Why do we need CPD, in what aspect and how?

In responding to the international focus on educational reforms in the late twentieth

century, teachers’ CPD has become a major concern for educational reformers, researchers and policy makers in Taiwan. Although the link between teachers’

development and pupils’ learning is not easily demonstrated, it is believed that improving teachers’ CPD can eventually increase the quality of schooling as well as

pupils’ learning (Pissanos & Allison, 1996; Guskey, 2000; Goodson, 2003; MOE, 2003b; Armour & Yelling, 2004a, 2004b; Armour, 2010).

According to the development of social and educational circumstances, the demands

of teachers’ professional development will change. In the period that Hargreaves (2006) describes as the ‘pre-professional age’, “education actually evolved as a

factory-like system of mass education” (p. 675) which focused on the delivery and reproduction of standardized knowledge and skills. In such circumstances, the major

teaching problems were “order and control” (ibid., p. 676). Thus, “teaching was technically simple” and “once you had learned to master it, you needed no more help

after that point” (ibid., p. 676). This is, perhaps, the reason that Craft (1996) comments that, traditionally, in-service education and training “has been taken up as a

matter of voluntary commitment or seen as just for those with career ambitions” (p. 5).

However, together with the evolution of educational ideology, teachers’ professionalism has been challenged by two emerging factors. The first is the

autonomy that allows teachers to engage in curriculum development and decision making. One major purpose of this is to ensure that teachers can deliver

student-centred and specialized education rather than centralized or standardized teaching material (Hargreaves, 2006). The second challenging factor is the rapid

expansion of knowledge, media and information technology, which not only forces educators to “keep abreast of this emerging knowledge and… use it to continually

refine their conceptual and craft skills” (Guskey, 2000, p. 3), but also challenges their monopoly of knowledge provision and leads them to face such changing roles by

turning/learning to work with pupils, colleagues, parents and communities around them (Hargreaves, 2006). Apart from the above factors that challenge teachers’

professionalism, any changes happening in teachers’ daily work, such as curriculum, syllabus, work roles and the characters of pupils and parents, also require learning. As

a result, continually pursuing professional development is essential for teachers (Knight, 2002).

With respect to what teachers need to learn, a number of researchers have attempted to

define the knowledge that underpins teaching, and have indicated that teacher learning should have multiple dimensions in terms of what and how to learn. For example,

rather than “delivery models” for training and professional development activities, Knight (2002) suggests that non-formal learning should be more seriously considered.

Presumably, this is attributable to the diversity of teachers’ learning needs through their careers; for example, teachers who reach different career stages tend to have

dissimilar career ambitions and learning needs (Steffy, Wolfe, Pasch & Enz, 2000; Ha, Wong, Sum & Chan, 2008), as do teachers with specific training backgrounds (Harris,

Cale & Musson, 2011) or those in particular working conditions (O’Sullivan, 2006). The above examples suggest that professional development should not just provide

teachers with new curriculum materials to be delivered, but should be designed to meet their diverse intellectual, practical and emotional needs. The term ‘CPD’,

therefore, refers to complex understandings of teachers’ professional learning rather than a narrow definition of attending in-service training ‘courses’. In this study, the

definition of CPD includes “all the activities in which teachers engage during the course of a career which are designed to enhance their work” (Day & Sachs, 2004,

p.3).

In terms of the methods that tend to be used in teachers’ CPD activities, Craft (1996: p.7) provides a list of practical options as follows:

Action-research Self-directed study

Using distance-learning materials

Receiving on-the-job coaching, mentoring or tutoring

School-based and off-site courses of various length Job-shadowing and rotation

Membership of a working party or task group Teacher placement

Personal reflection

Experiential ‘assignments’

Collaborative learning.

Not surprisingly, although a range of options are available, the provision of traditional

(one day, off-site) in-service training courses “continues to be the principal means of accessing development”. This is because “it appears to be the most efficient and

cost-effective way to reach the huge population of teachers” (Day & Sachs, 2004, p.8).

The effectiveness of the received-knowledge model of training courses has been

questioned by a number of researchers, mostly because this approach has been found to be contextually irrelevant and therefore difficult to ‘transfer’ to practice (Craft,

1996; Knight, 2002; Bechtel & O’Sullivan, 2006). Moreover, when considering the cognitive aspect of learning activities, Hager & Hodkinson (2009) remind us that

learning application can rarely be direct. They argue that to apply what is learnt is not as simple as “transfer”. It is more appropriate to view learning application as a

“renovation and expansion of previous knowledge via the experience of dealing with new situations in new settings” (p. 620). Additionally, although many in-service

training courses have been found to have little impact upon teachers’ practice, some studies note that teachers still recall some specific ‘events’ as good and useful (e.g.

Armour & Yelling, 2004b). Therefore, in thinking about the usefulness of different forms of professional learning activities, it might be argued that there is something

more fundamental about the principles of learning underpinning different CPD designs that needs to be explored. Potential principles will be reviewed in later

sections of this chapter.

In an attempt to improve or complement traditional delivery forms of professional development provision, there is an increasing focus, in the general education literature,

on the use of collaborative learning (Knight, 2002; Klingner, 2004; Hargreaves, 2006) and also in the PE literature (Armour & Duncombe, 2004; Armour & Yelling, 2004a,

2004b, 2007; Keay, 2006a). This trend is based on assumptions that collaboration has the potential not only to provide a dynamic environment for CPD but also to “enable

knowledge of best practice and research findings to be shared and utilized” (Bolam & McMahon, 2003, p.36). This may explain why related notions – i.e. team teaching and

learning community – were mentioned frequently by policy makers at the beginning of the educational reform in Taiwan. It is interesting to consider, therefore, how such

aspirations were put into practice in the context of Taiwanese PE.