Personal and Professional Development for Teachers: A Phenomenological Study of the Cultivating Awareness and Resilience in Education Retreat

• In Event: 49.083 - Exploring Processes of Effectiveness and Impact in Social Emotional Learning Programs for Educators

Abstract

Stress and burnout are negative effects that occur in the profession of teaching. Often professional development offerings miss the mark of developing educators and helping them deal with these issues. Professional development is often conceived without personal growth considerations. Personal growth opportunities may be seen as removed from the goals of becoming more effective in professional practice. Based on the theory of situated cognition, this study investigated one personal and professional development retreat program for teachers aimed to develop inner resources to help them and their students socially, emotionally, and academically in ways that may reduce stress and burnout. The Cultivating Awareness and Resilience in Education (CARE) retreat is a personal and professional development opportunity that allows participants to learn how to handle the stresses inherent in teaching and rediscover the joys of teaching. The CARE retreat arms teachers with skills to become more aware of causes of stress, and promote empathy and compassion for themselves and their students. CARE retreat teaches teachers social, emotional and mindful awareness skills needed to become more self-aware and reflective practitioners who will hopefully have long and rewarding careers.
This study utilized hermeneutical phenomenology and autoethnography to give context to my own experience of being a CARE retreat participant and staff member. By describing and interpreting the interview data that were collected, I convey the meaning of the participants’ accounts and, when appropriate, make links between common threads, recurring themes, and other patterns in the data that occur. I conducted fourteen semi-structured in-person interviews of past CARE retreat participants and then, via teleconference, I conducted a focus group conversation. The two guiding research questions were: 1) what is the CARE retreat experience for participants?, and, 2) what is the value (personal and professional P/PD) of the CARE program retreat to participants? Interviews were approximately one-hour in length and semi-structured. The goal was to answer the questions on the protocol and allow participants freedom to expand on any issue that was important to them and give the researcher flexibility to extend the questions or alter them, as needed. Using Anfara and Brown’s (2001) structure for a Code Map, I compared data and created categories in order to achieve multiple levels of data analysis.

Author

• Adam Diliberto, Cambridge College