist, all together, in the present. They must recognize that every moment in the postmodern world is a learning opportunity, and that every moment must be productive. While the notion of teachers’ time will be explored further on, teachers as ongoing producers of their own learning will be considered first.

 Teachers’ learning

To avoid becoming casualties of the knowledge society, as indicated above, political savoir faire is a sensitivity that professional teachers must develop. To be an equal player in the stakes of education, teachers need to learn what they know. Burney (2004) has stressed that, through professional practice, teachers’ craft knowledge must be collected, codified, legitimated, and shared. As rigorous professional knowledge is developed and made explicit through research and practice, the productive pedagogue gains authority in the political arena. An increasing sensitivity to all aspects of the external environment, for example, to parents and community, would serve teachers well, yet there are internal sensitivities that are perhaps more primary. By its activist nature (Sachs, 2003), the process of developing professional practice involves teachers in self-empowerment. Self-initiated and self-owned power makes the productive pedagogue a force to be reckoned with in education and a stakeholder in his or her own right rather than an instrumentality. Internally, teachers become more sensitive not only to the outside world they are making but to themselves. Being in control of themselves, they are able to develop a detached self-awareness through which to watch their selves living. They can learn from what they see in themselves, and can ask if they can make improvements in who they are, in how they relate to others, and in what they create.

As a professional, the productive pedagogue has ownership and responsibility for self and practice. In so accepting self-responsibility and hence personal accountability, the inevitable outcome is that teachers become learners because that is the only path to walk to produce change for improvement in themselves and their students. Whereas as technicians, teachers may have been content with knowledge-for-practice handed down to them as a given and with often unaware knowledge-in-practice implemented daily, more cognizant teachers centre on knowledge-of-practice (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999). By taking a detached, inquiring stance, the productive pedagogue can “generate local knowledge of practice by working within the contexts of inquiry communities to theorize and construct their work and to connect it to larger social, cultural and political issues” (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999, p. 250). Such professional practice reflects the characteristics of teacher professionalism as outlined by Hargreaves and Goodson (1996). It involves continuous and complex learning with colleagues; it involves personal judgment and is open to community; and it involves care and moral responsibility. Producing professional knowledge is therefore a hallmark for teaching in the postmodern world. In inquiring into what they know and what they are producing, teachers put themselves within the act of learning and within the now of change.

According to DuFour (2004) and Eaker (writing in Eaker et al., 2002), it is not before time that teachers put student learning rather than teaching at the core of their professional work. Teaching as primary implies a notion of modern pedagogy where knowledge was delivered. As explored above, for today’s productive pedagogue, teaching is learning. It is not so much that a shift from teaching to learning is required, but a shift in what teaching means. In shifting the reality of teaching-as-a-profession to producing knowledge, the productive pedagogue is clearly focused on teacher and student learning. In 1990, as the postmodern world was emerging, Sarason (1990) made the proposal that schools should exist for teacher learning as well as student learning. With foresight, he posited that “teachers cannot create and sustain the conditions for the productive development of children if those conditions do not exist for teachers” (p. xiv), and that “in no less than our public schools the teachers have come to see that if conditions for their growth do not obtain, they cannot create and sustain them for students” (p. 130). The idea of teachers being paid to learn and of education funding being expended on teacher learning has taken time to gain currency. In other professions such as science, medicine, and law, ongoing learning has long been socially accepted as a necessary part of practice. The need for professional learning has certainly not been seen as displaying negligence in duty or incompetence, whereas for teachers there have been negative connotations associated with not being in front of a class all the time and with not knowing the answer to everything.

The path to public recognition of teaching as a profession has been long, due in part to the lingering industrial modus operandi of education and teaching, to quick fixes through restructuring and other operations on teachers under the guise of professional development, and to the lengthy gestation of the empowered productive pedagogue as postmodernism emerged. By the end of the nineties, there were calls for teachers to have their own learning curricula (Day, 1999), and a growing consensus that teacher learning was linked to student learning (Hawley & Valli, 1999). In the early years of this decade, it was increasingly recognized that teacher learning and professionalism needed to be supported if student learning was to improve (Hoban, 2002). In Hargreaves’ words (in an interview with Sparks, 2004):

… there has to be consistency between what we want for students and what we want for teachers. If we want high-level, deep learning for students we have to have highly skilled and intellectually able teachers. That means attracting, developing, and retaining teachers who have those qualities and giving them the working conditions that inspire them and offer them a chance to soar. (para.2)

Stakeholders in education are finally beginning to invest, financially and culturally, in teachers to support their transformation into productive pedagogues. In the state of Queensland, Australia, for example, the Department of Education and the Arts body, Education Queensland, appears to have “recognized the very real need to go beyond structural changes in education, and instead place teachers and their ongoing learning at the core of the educational reform agenda” (Lingard, Hayes, Mills, & Christie, 2003, p. 10). It seems that the productive pedagogue can at last come of age.

