*Hargreaves, A. & Fullan, M. (2012). Professional capital: Transforming teaching in every school. (pp. 46-54). New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Available for purchase at Amazon.com.
Within the chapter Investing in Capability and Commitment, this excerpt from the subsection “Evidence and Experience” discusses the need for teachers to develop professional capital and improve classroom strategies through a combination of evidence based practices informed by experience. As part of this approach, the authors caution against the development of instructional practices driven by overdependence on and uninformed use of evidence-based programs. Instead, they suggest that districts provide time and contextualized professional learning opportunities—particularly those where teachers act as communities to test, observe, interpret, and inquire about best and next practices—as means to effectively utilize evidence based practices and teacher experience to improve classroom instruction. It is then that classroom instruction and teacher professional capital can reciprocally enhance each other as they move beyond the isolated classroom and move towards adopting strategies that embed feedback loops both in the
classroom—between students and teachers—and the teacher community.
*Hargreaves, A., & Fullan, M. (2012). Professional capital: Transforming teaching in every school. (pp. 88-96). New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Available for purchase at Amazon.com.
This excerpt from the chapter Professional Capital, a subsection entitled “Three Kinds of Capital,” describes the professional capital framework—the confluence of human, social, and decisional capital—which the authors describe as essential for transforming the teaching profession for the common good. Human capital, defined as the investment in people’s education and development, functions as the initial capital to revitalize the teaching profession. In teaching, human capital translates to developing the requisite skills and knowledge necessary to understand students in a multi-faceted way and adapt innovative pedagogy to serve students adequately. Social capital, in turn, exists in the relations among people, and refers to connections through which individuals and groups share knowledge and information. Social capital, the authors explain, gives individuals access to other people’s human capital. The third component of the framework, decisional capital, is the exercise of sound judgment that is informed through extensive professional experience. The professional capital framework considers the development of all three forms of capital necessary to transform the teaching profession.
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