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Professional knowledge communities of practice: building teacher self-efficacy

What sort of person becomes a successful teacher? This question has at some time or another occurred to all teacher educators and many others beside. Accruing evidence would suggest that strong self-efficacy is a key factor in effective teaching and pupil achievement (Scheerens 2010). Arising from Bandura’s (1977) theory of social-cognitive behavioural change, teacher self-efficacy has been described as the belief in the teacher’s own ability successfully to manage professional activities. However, it is difficult to imagine teacher self-efficacy developing in a vacuum because obviously teaching is not a solitary activity. In their seminal work on situated learning, Lave and Wenger (1991) introduced the notion of the community of practice. Further elaborated by Wenger in 1998 as ‘groups of people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavour’ (Wenger 1998), although not without continuing critical debate (Hodkinson and Hodkinson 2004; Pyrko, Dörfler, and Eden 2019), the concept has become central to models of learning to teach over the past three decades. Within this type of learning community, professional knowledge is exchanged, understood and advanced. It becomes what might be thought of as a community of knowledge and practice of that knowledge. It relates to the professional knowledge bases that need continuously to be built utilising what has long been argued for in the pages of this journal: research-based evidence (la Velle 2015). Clearly, a professional knowledge community of practice has implications for the development of teacher self-efficacy and the multiple factors that contribute to it. It is not surprising therefore that this concept is a focus for many submissions to our journal, having as it does profound implications for teacher education. This issue of JET is no exception and teacher self-efficacy is reflected in each of its five original papers, echoing through the short pieces that follow. The first full article, by Eileen Slater and Susan Main from Western Australia, focusses on the importance of self-efficacy in classroom management. They argue that this has a strong influence on student teachers’ readiness to engage in certain actions and their perseverance when encountering difficulties in executing those actions. A useful instrument for gauging self-efficacy in this context is presented and validated using a novel methodology, a Rasch analysis. A strong statement of the importance of self-efficacy in learning to teach opens the second paper in this issue. In the context of teaching mathematics for conceptual understanding, Bilge Yurekli and colleagues from the USA and Turkey describe how their initial teacher education methods course develops student teachers’ belief in their capabilities. They list factors such as ‘mastery experience, vicarious experience, social persuasion, and affective state’ and claim that features of their provision such as lecture hours, group work, feedback on group work, peers’ presentations, assigned readings, and examinations were important in the development of self-efficacy. JOURNAL OF EDUCATION FOR TEACHING 2020, VOL. 46, NO. 5, 613–615 https://doi.org/10.1080/02607476.2020.1863103