Professional Development in Education: New Paradigms and Practices

The knowledge base in education is constantly expanding. Practitioners in education, like those in other professional fields, must keep abreast of this emerging knowledge base and use it to upgrade their craft skills regularly. How this is to be accomplished can be viewed from a variety of perspectives, each with its own conceptual premises, each informed by different bodies of research, and each offering different prescriptions for improvement. This book contains a collection of these varied perspectives, with individual chapters written by researchers and theoreticians renowned for their work in the area of professional and career development. Their contributions not only detail their particular perspective and the conceptual ground from which it derives, they also offer specific prescriptions for practice based on that perspective. Each chapter's discussion is framed by a common set of issue questions provided by the editors; as a result, the reader can draw upon these unifying themes to compare the various perspectives.