A Blueprint for Teacher Design Teams to Create Professional Development Interventions

Abstract

An effective way to stimulate teachers’ engagement and involvement in educational innovations is by employing teacher design teams (TDTs, Vangrieken et al, 2013). The design activities that TDTs engage in should be chosen carefully, and a facilitator should be available to support the TDTs (Becuwe et al, 2016). So far, little attention has been paid in the literature to the nature and role of such design activities (Vangrieken et al, 2013; Brouwer et al, 2012). Therefore, the goal of this paper is to provide guidelines for the design activities of TDTs aimed at teachers’ professional development. A series of design activities to support TDTs in five secondary schools in the Netherlands was constructed and evaluated through audio recordings of each session, logbooks, and interviews about teachers' perceptions of the design process and activities. In this article, we present and discuss the resulting blueprint for TDT activities aimed at teachers’ professional development.