The nature of teacher education
✏ Teachers have different needs in their professional career. Professional development is not related only with academic courses but also with experience on the field.
Teacher training and teacher development
✏ Teacher education: Process of knowledge, experience and skills that teachers acquire during their career.
⭐ Teacher training: Learning with specific purposes mostly for implementing new academic improvements with goals in short term. They are guided and supervised; commonly in the end you get feedback.
⭐ Teacher development: It's not focused on a specific job. It has long-term goals. It is about the comprehension of the basis on how to teach and what it means to be a teacher.
Understanding teacher learning
⭐ Understanding how we learn to teach, how we think while we teach, what we learn when we teach.
Conceptualizations of teacher learning
⭐ Skill learning: Teaching can be broken down into discrete skills that can be mastered one at a time
⭐ Cognitive process: How beliefs and thinking influence the way teachers acquire knowledge.
⭐ Personal construction: Learning is actively constructed and not passively received. Knowledge gets internalized by reorganization and reconstruction.
⭐ Reflective practice: They learn on what they reflect about their personal experiences in teaching.
Novices and experts: The main difference relies on the experience they have on how to manage different situations in the work area and how they relate solutions based on different techniques.
Individual and institutional perspective
⭐ Individual perspective: It's the point of view of teacher's personal development where different areas may be identified such as:
👓 Subject matter knowledge
👓 Pedagogical expertise
👓 Self-awareness
👓 Understanding of learners
👓 Understanding of curriculum and materials
👓 Career advancement
⭐ Institutional perspective: Teacher development is primarily conceived of in terms of the needs of the institution. It has the following goals:
🏛 Institutional development
🏛 Career development
🏛 Enhanced levels of student learning
‼ It is intended not to improve the performance of teachers but to benefit the school as a whole
Colaborative and self-directed learning
⭐ Colaborative learning: School is view as a learning community. It refers to the way teachers learn while they work in teams and because of all the ideas they can obtain from others experiences and knowledge.
⭐ Self-directed learning: Teachers have the responsability of setting goals for self-development and the construction of their own knowledge.
Professional development: Teacher's and institutional perspective
⭐ Teacher's perspective: This is a perspective on how teachers may plan their professional development
👓 Decide what you would like to learn about your teaching and about the field
👓 Identify a strategy to explore the topic you are interested in.
👓 Talk to people who have taken part in a professional development activity
👓 Decide what kind of support you will need
👓 Select a colleague or colleagues to work with
👓 Set realistic goals and establish a time frame
👓 Evaluate what you have and share the results
⭐ Institutional perspective: This is a perspective on how the institution may support teachers acquire their professional development
🏛 Determining the needs of both the institution and its teachers
🏛 Setting goals for professional development
🏛 Selecting the participants
🏛 Important considerations (principles that should be reflected in a teacher development)
🏛 Providing support
🏛 Evaluating what has been learned
🏛 Disseminating the results