Professional Development Across the Teaching Career

Abstract

This chapter addresses the learning opportunities available for in-service teachers, summarizing the research on teachers’ professional development conducted in the COACTIV research program. The findings showed that the majority of teachers continued to take advantage of formal learning opportunities but also engaged in nonformal and informal learning. In particular, the uptake of in-service training opportunities was explained by teachers’ attitudes and motivation and by school-level characteristics. Additional analyses of individual differences revealed that teachers at different stages of their career differed in the time they invested in learning. Finally, the chapter presents findings from new analyses investigating differences in the use of learning opportunities between teachers of different school tracks. The results indicate that academic-track teachers, who received more in-depth training in subject matter knowledge during their initial teacher education, attended notably more content-specific in-service training courses. Nonacademic-track teachers, in contrast, attended more courses on pedagogy and psychology, counseling, and school organization.