Identifying Masters of Teaching: Accrediting and Supporting Professional Development in Schools

This paper provides a rationale for redesigned pedagogies within a new professional master’s degree (The Masters in Teaching) in a Northern Ireland University College. The author evaluates a teaching strategy designed to support the accreditation of teacher continuing professional development (CPD) across a range of recently proposed stages of teacher professional registration. Issues in the design of university master’s programs that will support and accredit teacher professional development at graduated levels are considered from a postmodern perspective in which professional knowledge is broadly construed as capital which practitioners invest in universities with the prospect of knowledge gains. Drawing upon archive of online, shared and managed teacher discussion around critical incidents of learning at work, the paper reports the author’s own action research designed to raise teacher competence levels from critical incident writing and narrative enquiry to participatory action research in schools and communities. Strategies for raising the value of story and its place within grand narratives and theory are considered. A new role for universities in recognising and developing pedagogies for advancing workplace learning is critically considered