CSET Speaker Series: Pondering Excellence in Teaching

Teachers’ professional learning goals in relation to teaching experience

Monika Louws MSc – ICLON Leiden University Graduate School of Teaching, the Netherlands (m.l.louws@iclon.leidenuniv.nl)

Collaborating with: Prof. Klaas van Veen, dr. Jacobiene Meirink, Prof. Jan van Driel.

This talk will highlight some important findings from two small-scale qualitative studies that address the relationships between teachers’ professional learning goals and their teaching experience. Although those relationships seem self-evident, professional development (PD) programs hardly take teachers’ years of experience into account. PD programs are often misaligned with teachers’ particular professional development goals and are subsequently experienced irrelevant to their classroom practices. Our guiding research questions were:

What do teachers (still) want to learn? And how do these professional learning goals relate to their years of teaching experience?

After a period of socialization in two schools and reciprocal acquaintance with their teachers, I had selected 31 teachers ranging from 1 to 35 years of teaching experience  and interviewed them about their professional learning goals, their current concerns, and about their teaching practice in general. The results show that teachers formulated learning goals in terms of classroom organization and communication, curriculum and instruction, technological innovations, extra-curricular tasks in the school, and in their role as a professional. Especially learning goals on curriculum and instruction were of interest to all teachers regardless of teaching experience. During the talk, I’ll discuss these results more in depth and I’ll try to relate my results to theories on teacher development.