Abstract

Teachers in disadvantaged settings often perceive their students to be unable to engage with new pedagogic approaches.

While attempting new approaches commonly leads to surprise, our research illustrates that such surprise is not sufficient for enabling sustained change in teachers’ ways of thinking about their students or their pedagogic practice. Through analysing the development of teachers’ collaborative dialogue in the context of a longitudinal pedagogic intervention in a disadvantaged school via a discursive and activity-theoretical lens, we demonstrate the nuanced ways in which teachers’ collective conceptualisations of their students and practice can change.

We propose a notion of ‘reflexive noticing’ to illustrate the kind of professional dialogue that researchers, leaders and educators need to seek to foster and understand.