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Learning through others : connecting research to professional learning

University of British Columbia

Research shows that collaborative professional development, when driven by teacher interest and needs, may be the key to quality professional learning. However, many professional development activities offer little connection to teachers’ individual contexts and fail to offer time for engaging with research and resources, or for collaboration and reflection. The single workshop model often consists of experts telling teachers what the current research says and how it should be implemented in the classroom. These forms of professional development follow a training model and do not encourage transformational learning that “increases our cognitive, affective, interpersonal capacities so we are better able to manage the complexities of leading, teaching, learning and living” (Drago-Severson & Blum-DeStefano, 2014, p. 120). This study explored how a small group of teachers learned in a resource rich, collaborative inquiry driven by their own needs and interests. In this study, eight teachers participated in yearlong collaborative inquiry centered on the renewed curriculum in British Columbia. Through their voices, this study sought to gain insight into how this group of teachers interacted with educational research and resources as part of their professional learning and how this learning impacted both teacher learning and classroom practice. With this new knowledge, this study contributes to teacher professional development literature related to transformative professional learning for teachers.

Text

2018-12-18

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/68090

Education

University of British Columbia

UBCO

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/