Professional Development

To abandon the idea of working in isolation could be the possibility of growing up as professionals. Creating a space to share experiences, ideas even the fears, may enrich teaching environment by building up collective knowledge in order to foster the institutional work in benefit not only of the students but the teachers too.

31 One of the professions that requires a permanent growing is teaching, since it is a dynamic process which is been continuously reflected on. It is an everyday teachers’ commitment to be updated with their profession’s demands through an accurate professional development that fulfill those needs. Lassonde & Israel define professional development as the “participation in

opportunities that result in the acquisition of new knowledge, understandings, skills, or strategies that enhance and build upon current knowledge.” (2009, p. 6)

However, in order to design and implement an accurate professional development process, it is relevant to consider some aspects. Díaz (2004) states eleven issues which professional development has to face. (p.2). Generally, professional development has been designed by administrators and consultants rather than teachers in a top-down decision making. This

perspective has been apart from teachers’ views and most of the time has not corresponded to real institutional needs. Another point of view claims that teachers do not know how to teach,

therefore the students do not learn, that is why panacea programs are designed to provide definite solutions to that problem. Those programs are based on new methodologies without considering the real and specific contexts in which they are going to be applied. A third issue has to do with the lack of ownership of the professional development process and its results, due to the

inconsistency between what teachers look for and what they gather. The fourth problem is related to the technocratic nature of professional development content, in which teachers must apply strategies previously designed. It is supposed that these strategies are effective but are difficult to implement. The fifth one is the universal application of classroom practices, regardless how different students are. Problem number six is the lack of variety in the delivery modes of

professional development, the same approaches are used to instruct teachers without taking into account their differences, needs and expectations.

32 Next concern is related to the inaccessibility of professional development opportunities because of the lack of time or money and sometimes the difficulty to find the program that fixed to teachers’ needs. Another obstacle that should be overcome is the little or no support in

transferring professional development ideas to the classroom, it is quite difficult to build a bridge between theory and practice and even more when the respective support does not exist. The following difficulty presented by the author is the standardized approaches to professional development that disregard the varied experiences of teachers, in this sense teachers’ knowledge and experiences has been sub valued and they have not seen as a point of departure to scaffold new knowledge. The lack of systematic evaluation of professional development is one the biggest challenge to be overcome. Those programs need to be evaluated in order to find out their weaknesses and strengths and their real validity. Finally it is quite important to take into account the teachers’ learning differences to design effective and highly impact programs.

With the aim of overcoming the issues stated previously, Griffin (1997) points out six characteristics of an effective professional development program. First, it is necessary a purposeful and articulated program that fulfills the needs teachers have detected, therefore it should be focused on students’ context, school curriculum and what society demands. The second one claims that the program must be participatory and collaborative, in other words teachers’ experiences must be valued as a source of useful knowledge to lead processes of changing. Another key aspect is the theoretical support and the researches carried out by experts in and out the classroom. An effective professional development program combines theory and practice to find the answer to the teachers’ concerns, motivation and interests. The fourth characteristic demands that the program should be an ongoing process that emphasizes on what and how to teach a subject inside of the school curriculum. That is to say that a teaching professional development program has as its main goal the improvement of didactics of each area of

33 knowledge. As the fifth one, the professional development program must be developmental. In this sense, the implemented actions are not apart from the daily pedagogical practice, they are continuous and totally integrated to classroom dynamics, and therefore professional development requires a systematic support through a permanent feedback, an individual and collective

reflection. Finally, the professional development program must be analytical and reflective. It must be assessed to determine its impact in the teachers’ learning, in students’ learning and in the whole educational community.

This overview provides a new perspective of what it is possible to do in terms of professional development in the school context, where teachers’ collaborative work can foster their practice and contribute to improve students’ learning process. In this part the concept of collaborative work appears like a light that can guide the professional development process since it gives opportunities to interchange their pedagogical experiences, to design and evaluate their teaching process, to make didactic material to support students’ learning and to build up new ways of teaching in a collaborative and cooperative work.