Teacher Professional Learning and Development Assignment

Teacher Professional Learning and Development - Assignment Example This should be useful particularly to those who are involved in helping teachers develop the professional skills they need to teach challenging curricula to diverse students, including students who typically have not achieved well in some of our educational systems. There are four out ten important understandings that arise from the evidence base. These include notwithstanding the influence of factors such as socio-economic status, home, and community, student learning is strongly influenced by what and how teachers teach. Teaching is complex and teachers’ moment-by-moment decisions about lesson content and process are shaped by multiple factors, not just the agendas of those looking for changes in practice. Such factors include teachers’ knowledge and their beliefs about what is important to teach, how students learn, and how to manage student behavior and meet external demands. It is important to create conditions that are responsive to the ways in which teachers lear n. A recent overview of the research identified the following as important for encouraging learning: engaging learners’ prior conceptions about how the world works; developing deep factual and conceptual knowledge, organized into frameworks that facilitate retrieval and application; and promoting met cognitive and self-regulatory processes that help learners define goals and then monitor their progress towards them. Professional learning is strongly determined by the context in which the teacher practices. This is usually the classroom, which, in turn, is strongly influenced by the wider school culture and the community, and society in which the school is located. Teachers’ daily experiences in their practice context determine their understandings, and their understandings determine their experiences. The focus of this particular research is on the conditions for professional learning and development that impact positively on valued student outcomes (Sleezer, 2002). 1. Focus on valued student outcomes Professional learning experiences that focus on the relationship between particular teaching activities and valued student outcomes are associated with positive impacts on those outcomes. Research findings The major factor influencing whether professional learning activities have a positive impact on outcomes for students is the extent to which those outcomes form the rationale for, and ongoing focus of, teacher engagement. Such focus requires teachers to understand the links between particular teaching activities, the ways different groups of students respond, and what their students actually learn. In addition, success needs to be defined not in terms of teacher mastery of new strategies but in terms of the impact that changed practice has on valued outcomes. Because teachers work in such varied contexts, there is no guarantee that any specific approach to teaching will have the desired outcomes for students. Therefore, it is important to keep pro gress towards