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Introduction

Teachers are central to teaching and key in the learning process.

The right to quality Education for every child can only be achieved if there are sufficient numbers of adequately and highly qualified teachers. This requires sufficient and quality teacher education institutions and continuous education and lifelong facilities for all teachers.

Professional A professional is a person who is paid to undertake a specialised set of tasks and orchestrate them for a fee. One who is payed for a service or receives a fee for their work or effort. Traditional examples of professionals included doctors, lawyers, and clergy but is now more widely used to include estate agents, surveyors, environmental scientists, forensic scientists, educators and many more. The term is also used in sport to differentiate amateur players from those paid for their work. Hence professional footballer or professional golfer. Someone who is able to procure their knowledge and capabilty of a particular subject or area of experience.

In some cultures, the term is used as shorthand to describe a particular social stratum of well educated, mostly salaried workers, who enjoy considerable work autonomy, a comfortable salary, and are commonly engaged in creative and intellectually challenging workLess technically, it may also refer to a person having impressive competence in a particular activity

Because of the personal and confidential nature of many professional services and thus the necessity to place a great deal of trust in them, most professionals are subject to strict codes of conduct enshrining rigorous ethical and moral obligations

The main criteria for professional include the following: Expert and specialized knowledge in field which one is practicing professionallyExcellent manual/practical and literary skills in relation to profession High quality work in (examples): creations, products, services, presentations, consultancy, primary/other research, administrative, marketing, photography or other work endeavours. A high standard of professional ethics, behaviour and work activities while carrying out one's profession (as an employee, self-employed person, career, enterprise, business, company, or partnership/associate/colleague, etc.). The professional owes a higher duty to a client, often a privilege of confidentiality, as well as a duty not to abandon the client just because he or she may not be able to pay or remunerate the professional. Often the professional is required to put the interest of the client ahead of his own interests. Reasonable work morale and motivation. Having interest and desire to do a job well as holding positive attitude towards the profession are important elements in attaining a high level of professionalism. Participating for gain or livelihood in an activity or field of endeavour often engaged in by amateurs b : having a particular profession as a permanent career c : engaged in by persons receiving financial return Appropriate treatment of relationships with colleagues. Consideration should be shown to elderly, junior or inexperienced colleagues, as well as those with special needs. An example must be set to perpetuate the attitude of one's business without doing it harm. A professional is an expert who is master in a specific field.

Professionalization

Professionalization is the social process by which any trade or occupation transforms itself into a true "profession of the highest integrity and competence."[1] This process tends to involve establishing acceptable qualifications, a professional body or association to oversee the conduct of members of the profession and some degree of demarcation of the qualified from unqualified amateurs. This creates "a hierarchical divide between the knowledge-authorities in the professions and a deferential citizenry."[2] This demarcation is often termed "occupational closure",[3] [4] [5] [6] as it means that the profession then becomes closed to entry from outsiders, amateurs and the unqualified: a stratified occupation "defined by professional demarcation and grade."[7] The origin of this process is said to have been with guilds during the Middle Ages, when they fought for exclusive rights to practice their trades as journeymen, and to engage unpaid apprentices.[8] Professions also possess power,[9] prestige, high income, high social status and privileges;[10] [11] their members soon come to comprise an elite class of people, cut off to some extent from the common people, and occupying an elevated station in society: "a narrow elite...a hierarchical social system: a system of ranked orders and classes." [2] The professionalization process tends to establish the group norms of conduct and qualification of members of a profession and tends also to insist that members of the profession achieve "conformity to the norm."[12] [13] and abide more or less strictly with the established procedures and any agreed code of conduct, which is policed by professional bodies, for "accreditation assures conformity to general expectations of the profession."

WHAT IS A PROFESSION?

Pratte & Rury (1991) succinctly list four criteria that shape the traditional view of a profession: remuneration, social status, autonomous or authoritative power, and service. Burbules and Densmore (1991) label the typical reform approach to teacher professionalization the "taxonomic approach," which focuses on a list of characteristics which are typical of occupations that have been traditionally regarded as professions, especially law and medicine. These characteristics include: professional autonomy; a clearly defined, highly developed, specialized, and theoretical knowledge base; control of training, certification, and licensing of new entrants; self-governing and self-policing authority, especially with regard to professional ethics; and a commitment to public service (Burbules & Densmore, 1991; Case, Lanier, & Miskel, 1986; Haberman, 1991; Pratte & Rury, 1991). Case et al. (1986) include the presence of a collegium among the essential characteristics of a modern profession. Sockett (1990) makes a distinction between professionalization, which focuses on the process by which an occupation becomes a profession, and professionalism, which describes the quality of practice.

