Reflection: Being a facilitator in PD activities

I was involved as a facilitator in many teacher professional development activities in Indonesia prior to my study in Brisbane. My aim was to promote some new teaching strategies by engaging teachers in contextual teaching and learning concepts. I witnessed many positive outcomes based on the participants’ oral and written reflections and through informal conversations. I also witnessed the enthusiasm of many teachers. However, I also found myself concerned about the struggles they had to implement new ideas in their actual teaching context.

Furthermore, in my experience as a lecturer with pre-service student teachers, I found that they were very enthusiastic about planning, designing and demonstrating teaching using new teaching approaches or more innovative methodologies. However when they returned from their practicum of several weeks at a time, many reported that they found that the most effective way of teaching was direct instruction, in other words, the established pedagogical approach. What they were learning in their teaching education programme at the university was perceived to have very little relevance to the actual classroom context in practice. My study about teacher professional development has really given me a much better insight into why this process was happening, and how it could be addressed.