The Expert Teacher Teams (ETTs) are assigned to lead teacher professional development projects in underprivileged areas in China. However, the literature has given scant attention to how teachers enact leadership and collaborate with other agents, such as the government. Integrating two critical constructs in education, professional capital and Leading from the Middle, this article examines the experiences of ETT members from two typical educational assistance projects. Using qualitative methods, this study delineates a series of professional capital of expert teachers leading in the middle zone, deemed the most crucial force in each case. Expert teachers possess high levels of human capital, extensive social capital, and strong decision-making capital, providing robust professional support for the continuous and effective advancement of projects. Additionally, the ethical capital and influence that expert teachers hold attract a significant number of followers, establishing a solid foundation of educators for improving education in underprivileged areas.They establish a systematic network with clear labor division among other stakeholders, including the government, recipient schools, and local institutions. The implications from Chinese cases suggest the shift of educational assistance from "top-down imput" to "LfM- interscholastic support".

This study is a part of the project What helps one, helps all: Implementing language and content integrated methodology in Norwegian classrooms. The project aims to introduce an adapted SIOP model (Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol) to classrooms in selected middle and upper secondary schools in Norway in order to increase plurilingual students’ engagement and academic achievement. We investigate how the teachers perceive self-study instruments such as journaling in their own professional development process. The study focuses on the dialogical relationship between beliefs and practices the teachers report (Borg, 2017) and looks at whether their pedagogical awareness changes with the use of self-study instruments.

The study is relevant to the conference as it contributes to promoting equity and inclusion through effective partnerships with schools. The Norwegian Education Act (2024) stipulates that plurilingual students are entitled to adapted language instruction but does not delineate a specific approach. Thus, there is a growing need for increasing in-service teachers’ competence in teaching plurilingual students as 52% of teachers in upper secondary schools are not accredited in second language pedagogy (Næss et al, 2023) and 84% of those working with plurilingual students see the need for more training (Lødding et al, 2024).

The study has a collaborative research design where the researchers and in-service teachers use self-study methodology (Samaras, 2011; Feldman, Paugh, & Mills, 2004), and Educational Research Design (McKenny & Reeves, 2019) to uncover the practitioners’ perceptions of pedagogical practices. Data collection includes teachers’ self-filming, journaling and bi-weekly online teacher-researcher group meetings where the data is discussed and analysed jointly.

Preliminary results show that Norwegian teachers are given a significant amount of autonomy by the school administration which might make professional development an individual endeavour. However, the teachers responded positively to a collective process and used it to leverage change in classroom culture.

This research aims to explore educator confidence in taking learning outdoors and in Learning for Sustainability (LfS) in relation to the professional development opportunities of primary teachers and early years practitioners in Scotland.

LfS is the Scottish policy context within which outdoor learning is situated. Outdoor education and outdoor play and learning has a long-standing heritage. Based on a desire to engage learners experientially through structured and unstructured activities, and via reflection on “learning by doing” (Dewey, 1915, p255). Distinctively, the affordances of the outdoor environment are seen to enhance opportunities for learning in ways that are interdisciplinary, authentically felt, ‘hands-on’, ‘place-based’ and connected to local contexts (Beames and Brown, 2016; Lloyd, Truong and Gray, 2018). Of late, concerns around young people’s wellbeing, and the need for an educational response to issues around sustainability, climate change and biodiversity loss, have led to renewed emphasis on provision for outdoor learning.

Our research involves a cross-sectional survey approach is internationally distinctive in that it asked educators to provide records of location, duration, focus and curricular area of all outdoor provision during a pre-determined time window. In the 2022 research, educators were additionally asked to reflect on their confidence in taking learning outdoors and in LfS, and also to describe any professional learning opportunities they had had throughout their careers. 86 educators from primary and early years settings responded to this part of the survey.

Our findings show that shows that when practitioners have engaged with between 6 and 10 professional learning half-day or similar ‘sessions’ there is a correlation with more secure levels of confidence in both outdoor provision and Learning for Sustainability. This finding suggests that commitment to changing professional practice happens most successfully with sustained provision over time.

The research aim is to show the link between professionalism, professional development, and teaching quality.

The paper will apply Linda Evans’s’ (2014) conceptual models or professionalism and professional development as the theoretical framework. These models are increasingly being applied as analytical frames by researchers of teaching and teachers’ lives (e.g. Behroozi & Osam, 2021; Beresford-Dey & Holme, 2017; Guerin, 2021; Johnson, 2018; Kowalczuk-Walędziak, 2021; Philipsen et al., 2019, 2023; Pineda et al., 2022; Zeggelaar et al., 2018), and in their analysis of five ‘powerful or potentially powerful’ models of professional development Boylan et al. (2018) describe Evans’s (2014) model as offering a ‘paradigmatically distinct approach’.

Methods and findings: The paper will be predominantly conceptual, so will not present a method and findings in the traditional sense of the terms. Its method will take the form of an examination of the contribution that Evans’s model may make to researching professionalism and professional development, and to delineating and underpinning teaching quality. The paper will explain Evans’s model, introducing its link with a parallel model of professionalism, and the 11 dimensions that, to Evans, comprise the componential structure of professional development. The paper will illustrate what Evans calls the chain-reaction-type process of individuals’ micro-level development, whereby change (for the better) to one dimension leads to change in another, and then another, etc., exposing the multi-dimensionality of professional development for teaching quality. Drawing upon selected empirical data from research into teacher morale, job satisfaction and motivation, the paper will illustrate how teaching quality may be conceived of as reflecting not only what teachers do (which, in Evans’s model, is encompassed within the behavioural component of teacher professionalism), but also teachers’ attitudes (what Evans calls the ‘attitudinal component’), and their intellectuality (the intellectual component of their professionalism).