Organizational Resources for Professional Development: A Cross-National Analysis

• In Event: Case studies in educational trajectories, professional development, job satisfaction and training

Proposal

Background
Although the benefit of professional development (PD) is clear, the literature suggests that teachers face multiple barriers to engage in PD activities (Boeskens et al., 2020). There is a need to identify what types of organizational resources are needed to overcome these barriers and increasing teachers’ participation in PD activities. Previous studies on organizational resources for PD tend to focus on material resources in a single country or region, and only a few comparative or cross-national studies have been conducted to demonstrate the importance of other types of organizational resources (Author et al., 2019; 2022). To fill this knowledge gap, this cross-national study used survey data from nationally representative samples of teachers and principals from 42 educational systems that participated in the 2018 Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) to investigate the level of organizational resources provided to teachers and relationships between three types of organizational resources (i.e., monetary, material, and time resources) and teacher’s participation in PD contents across these educational systems. Research questions are as follows:

1. How do countries vary in their provisions of organizational resources to promote teachers’ professional development activities?

2. How is the national level of provisions of organizational resources (monetary, material, and time) associated with teachers’ participation in professional development on various content areas?

This study adopted a situative perspective proposed by Putnam and Borko (2000), and focused on both individual and contextual features of teacher PD. One major theme of the situative perspective is that teachers’ learning and cognition are situated in particular physical and social contexts. When studying teacher learning and PD from this perspective, researchers need to pay attention to interactive systems in which individuals are active participants and interact with each other and materials. Consequently, both individual teacher-learner and the organizational contexts in which they are embedded are the focus of the situative perspective.

Methods
We used data from the 2018 TALIS administered by OECD. In this study, to address the first research question, we focused on 42 educational systems that provided lower secondary teacher survey data on organizational resources. To address the second research question, we conducted a 3-level Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) with 78,527 teachers in 6,056 schools in 34 educational systems without any missing data in all variables.

In this study, we used aggregated teacher survey data on their organizational resources at the system level. Organizational resources for PD were measured by the percentage of teachers who received each item of monetary (3 items), material (2 items), and time (2 items) resources as national system variables. We also created three national composite resource variables by averaging the percentages (e.g., averaging the percentages in three items for monetary resources) as well as overall measure by averaging these three composite variables. Teachers’ participation in PD was measured by summing the number of various PD content each teacher participated during the previous year.

To address the first question, descriptive statistics were used to compare the percentage of teachers who received seven organizational resources for PD along with average percentages for three types of resources and the overall measure. To address the second question, we used HLM 8.0 to conduct three-level multilevel modeling analyses to examine the relationships between the national levels of organizational resources and teachers’ participation in PD content, controlling for teacher, school, and national background. Due to the multicollinearity issues, these organizational resources variables were included separately in 11 different fully conditional models (7 organizational resources and 4 composite variables).

Results
Across the 42 educational systems, release from teaching duties for activities during regular working hours had the highest percentage, indicating that on average 45% of teachers reported they received this item of time resource for PD participation during last year. Receiving materials needed for the activities had the second highest percentage of 41%, followed by reimbursement (31%), non-monetary support for activities outside working hours (19%), non-monetary rewards (18%), and monetary supplements (14%). Increased salary had the lowest percentage with only 13% of teachers reporting that they received this item of monetary resource for PD during last year.

From the HLM results, we found that out of seven organizational resources, for only two material resources, namely materials needed for the activities (β = 6.46, p < .001) and non-monetary rewards (β = 8.06, p = .009), were positively and significantly associated with teachers’ participation in PD. We also found that the composite variable of materials resources (mean of two items) was significant (β = 8.74, p < .001). Moreover, the overall organizational resources (mean of monetary, material, and time resources) had a positive and significant relationship with teachers’ PD participation (β = 6.31, p = .029).

Discussion
In summary, our cross-national study revealed that, on average, no more than one-third of teachers across 42 educational systems reported that they received organizational resources for PD participation during the previous 12 months. In many educational systems, the percentage of teachers who received organizational resources to support their PD participation was even below 10%. Previous studies have identified organizational resources, including time, monetary, and material resources as an important lever to remove barriers to PD participation. However, this study suggested that many educational systems do not provide enough resources to their teachers and the average international levels of resource provisions are quite low.

This study also demonstrated that material resources may play a more important role in facilitating participation in PD content compared to monetary and time resources cross-nationally. Therefore, these results imply that, to maximize the effectiveness of resource investment, educational systems may focus on investing in material resources such as instructional materials, books, and ICT to enhance teachers’ PD participation. Providing material resources may be more feasible and beneficial since the time schedule is not easy to change in many countries (OECD, 2019) and monetary incentives might undermine teachers’ intrinsic motivations for PD participation (Desimone et al., 2007). Moreover, this study provided the general global pattern which can inform future single country studies to investigate the impact of organizational resources in their own national context.

Authors

• Xiaonan Jiang, Florida State University

• Motoko Akiba, Florida State University