Teachers' Insights into Professional Learning Opportunities that Support Their Learning 3 views

On-the-job training or professional skills development is typical in most professions. In education, professional development, now rebranded professional learning (PL), is commonly viewed as one of the ways to help in-service teachers improve their teaching practice after they have entered teaching (Hargreaves & Fullan, 2012). Mavis County Schools (MCS), a small school district in a rural southeastern state, provided professional learning for its teachers. MCS’s leadership team was not convinced it was seeing transfer of instructional strategies from professional learning opportunities into classroom instruction. Initially, the professional learning opportunities were focused on secondary level teachers who worked with multilingual learners but were shifted to all secondary level teachers to focus on several new core content initiatives. This survey-based study investigated the teachers’ perceptions of the professional learning opportunities provided. The survey included sections on professional learning components, format of the professional learning opportunities, andragogical features that might influence how the opportunities were perceived, and open-ended questions to allow for clarification and additional information participants wanted to share. Due to numerous possible outside influences, the survey received an extremely low response rate. Analysis of the responses while limited still provided some possible insights into teacher perceptions of the professional learning. Those who did respond indicated that they were interested in professional learning that was useful and tied to helping them increase their own professional knowledge that could have an impact on their lessons, classroom instruction, and their students.

EDD (Doctor of Education)

andragogy, pedagogy, professional learning, adult learning

English

All rights reserved by the author (no additional license for public reuse)

2025-11-21