Search results for: Facilitation

Teacher professional development (TPD) programs are increasingly using video recordings of teaching practice to develop teacher capacity and foster student learning. However, consensus has yet to be reached about how to utilize video recordings in TPD for physical education (PE) teachers. The authors used semi-structured interviews and evaluations of PE teachers’ written reflective statements to investigate how they reacted as they engaged with different video material and external facilitators during a TPD program. Teachers believed video-based reflection on their own teaching, rather than viewing others’ practice, was the most useful, even though both forms of analysis produced a similar depth of reflection. PE teachers also benefited from dialogue with external facilitators during the TPD program. These results highlight the importance of researchers, teachers, and facilitators delivering and participating in TPD collaboratively and focusing on strategies that may increase the depth of teacher reflection on their own practices, which is considered a first step toward changing classroom practice and improving student outcomes.

This study explores the role that teacher educators themselves may play in instances of limited success. The first author used self-study to explore how his framing of his facilitation role created a defensive rather than an open-to-learning professional development experience. This article has described how, despite being skilled in teaching, the first author was not skilled in helping teachers learn, at least initially. By building on the work of Argyris and Scho¨n (1974), this article describes a self-study process that involves using transcripts to infer the beliefs and values that underpin in-service educators’ decisions about how to act.

In this study, the authors intended to focus on: (1) the development of teachers’ self-perception of their roles; (2) the major concerns of the teacher candidates; and (3) the reasons behind these concerns. The findings revealed that the participants considered their roles as teachers as being both the authority and facilitator in the classroom, and focused on both content delivery and student moral development. The authors claim that it is important for teacher educators to recognize teacher candidates’ struggles between the ideal and the reality of teaching, and their concerns with the ways they present themselves in front of the students.

The article presents facilitators and barriers of a longitudinal study on the emerging professional, academic identities of five beginning teacher educators. Barriers in the early stages include: a reliance on trial and error learning, inappropriate induction courses, poor mentoring and support structures and relatively few opportunities for collaborative work. Facilitators include: flexible induction programmes, learning conversations with key colleagues and personal experience of learning at Masters' level.