Teachers’ Teachers’ Perception of Their Professional Development Training Transfer in the Classroom

Abstract

Teachers develop professionally when they are given the opportunity of training along with academic courses, teaching, co-teaching, peer observation, reflection, insights, regular meetings, and students’ feedback. A teacher’s professional development training is a regular program aimed at updating and developing the teachers’ knowledge, skills, and techniques that facilitate student classroom learning. However, TPD training has been limited to develop the teachers’ theoretical understanding of learner-centered methods and techniques, rather than transforming students and their learning. The study focuses on integrating TPD training practices in classroom teaching and their appropriation by the teachers’ perspectives in community schools of Nepal. My study aimed at exploring and understanding teachers’ perception of TPD training transfer into the classroom. This research delimited the study of how the teachers, as adult learners got reflections on the practice of their pedagogical knowledge, skills, and techniques, experiences of making

ii lesson plans and their execution in the classroom, and assumptions of self-confidence and competence while they got in their classroom with the training. Similarly, my research delimited to study the training and how the focus was followed on participants’ engagement and practices of three phases—establishing goals, ranking their priority, and persistence. Guided by the research questions, I have conducted an interpretive study within the interpretive paradigm to explore and present teachers’ perception regarding the transfer of TPD training in classrooms. As my research participants, I purposively selected six teachers in total and included two teachers from each community school as my research participants. I conducted qualitative interviews based on semi-structured and open-ended questions guided by research questions as the tools for collecting primary data. The study compiled, analyzed, and interpreted the data collected from the participants’ interviews. While going through the interviews of the participants, the study explored the teachers’ perception of training as a tool for TPD and so could play a role in transforming teachers’ learning. However, the transfer of training is challenged by head teachers’ ‘practice of distributed instructional leadership, mother tongue of students for learning Nepali or English, dishonesty of training providers and teachers, deficit budget with schools, and low attendance of students. The teacher participants expressed that the training has prospects if digital skills, recruiting a sound evaluation system of training and organizing training perpetually on the needs of teachers and demands of learners ‘context, and learner-centered methods are met together. I took the transformative theory of adult learning to interpret teachers ‘perception regarding the training acquisition and practice of pedagogical knowledge, skills, and

iii techniques in classrooms by teachers in the transformative process. Similarly, the training engagement theory was chosen to study teachers’ teaching goals, develop the instructional activities to achieve the goals, continue the instructional activities to achieve the goals, and continue their practice for the transfer of the training through the lens of the theories. The study would have new findings if it could be studied with an ethnographic methodology and taking head teachers, parents, and the school management committee (SMC) as research participants to explore the transfer of TPD training in the classroom.