Professional Development

This paper synthesises a group of educators’ engagement with an action research project endorsed by the Council of Europe’s Pestalozzi Programme’s Action Research Group 2013 – 2014. Educators fulfilling duties at Giovanni Curmi Higher Secondary School (GCHSS) collaborated within the context of a think-tank by engaging in action research on professional development for teachers at Giovanni Curmi Higher Secondary School (PDGCHSS). Data that emerged from the foregoing research indicate that professional development (PD) should be grounded in, and not disconnected from, the school-context, and must be relevant to the teachers’ everyday teaching. In addition, knowledge gained from PD training should not be sporadic or disconnected, but transferable to everyday practice. A highly bureaucratized system and lack of resources, such as time, financial resources and technological skills, are detrimental to teachers’ motivation for PD.

This study aimed at comparing and contrasting the currently available professional development (PD) programmes for English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers working in public schools in Palestine. The design of this study was exploratory in nature utilizing a qualitative approach. The research participants consisted of twelve EFL teachers and eleven teacher trainers and programme designers. Data were collected using semi-structured interviews. To ensure validity of the study, triangulation was used where data was obtained from the teachers and trainers. Inter-rater reliability was checked giving an 82% of agreement. Thematic analysis was used to analyse data. From the analysis, teachers and teacher trainers identified the areas of differences and similarities between the programmes. The study concluded with a set of recommendations for practice and future research. There was a consideration of possible implications of these findings for teacher education in Palestine, and for policy making bodies in Palestine.

Student-centred approaches have been associated with deeper learning and improved interest in science. The chemistry curriculum and the pedagogies used in the chemistry classroom in Malta and other countries are often traditional and emphasise content delivery. This exploratory study focused on the way teachers learn and how they approach and feel about making changes to their teaching towards a more student-centred approach. A teacher learning community of four chemistry teachers was formed. Focus groups and reflective journals were used to generate data. Results show how teachers appraise the nature and content of different kinds of professional development sessions and how the community helped teachers with different epistemological beliefs to move along the teacher-centred to student-centred continuum.

Throughout their career, several teachers seek to improve their professional practice through various means. Lesson study, a collaborative approach to teacher professional development, involves educators working together over an extended period of time to improve teaching and learning. The cyclical process involves identifying a learning goal, preparing a lesson plan, implementing the lesson, reflecting on student learning and revising the lesson plan. This article illustrates the process of a lesson study which was implemented in a local state primary school. This lesson study, conducted as part of the Master of Arts in Educational Leadership and Management course at the University of Malta, focused on teaching mathematics through the concrete-pictorial-abstract (CPA) approach.

Lesson study or Jugyokenkyu is based on a Japanese model of teacher professional development (PD). This PD model fosters reflective practice and can help teachers to become more effective practitioners. It involves a collaborative process of planning, teaching, observation, evaluation and reflection. This lesson study, which involved two lesson trials, aimed to improve teaching and learning the Maltese language, targeting two classes of Year 3 students, aged 8 years. Each lesson was 70 minutes long and involved students in speaking, listening, reading and writing tasks. The focus was to improve their vocabulary and facilitate comprehension. The tasks supported reading comprehension by enabling students to learn new vocabulary through a multi-faceted approach. Discussions in pairs presented ample opportunities for collaborative learning and to use the vocabulary in context. Furthermore, posing higher order questions stimulated student thinking and promoted critical thinking skills, encouraging students to use more complex vocabulary. The results show that lesson study was beneficial for teachers to plan a well-structured lesson through ongoing collaboration and group reflection. The knowledgeable other was instrumental in lesson design, and in fostering teachers' professional growth.

This article zooms in on a lesson study process which sees a group of mathematics teachers designing a research lesson to address the students’ prevalent reliance on rote memorisation which is overshadowing the importance of conceptual understanding. Breaking away from the traditional approach of posing a textbook question, the team chose to present a Year 10 high-ability class with an open-ended investigation, allowing free exploration of a hexagonal visual aid. To ensure a structured and guided learning process, the lesson was designed on the 5E Inquiry-Based Instructional model (Bybee & Landes, 1990), a framework that was introduced to students as well. Through this self-directed learning opportunity, students took on roles as active agents fuelling a collaborative inquiry and using their existing knowledge as a scaffold for constructing new knowledge independently. The observations of this research lesson proved to be an enriching experience for everyone involved as the shared feedback revealed various successful aspects of the lesson. This experience motivated the lesson study team to intensify their efforts towards integrating lessons promoting students’ conceptual understanding. Concurrently, the observations also shed light on the challenges of teaching for conceptual understanding, urging the lesson study team to reflect on their practices for ongoing improvement.