It is now accepted that teachers as professionals can have the proper selfishness (Langford, 2003) of investing in their own learning. However, caution is needed in considering the nature of this learning. More of the same professional development is not the answer (King & Newmann, 2000); indeed, it can be construed as counter-productive to productive pedagogy. King and Newmann (2000) outlined several factors as pertinent to success in teacher learning.

They suggest that learning is most likely to occur if it is contextualized in their real worlds of teaching; if it is sustained through opportunities to study, experiment, and get feedback; if it happens in collaboration with professional peers; and if teachers are in charge of the substance and process of the learning. Overarching and influencing these are teachers’--and indeed all education stakeholders’--conceptions of time and of how they learn. The latter will be examined in a following section, but teachers’ time and its impact on learning will now be explored.

Teachers’ time

The time of now presents a challenge to the productive pedagogue learning within the moment. Carpe diem (seize the moment) well describes the task of the awakened professional teacher who would be within the act of producing learning at every opportunity. The literature of teacher professional development is replete with calls for time for teachers’ learning (for example, Adelman & Walking-Eagle, 1997; DuFour & Eaker, 1998; A. Hargreaves, 2003; Huffman & Hipp, 2003; Little, 1999; Sykes, 1999). Indeed, Sparks and Hirsh (2000) recommended that twenty-five per cent of teachers’ time be devoted to their own learning and sharing. However, rather than look at how teachers may be given time, consideration here is given to the empowered productive pedagogue producing time; of taking and making the moment of learning and change. For the modern pedagogue, time may have been driven by a curriculum to cover, but for the postmodern teacher, time is uncoupled from the factory system and hitched to learning. In unbinding time, the self-aware, productive pedagogue can participate in flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1992) or optimal experience, allowing learning to measure the pace with which time is walked. Rather than compressing more and more activity into set units of time, time in flow becomes expansive as the learning journey unfolds. Therefore, as DuFour (writing in Eaker et al., 2002) points out, learning (and change)--not time--is the one and only constant, and should be chosen as the focus and first priority when making decisions about professional practice.

In a study of the barriers to sharing and learning as perceived by a group of teachers, Collinson and Cook (2001) noted that the nine most important were all to do with time: feeling overwhelmed; lack of discretionary time to learn; lack of discretionary time to share with colleagues; lack of common time; lack of a designated time for sharing; lack of uninterrupted time; lack of unpressured time; lack of renewal time, and habitual time where teachers worked harder in the same old ways rather than smarter. As the productive pedagogue asserts learning as primary, and insists on taking and making the time to walk the walk of true productivity, that is, deep and complex learning, stakeholders may become alarmed at what they might perceive as a slowing rather than increasing pace of change in teacher and, therefore, student learning. In reality, the walk of the productive pedagogue becomes almost an enthusiastic run as learning begets learning and productivity increases exponentially. At that stage, time slows down into flow, and teachers are able to seize the learnable moment. However, it is in that beginning stage of professional walking when those interested in supporting teacher learning can address the barriers listed. In gifting teachers time to learn and to share together, the investment is in better learning for both teachers and students, as the following will demonstrate.

Teachers in community

The productive pedagogue first acknowledges that he or she is an adult learner. This is appropriate to teachers as emerging professionals because the andragogical model of learning accepts that adults have the personal power to direct their own learning, that they have a need to know and are ready and motivated to learn, and that adults’ learning is centred in their real life contexts and experiences (Knowles, Holton III, Elwood, & Swanson, 1998). However, each on their own, teachers are only able to learn through their own habitual perspectives. To learn together through multiple perspectives broadens and deepens the path of learning. The productive pedagogue interested in making the most of learning, in being expansively creative and productive, also acknowledges that he or she is a social learner who learns most effectively when in community with others.

