Training Teachers as a Self-Empowerment Approach for Sustainable Professional Development https://doi.org/10.34074/rere.00203
By: Bing Dai Omer Altaf Srividya Krishnamoorthy
Abstract
Two key ideas proposed by the 2020 Agenda for Sustainable Development were to “expand the definition of the right to education” and to “value the teaching profession and teacher collaboration” (Zewde et al.,2020, p. 5). In light of these two ideas, teaching practices need to enhance the connectivity and access to knowledge and information and innovatively to engage in various formats of collaboration. Thus, as education professionals, teachers’ sustainable professional development is a lifelong, collaborative, action-based, research-based, and reflective learning process enabling continuous teacher empowerment. This research adopted an in-depth case study as the research method to critically evaluate the professional learning from the workshop conducted by the teachers (trainers) from the Construction Department of Otago Polytechnic Auckland International Campus. The workshop was delivered to the construction teachers (trainees) from a counterpart polytechnic in China. Our approach involved critical evaluation of the trainers’ professional learning from the initial development, facilitation, and feedback from trainees via participating trainers’ deep reflection. Critical evaluation and reflection allowed the researchers (three out of the trainers) to reconstruct the meaning of teacher training as a way of teacher empowerment and formulate an evaluative framework for sustainable professional practice.
Keywords:
sustainable professional development, critical reflection, teacher training, learning evaluation, case study