Making the Most of Experience —Teachers ’ Representations of Practice as a Resource for Professional Learning and Instructional Decision Making1

Tales of classroom experience punctuate teachers ’ talk with one another in a range of workplace contexts — in staffrooms or hallways, meetings of one sort or another, professional development events, and increasingly, activities focused on reviews of school assessment data or samples of student work. Such accounts form a pervasive feature of professional interaction, but only recently have researchers begun to examine what and how teachers learn from such “representations of practice. ” In this talk, I characterize recent research on teachers ’ representations of practice and how they serve as resources for professional learning and instructional decision making. I also speak to the organizational conditions that foster or impede teachers in learning from and through experience. I close by raising the question of how research in a range of cultural and national contexts might better inform efforts to aid teachers in learning from experience in generative ways. Accounts of Experience as Ordinary Workplace Practice Most broadly construed, the significance of teachers ’ accounts of experience resides in the place of narrative as a primary vehicle for structuring human understanding