IS TEACHING A PROFESSION?

When teaching is examined through the lens of traditional perceptions of what constitutes a profession, certain critical criteria are missing. First, teaching is generally considered to lack a clearly defined, codified, accessible knowledge base. Goodlad (1990b) maintains that while there is a "potentially relevant and powerful" knowledge base for teaching, it has not been codified and rendered useful, and it is generally inaccessible to practitioners.

Case et al. (1986) contend that the major characteristic of a profession that is missing from teaching is the presence of a collegium. A sufficient degree of autonomy and self-governance are also missing (Goodlad, 1990; Levine, 1988). Levine argues that for teaching to become a self-governing profession it must have a "structured induction experience conducted under the supervision of outstanding practitioners who can and will attest to the competence of new inductees to practice" (1988, 2). Both Levine (1988) and Darling-Hammond (1987) view as a critical element in teacher professionalism the existence of agreed upon standards of professional practice shaped by practitioners. Ruth Danis (personal communication, May 19, 1992), project director of the Rochester (NY) City School District's PDS program, notes that, "Schools are both public and professional institutions and that the larger values of society and the community come into play more consistently in education than in other professions. Teaching is not strictly a technical/rational, skill-driven task. The context of teaching is closer in texture to parenting than to debating in a courtroom or overseeing surgery in an operating room." The nature of teaching, the context in which it is performed, and the process by which occupations traditionally have become professions make it impractical and undesirable to use traditional models of professionalization for teaching (Burbles & Densmore, 1991; Fenstermacher, 1991; Pratte & Rury, 1991; Soder, 1990; Tom, 1986). In summary, regardless of whether one agrees that professionalization is the best path to take to improve the condition of teachers and teaching, it is evident that several of the key features associated with professions are missing from teaching.

DO PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT SCHOOLS HAVE A ROLE IN PROFESSIONALIZING TEACHING? A professional development school (PDS) is a functioning, exemplary, public school (Holmes, 1986) which has three major functions: student achievement, teacher induction, and improvement of practice. Schools which share this mission are also known as professional practice schools (Levine, 1988) and clinical schools (Meade, 1991). These schools are collaborations between school districts, colleges, and often, teachers unions; sites where practitioners, researchers, and clinical faculty work together to expand the knowledge base of the profession and prepare future practitioners

(THE PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT SCHOOL, 1991).

Many of those who believe that PDSs are a potentially significant element in professionalizing teaching generally support, at least in part, the medical model of professionalization and professionalism. Wise maintains that PDSs can provide an "organized introductory period of supervised teaching" (1989, 31) which would provide practical experience for beginning teachers in much the same way as teaching hospitals provide it for beginning physicians.

PDSs can help to promote teacher professionalism and teacher professionalization by providing a setting in which many of the features associated with traditional professions, but missing from teaching, can be developed, tested, and refined, and from which they can eventually be disseminated. Ultimately, the major contribution of PDSs to the professionalization of teaching may come from public confidence that the interns who leave PDSs have been rigorously prepared and confidence that the practices that have been validated by the PDSs have been rigorously tested. This confidence provides the foundation for public respect and recognition which, as Goodlad (1990a) states, are necessary conditions for establishing a profession.

SUMMARY The more recent calls for school reform have focused on a re-visioning of the work of teachings and teacher education. A central rhetoric in the current climate is related to the professionalization of teaching. We can view the public discourses as not simply a formal mechanism for describing events but as part of their context serving to align loyalty and social solidarity with particular values and social interests. My intent in this discussion is to raise questions about how the word, professionalization, is used within the social and political contexts in which teaching occurs. At the same time, I propose that there are certain issues in teaching that professionalization can address. In particular, I examine tensions of modernity and a post-modernity for considering the power relations in which the professional production of knowledge and the development of expert-mediated systems of ideas occurs.