Supervisors’ Feedback and Teacher Professional Development in a Context of Students’ Linguistic Diversity in OECD Countries

Abstract

Teacher professional development was examined in the context of student linguistic diversity in countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Data for this quantitative study were taken from the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS, 2013) with teachers (N = 170,005) from 6500 schools. Factor analyses enabled us to identify two factors associated with teacher professional development and two factors pertaining to the teachers’ perceptions of their supervisor’s feedback on such aspects as skills development and career perspectives, collaboration and support actions with the students, and teaching and assessment practices. Our results show that skills and professional growth development correlated differently depending on the importance the teachers gave to the feedback they received in the presence or absence of linguistic diversity in their classroom. Implications of this diversity on the teachers’ perceptions are discussed, as well as socioprofessional characteristics and teacher professional development.