Burney (2004) has proposed that the artificial division between teachers’ research (knowledge-for-practice) and practice (knowledge-in-practice) should cease. Indeed, knowledge-of-practice demands it, as does building professional knowledge and being within the act of learning. Change characterizes learning because new perspectives foster different perceptions, thus enabling new connections to be made and new conceptions formed. However, to learn alone - even if he or she moves competently amongst personal perspectives such as researching, practising, reflecting, and creating--would be a poor choice for the productive pedagogue. As an isolated individual, the teacher has the tendency to sift any alternative perspectives through existing mindsets (Sytsma, 2003) in what Thompson and Zeuli (1999) have termed psychological constructivism. Mental schemas accommodate new information, and little significant learning occurs. The modern teacher’s self-contained autonomy could lead to this kind of self-reinforcing learning; of walking a treadmill but going nowhere fast because no adaptations are made. In contrast, the postmodern teacher’s professionalism is characterized by heteronomy, as indicated earlier. The walk of the productive pedagogue is co-joined with colleagues to lay a diversified path with multiple options. As Burney (2004) has affirmed, highly active engagement with ideas and actions and interconnections amongst learners grows a robust, fluid, and usable knowledge that continually evolves into more complex and integrated forms.

The best learning, therefore, is social (Burney, 2004), and teachers engage in this when they share: when they talk with each other and watch each other, when they articulate their ideas, contest each other’s perspectives and develop a common language, and when they make public a communally-validated knowledge base. This kind of learning is problematic and, in resolving cognitive dissonances, adaptively alters mindsets (and thereby actions) because significant learning and change occurs in the problem-solving process. It is what Thompson and Zeuli (1999) termed sociocultural constructivism, since emergent knowledge is truth-tested within the learning community. With professional detachment and collegiality, teachers are also able to engage in metalearning--in learning about their processes of learning --and this impacts on their creation of effective practice (Munro, 1999). The productive pedagogue, in the company of colleagues, is therefore well placed to “actively construct ways of knowing which act as maps of their worlds” (Day, 1999, p. 201). In learning new ways of knowing as they walk together, teachers renew the shapes of their world maps and have the capacity to recreate the world itself.

Teachers need other teachers to grow, to multiply their perspectives, and to literally change their minds and their realities in the world. For this reason, researchers such as Wenzlaff and Wieseman (2004) and Little (1999) have advocated that teachers have the opportunities to learn through the joint work of participating in professional communities. For teachers in today’s world, community is a shifting phenomenon. As Sergiovanni (2000, p. 69) explained, “Acceptance of others and cooperation within differences are the universal values postmodernists claim are needed to guarantee feelings of belonging, trust, and safety essential to building community.” A community of productive pedagogues, therefore, is characterized by differentiation, diversity, and inclusion rather than exclusion and stifling conformity to unquestioned tradition. According to Sergiovanni (2000), learning communities today need to incorporate community in relationship, in place, and in mind and heart through caring and collaboration. They also need to be fostering community in memory and in practice through producing and creating patterns of learning in daily work that connect and make whole. The productive pedagogue recognizes that being in community with others is essential to the making whole of their professional learning. The professional knowledge landscapes (Connelly & Clandinin, 1995b) of modern teachers need to be replaced. Secret stories of practice told by teachers within the classroom walls, and cover stories told without, served to perpetuate and make sacred the division between theory and practice. For the productive pedagogue promoting a knowledge-of-practice, what Craig (1995) described as knowledge communities are safe places for teachers to come out to challenge and support each other’s learning. In such communities, teachers can tell their stories, cultivate the caring and collaborative relationships that connect them together, and reflect on the path they are simultaneously dreaming, making, and walking. In so doing, they are participating in educative acts (Connelly & Clandinin, 1995a); they are participating in the sociocultural construction of themselves; and they are producing professional knowledge-of-practice as a communal resource (Sachs, 2003). Within the educative knowledge landscape of professional community, productive pedagogues are within the act of learning, and are creating the moment of living in the present while being in the presence of the past and the future.


