Teachers’ professional needs as constructed by an influential CPD actor

Abstract

Decentralisation, marketisation and privatisation are phenomena that have led to new contexts for teachers’ continuing professional development (CPD) and, in consequence, a wish for (new and) certain types of professional change in teachers. The purpose of the article is to analyse the professional needs of (L1) teachers as constructed by an influential player in the CPD market.

Theoretically, the study is based on the well-known researcher of professional working life, Linda Evans, and her model of professional development. The model consists of a typology over three components of professional development: behavioural, attitudinal, and intellectual. The behavioural component refers to teachers’ activities and has four dimensions: the processual (how to teach), procedural (how to proceed with assessment), productive (how to be more efficient and reach higher degrees of goal fulfilment), and competential (e.g. how to handle digital tools). The attitudinal component, which ‘relates to attitudes held’, has three dimensions: the perceptual (to develop a changed attitude towards subject content or teaching), evaluative (what to value), and motivational (to get increased job satisfaction). Finally, the intellectual component relates to teachers’ understanding and has, in turn, four dimensions: the epistemological (to learn definitions and get acquainted with knowledge based in research), rationalistic (to change one’s nature of reasoning), comprehensive (to get an increased understanding of connections), and analytical (to understand ‘a whole’ and its relation to disassembled parts). Following Evans, an even distribution of the components is the desirable objective.

The material used for our analysis connects to a larger project funded by the Swedish Research Council, in which thousand CPD invoices were collected in combination with extended material, providing the three conference flyers from the influential, commercial actor Skolporten that we chose for the purpose of this article. We analysed the material quantitatively to reveal the proportions between the components and dimensions. We also analysed the material qualitatively in order to expose and exemplify characteristics of the dimensions respectively. The article is rich on authentic text examples from the conference flyers. During the stage of analysis, we found it adequate to elaborate on the model and its content. Thus, we also provide our own additions and adaptations to the model.

In a quantitative perspective, the results show that the behavioural component overshadows the two other components: attitudinal and intellectual change. The behavioural component collects 49 % of the total, the attitudinal component 16 % and the intellectual component 35 %. Particularly frequent within the behavioural component is the processual dimension, in which practical advice is offered to teachers for their classroom practice. Some dimensions are not represented at all, for instance the evaluative dimension. The dominance of the behavioural component is problematised and we discuss its potential (negative) consequences for the teacher profession. Problematic issues appear also from the qualitative analysis. For instance, the three existing examples of the analytic dimension within the intellectual component should be seen as less complex than expected for fully trained teachers. Towards the end of the article we discuss the results and its alignment with contemporary ideals.