Teachers' Ongoing Learning in Ontario, Canada: A 10-Year Qualitative Longitudinal Study

• In Event: Professional Lives and Career Challenges for Teachers and Teacher Educators: An International Perspective

Abstract

Current research in teacher professional development points to the importance of an ongoing and continuous learning process over the teaching career (Day & Gu, 2010; vanVeen & Kooy,2012). In practice, short term activities, such as courses and workshops, are most commonly used to provide professional development to teachers around the world (OECD, 2014), including Canada (Tarc, 2011; OECD,2014). Evidence suggests that these short term activities are not effective for teachers learning (Desimone et. al, 2002). Thus, there is a need to depart from this short term approach and construct a continuum for professional development over the teaching career (Feiman-Nemser, 2001; McMahon et. al, 2015).

Longitudinal research offers a unique vantage point for understanding how teachers learn over time and advances relevant evidence to better support teachers’ learning over their careers (Authors, 2017). The objective of our qualitative longitudinal study (Saldaña, 2003) is to describe how elementary teachers from Ontario, Canada learn over the first 10 years of their careers, with a specific focus on their learning activities.

This study portrays the learning experience of two Ontario elementary teachers. The primary data included 13 interviews per teacher that took place in the period 2004-2014. These interviews allowed us to comprehend teachers’ learning from their own perspectives. We examined teachers’ learning through the lens of a constructivist theoretical framework (Richardson,1997) that considers teachers’ prior experience and knowledge and places their specific contexts of practice at the center of the analysis.

Our findings show teachers’ continuing engagement in learning through diverse activities over their first 10 years into the profession. The beginning of the career of our two cases (around first to third year of teaching) was characterized by: an intense engagement in courses and workshops, and a recognition of their knowledge gaps. From their third year of teaching onwards, we identified a constant and increasing investment on teachers’ own learning through self-selected activities, such as reading professional resources, registering in graduate courses, and exploring the use of technology in the classroom. Over years 3-10, we noticed that teachers identified and reflected on the ways they learned best, and pushed themselves into learning activities that connected to those preferred ways.

In contrast to learning through workshops and self-directed activities, we observed that teachers explored learning through collaboration at different moments in their careers. We noticed that enriching engagement in collaboration was strongly related to the school context. Throughout years 1 to 6, very few of their attempts to collaborate (i.e., co-planning, sharing resources) resulted in a helpful interaction. Our two cases pointed out to characteristics of teaching staff that facilitated an enriching collaboration: respect, openness to collaborate, and certain alignment in teaching approaches among teachers.

These findings illustrate the nonlinear continuity of teachers learning (Opfer & Pedder, 2011) over the first ten years in the career. This non-linearity was observed in the diverse learning activities teachers engage in, the emphasis of some learning activities at specific moments of the career, and the role of the school context to sustain teachers’ learning.

Authors

• Elizabeth Rosales, University of Toronto - OISE

• Clare Kosnik, University of Toronto/OISE

• Clive M. Beck, OISE/University of Toronto