The steep learning curve of teachers entering the postmodern world continues as they seek to participate as productive pedagogues in professional learning communities. In their being and their doing, teachers together need to assess the productivity of their own learning. They need to ask themselves if they are teaching themselves in productive ways that will continuously improve their outcomes as learners. The productive pedagogies (underlined below) elucidated by the QSRLS (Lingard et al., 2001) as a strategic tool for curriculum leadership and reform also have application to teachers’ leadership of their own learning. With regard to improving in the area of intellectual quality, there are several andragogical questions that teachers could ask to focus their professional learning in communities:

· Higher order thinking: Does conceptual thinking in professional learning communities operate at complex levels that result in creative adaptations?
· Deep knowledge: Does professional knowledge building centre on eliciting knowledge-of-practice?
· Deep understanding: Does the professional knowledge landscape publicly demonstrate that who teachers are and what they do is intimately related to the outcomes of students’ learning?
· Substantive conversation: Does teacher-talk feature sustained dialogues and communal critique of practices with a view to continuously and cooperatively improving learning and teaching?
· Knowledge as problematic: Is professional learning based on emerging notions of knowledge as complex and changing?
· Metalanguage: Is the language of producing learning used to frame creative and adaptive practice?

In reviewing the area of connectedness within professional learning communities, teachers could inquire into the following:

· Knowledge integration: Does professional knowledge reach across traditional domains to integrate the perspectives of multiple disciplines?
· Background knowledge: Does professional learning situate and contextualize knowledge-of-practice socially and culturally?
· Connectedness to the world: Does professional learning demonstrate concern with broader social issues beyond education per se?
· Problem-based curriculum: Is professional learning and practice engaging with the realities of the world in actively working towards improving the quality and sustainability of life?

In the area of creating a supportive environment for learning together, teachers could ask themselves these questions:
· Learner direction: Are the participants in professional learning communities directing their own learning?
· Social support: Is professional learning characterized by transparency, sharing, and mutually respectful relationships of support and challenge?
· Academic engagement: Do professional communities consistently engage participants in productive learning?
· Explicit quality performance criteria: Do professional learning communities develop criteria and standards for professional practice, and apply them to continuous improvement?
· Self-regulation: Do professional communities accept responsibility for learning and practising productively?

In developing ways to learn and teach together rather than autonomously, teachers could ask these questions in the area of recognition of difference:
· Cultural knowledges: Does professional learning move beyond modern, largely western boundaries to celebrate alternative knowledges of learning and teaching?
· Inclusivity: Do professional learning communities productively use the diverse talents of participants?
· Narrative: Does professional learning use stories from the field as legitimate sources in producing knowledge?
· Group identity: Does professional learning produce communities of practice?
· Active citizenship: Do professional learning communities demonstrate and foster democratic practices?

In so assessing the productivity of their own andragogies, teachers in professional learning communities are within the act of learning, and are able to recreate themselves and their practice. However, they do not--and should not--have to go it alone in their quest of walking the walk of the productive pedagogue. For example, the Ministerial Advisory Committee for Educational Renewal (2004) from the Department of Education and the Arts in Queensland, Australia recommended four strategies for transformative professional development for teachers: self-management (for social responsibility), community linkage (for networking with the wider community), flexibility or adaptive behaviour (for producer skills), and customization (for capacity building). These avant-garde (in advance of those generally accepted) strategies demonstrate stakeholder support for the emergence of teachers’ professional learning communities, yet it must be noted that researchers such as DuFour (2004) have been fearful that teachers’ professional learning communities are in danger of becoming the latest fad to fail on the long road of educational reform. DuFour (2004) has stressed the need to stay focused on learning rather than teaching, on working collaboratively --with each other and with other stakeholders, and on being accountable for results.

In accepting responsibility for producing learning in their own selves and in students, productive pedagogues must literally seize the moment that the unravelling of modern patterns is creating. In contrast to the enculturation that previously saw teachers as obedient instrumentalities, teachers are encouraged to become learners and now have opportunities to empower themselves through communal professional learning. With technological advances, teachers have a multitude of learning opportunities available to them. Indeed, the lone and dedicated pedagogue who seeks to produce learning can seize the moment and begin the journey of walking a new path of teaching. However, the road to deep and sustained learning, and thus to creativity and innovation, eludes emerging productive pedagogues, while structural and cultural conditions continue to restrain teachers from taking up newly available opportunities of professionally learning together. As Sergiovanni (2000) advocated, the cultural lifeworld requirements of producing learning should determine structural systemworld decisions. At present, reality is the other way around for teachers: the traditions of bureaucratic systems get in the way of teachers’ learning together to be more productive. Now is the time for teachers to be activists and leaders in change, so they can engage with each other in reshaping such realities and making new worlds.


