Professional Development

Professional development is an ongoing process of teacher learning and can take many forms, such as courses, self study, collaborative teacher groups or taking part in research. In different countries there may be different understandings of what is meant by professional development.

Successful professional development typically includes securing interest and engagement from the teachers, providing a theoretical framework for understanding of the innovation/strategy/programme and offering some practical tools to apply to classroom practice.

This section of the toolkit has three sub-sections:

• Principles for effective professional development, which provides a summary of the research in this area.
• Approaches, in which we describe some common approaches to professional development and outline which of these was used by various FaSMEd partners, also providing supporting materials used by the partners.
• Modules, in which we provide a range of professional development materials which can be downloaded and used within a range of professional development settings.