The Professional Development of Teachers: practice and theory
By Philip Adey with Gwen Hewitt, John Hewitt and Nicolette Landau
Kluwer Academic Publishers pound;27

These two contrasting and complementary books arrived for review just as I had returned from the second of two successive Fridays addressing residential conferences for staff in big south-east London secondary schools.

Like the books, the conferences were impressive in subtly different ways. In one, the scheduled workshops - all redolent with some advanced thinking on some aspect of curriculum, behaviour, assessment, learning and teaching - were to be taken by the school’s own staff. In the other, the headteacher told the story of the school so far in her introduction and involved members of staff as prompting witnesses to “the MA group”, those who had been studying “transactional analysis” and the team that had studied and were implementing the “opening minds” project in Year 7.

Both schools were emphasising learning and had realised that one of their most important spending priorities had to be professional development to keep their staff sufficiently fed and watered with the intellectual curiosity that ensures they are learning role models to their challenging council-estate pupils. So I reckon both schools will buy these two books.

Read these reviews in full innbsp;this week’s TES Friday magazine