Integrated Learning Framework for Teacher Professional Development
- Building Trust and Respecting Contexts. First, educators of adults must contextualize learning and instruction by accounting for the experiences of diverse learners who are taking on new and expanded professional roles. This element includes acknowledging prior knowledge/experience and developing rapport with the learners.
- Complex New Human Helping Role. Second, when teachers undertake complex new human-helping roles such as collaborative action researcher, mentor, or school-based teacher educator, the role-taking (action) precedes and shapes the intellectual consciousness that grows out of it. Guided inquiry, which includes analysis and reflection, best grows out of real problems present in immediate experience of the complex new role.
- Guided Inquiry. Guided inquiry includes both analysis (intensive written self-assessment using a variety of rubrics) and meta-reflection. Experiential learning can be just as arid as listening to lectures. Carefully planned activities encourage self-assessment of performance, ongoing discussion, and dialogic journaling (reflection). These assessment and reflection activities are guided by a “more capable other.”
- Balance. It is important that action (new role-taking) and inquiry remain in balance or as praxis. Usually this means that the complex new role or helping activity is sequenced with guided inquiry each week. Too great a time lag between action and inquiry or the other way around appears to halt the growth process.
- Continuity. There is a learning truism that spaced practice is vastly superior to massed practice. The complex goal of fostering both learning and development -- which, of course, includes interpersonal, conceptual, and moral/ethical development -- requires a continuous interplay between action and reflection. A one-or two-week workshop followed by actual helping has not caused shifts in the cognitive structures (development) of the participants. Typically, as least four to six months are needed for significant developmental changes.
- Support and Challenge. The investigators essentially rediscovered Vygotsky’s zone of proximal growth (1978). Support and optimal challenge (prompting the learner to accommodate to new learning) are necessary for integrated learning. This is the most complex pedagogical requirement of the DPPE approach. Persons in the complex new roles face new and complex responsibilities, and are often in the middle of a “knowledge perturbation” as they begin their new role.
- Reflective Coaching. Attention is given to fostering new abilities (performances). Coaching for new performances requires an instructional model, wherein the adult learner, over time, acquires “executive control” of complex new performances. Elements of reflective coaching include assessment of prior performance, overview of related theory and evidence, demonstration, opportunity for guided practice and feedback, and eventual adaptation and generalization of the performance.
Joyce, B, & Showers, B. (1995). Staff Development for Student Achievement. New York: Longman.
Reiman, A.J., & Johnson, L.E. (2003). Promoting teacher professional judgment. Journal of Research in Education, 13(1), 4-14.
Sprinthall, N.A., & Thies-Sprinthall, L. (1983). The teacher as an adult learner: A cognitive developmental view. In G. A. Griffin (Ed.), Staff Development: Eighty-second Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.