Unveiling Professional Learning: Shifting from the Delivery of Courses to an Understanding of the Processes

“This article was published in Teaching and Teacher Education, Vol 23 Issue 5, Maria N. Gravani, Unveiling professional learning: Shifting from the delivery of courses to an understanding of the processes, Pages 688-704, Copyright Elsevier (July 2007)”.

This exploratory study is an attempt to shed light on the internal dynamics of secondary teachers’ and academics’ professional learning, its context and its occasions, in a course of a university-provided in-service professional development programme in Greece, using the experiences and perceptions of its participants. In investigating the above, the study harnesses a qualitative methodology and a research framework that draws upon a set of ideas that cohere under the rubric programme development, in order to generate a heuristic that guides research techniques and analysis procedures.

The investigation reveals professional learning to be characterised by a number of dimensions: professionality, mutuality, emotionality and formality. Professional learning is therefore seen as a complex process rather than linear, a step-by-step event. The article concludes by emphasising a shift from the delivery of the in-service courses to an understanding of the complexity of the processes by which professional learning is developed.