Teacher participation in continuing professional development : motivating factors and programme effectiveness

Abstract

Teachers choose to take up professional development courses for different reasons. This paper reports on the motivations of a small group of Maltese secondary school teachers of mathematics in joining a continuing professional development (CPD) programme aiming to support them in Learning to Teach Mathematics through Inquiry (LTMI). During mathematical inquiry, students assume a central active role – wrestling with ideas, asking questions, exploring and explaining meanings – supported by the teacher as a facilitator. This paper also explores teachers’ understandings and their reported experiences of programme effectiveness. A qualitative design using thematic analysis was used to investigate views, experiences and accounts of LTMI features that teachers believed to be effective for their professional learning. The data reported here was taken from a focus group held with teachers at the end of the CPD programme, and three interviews held with the same teachers before, during and after their participation in CPD. Findings reveal intrinsic factors motivating teacher participation, namely: (1) teachers’ will to develop knowledge about teaching; (2) their beliefs about the benefits of inquiry; and (3) their need to change classroom practice. The key aspects that teachers voiced as effective throughout their CPD experience were learning by being part of a community, active learning and immersion in practice-based understandings.