Alex joined our community of inquiry with the goal of fostering more inclusive classroom learning experiences for her students. Early on in our year of work together, she identified how past professional learning opportunities had given her ideas, practices and principles she had found helpful, but that she had sometimes struggled to integrate them into her classroom, shift her teaching and achieve her goals for students. As the year progressed, Alex showed how she was empowered to draw in evidence-based resources to inform her learning and practice development and achieve her goals for students.
Professional development (PD) for educators is intended to support them in learning how to shift their practice to advance their goals for students. The challenge for educators like Alex is that they also need support to know how to interpret and mobilise what they are learning through PD in meaningful ways. In our work, we have been exploring an approach to PD that empowers educators to engage in collaborative, inquiry-oriented learning, and in that context grapple with evidence-based resources to inform their classroom-based decisions.
Evidence-based resources in teacher professional development
Research and practice both suggest that short-term PD approaches that position teachers as recipients of knowledge can be problematic. This is partly because teachers lack the opportunity to engage in a process of knowledge construction that considers their experience, understanding and contexts.[1] Furthermore, when teachers are positioned as recipients of others' information, they may lack agency to make decisions about teaching and learning in response to students' needs. Knowledge-telling approaches can limit educators' opportunities to make connections between learning and practice, which are needed to build a deeper understanding of teaching and learning.[2][3]
For instance, through a PD workshop, a teacher may encounter a principle they find helpful for their practice goals, but may then have difficulty generating principle-based practices suited to their classroom context. Or, that same teacher might be inspired by examples of effective practice but may not have opportunities to build up their understanding of the principles on which those examples were based to make decisions about how to adjust their teaching. At the same time, teachers may have difficulty identifying how the practices they are already using can be reimagined in relation to the new ideas they find inspiring.