Professionalism, performativity and empowerment: discourses in the politics, policies and purposes of continuing professional development

Continuing professional development (CPD) is a term used to describe all the activities in which teachers engage during the course of a career which are designed to enhance their work. Yet this is a deceptively simple description of hugely complex intellectual and emotional endeavour which is at the heart of raising and maintaining standards of teaching, learning and achievement in a range of schools, each of which poses its own sets of special challenges. Moreover, because teachers, like the students they teach, think and feel, are influenced also by their biographies, social histories and working contexts, peer groups, teaching preferences, identities, phase of development and broader sociopolitical cultures, the purposes, design and processes of CPD will need to mirror these if it is to result in effective outcomes.