Earlier in this paper, it was shown that productive pedagogues can take time and make time for learning because learning is the raison d’etre (reason for being) of teaching. If stakeholders are serious in supporting teachers’ journeys of producing learning, they as well need to take and make time for teachers to create or take up opportunities of participating in professional learning communities. Not only must stakeholders in education accept teachers as equal partners in producing learning, they themselves must also become learners. It’s about time they learnt that learning is a social act, and that it takes a whole village to raise a child. In learning to support teachers’ learning in professional communities, stakeholders are actively supporting students’ learning. Whilst emphasizing the need for adults to cooperate in educating students, Louis, Kruse and Marks (1996) have cautioned that cooperation alone does not guarantee success in improving learning outcomes. They note that a community of adults that reinforces and augments the talent, knowledge, and insight of individual teachers is essential, as without professional community, teachers “find it difficult to sustain the level of energy needed to reflect continually on and improve their practice for the benefit of authentic student achievement” (Louis et al., 1996, p. 179). Although in this case the reference was to adults within a school, the same could be extrapolated to the wider community, to school systems, to government bodies, and to business. If the so-called knowledge society wants to exist, the professional learning communities of productive pedagogues must be supported as a collective responsibility of all stakeholders. With appropriate support, productive pedagogues can walk the walk of producing learning in professional communities. As they maintain a focus on learning and a responsibility for improving learning outcomes, and as they openly work together and support each other to establish shared norms and values and to continually improve their practice in professional learning communities (DuFour & Eaker, 1998; Horde, 1997; Huffman & Hipp, 2003; Louis et al., 1996), teachers are within the act, and can produce the kind of learning that is needed in the knowledge society of postmodern times.

The time is ripe for leadership to create this changing reality in teaching. In acknowledging personal power and thus responsibility for ensuring learning improvement, teachers cast themselves as productive pedagogues - as producers of a pedagogy designed for learning. In so shaping themselves, they assume leadership because they must go ahead and construct the path of continuous improvement with their colleagues-in-community. In educative knowledge landscapes (Connelly & Clandinin, 1995a), the road can be rocky, but with the ongoing conversation, the problem solving, the conflict resolution, and the solution development in a professional learning community (Louis et al., 1996), teachers can take the lead in moving learning and change along more effective and productive routes. The andragogy of teaching themselves to learn in professional learning communities, for example, can extend to teaching other adults in the school community to also learn for producing improvement, thus increasing the capacity of all as a learning community (Beachum & Dentith, 2004; Newmann & Wehlage, 1996). So, too, can practices of productive pedagogy in the classroom apply to leading learning across the school. Productive pedagogues may engage others in intellectual activity, in making connection, in emotional labour, in attending to diversity, and in envisioning the kind of learning that will be encouraged (Lingard et al., 2003). To use Sergiovanni’s (2000, p. 179) term, such leaders are midwives to “both empower and enable others to make better decisions about what needs to be done to make school a better place for teaching and learning.” The realm of productive pedagogues as teacher leaders thus extends from within their professional learning communities and classrooms to growing learning in the wider community (Beachum & Dentith, 2004). In so creating distributed leadership (Harris, 2003) across the school, inclusively producing learning becomes a hallmark of the learning community. This point is here seen as the real beginning of reform in education.

As productive pedagogues, teachers can drive collaboration, the second pump of innovation identified in the report, “Innovation in the Knowledge Economy” (Centre for Educational Research and Innovation, 2004). In collaborating in professional learning communities, productive pedagogues are the “new actors” (p. 42) in innovation processes. As school practitioners find and exercise a collective voice, radical changes in priorities may be instituted in schools (D. Hargreaves, 2004). As teachers move from being transmitters to producers of knowledge (Centre for Educational Research and Innovation, 2004), productive pedagogues will be seen as “learning entrepreneurs, managers or producers” (p. 13) and as “learning architects” (p. 16). They are professionals; they are learners; and they function together. In collectively designing and producing learning and change in schools, productive pedagogues can at last shake the factory model and lead learning creatively into the postmodern era. Being deeply within the act of learning, teachers in professional learning communities can walk the walk of innovatively shaping new realities and making a new world with their students. The time of the productive pedagogue has come.


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Author Note

Dr. Sandra Sytsma is an educator based in South East Queensland, Australia. As a lifelong learner, she holds several postgraduate degrees and sustains interest and activity in leadership for change across the broad spectrum of the educational enterprise.

Correspondence regarding this article should be addressed to:
Dr. Sandra Sytsma
Rainbow Beach 4581
Australia
sandra.sytsma@eq.edu.au