What do we mean by career-long professional growth and how can we get it?

Abstract

Promoting career-long professional growth is an oft-stated goal in education. In this chapter, we explore what such growth can look like, some conditions needed to stimulate and support it and some implications for the design of professional development programs and materials. The chapter draws on the 20 year long Project for Enhancing Effective Learning (PEEL) (Loughran, Mitchell & Mitchell, 2002). PEEL teachers use collaborative action research to address concerns about students' learning. The founding group set out to research and develop ways of promoting learning that was more purposeful, intellectually active and metacognitive. What was not anticipated was the breadth, depth and permanence of the changes in both the participating teachers and students. Most professional development programs have short time frames. PEEL provides a context to examine professional growth over very long periods of time. The data comes from only one project, however it is a project that has involved thousands of teachers, teaching a wide range of subjects at all year levels in a wide range of schools; PEEL SEEDS, the journal of the project, has published articles from over 180 teachers in over 450 schools. While some features of PEEL are unique to the project, we have found that lessons from it have been relevant to a wide range of other projects that we have been involved with. © 2005 Springer.