Continuous Professional Development
Because the world that teachers are preparing young people to enter is changing so rapidly, and because the teaching skills required are evolving likewise, no initial course of teacher education can be sufficient to prepare a teacher for a career of 30 or 40 years. Continuous Professional Development (CPD) is the process by which teachers (like other professionals) reflect upon their competences, maintain them up to date, and develop them further.
The extent to which education authorities support this process varies, as does the effectiveness of the different approaches. A growing research base suggests that to be most effective, CPD activities should:
- be spread over time
- be collaborative
- use active learning
- be delivered to groups of teachers
- include periods of practice, coaching, and follow-up
- promote reflective practice
- encourage experimentation, and
- respond to teachers' needs.
Read more about this topic: Teacher Education
Famous quotes containing the words continuous, professional and/or development:
“Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wave-length of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.”
—Iris Murdoch (b. 1919)
“Three words that still have meaning, that I think we can apply to all professional writing, are discovery, originality, invention. The professional writer discovers some aspect of the world and invents out of the speech of his time some particularly apt and original way of putting it down on paper.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“The proper aim of education is to promote significant learning. Significant learning entails development. Development means successively asking broader and deeper questions of the relationship between oneself and the world. This is as true for first graders as graduate students, for fledging artists as graying accountants.”
—Laurent A. Daloz (20th century)