By Associate Professor Debra Panizzon

Professional learning ensures that all professionals continue to develop and grow, maintaining ‘currency’ and scholarship within their specialised field.

Many teachers will easily meet the mandatory hours of professional learning through their employers, while others, like Temporary Relief Teachers, need to proactively seek out these opportunities.

Regardless of your situation, it is imperative to think carefully about your own needs at any point in time. For example: Are you up-to-speed with recent developments in particular subject areas? How are practices changing in particular subject areas as electronic forms of student assessment increase? What does critical and creative thinking look like within individual subject areas?

Taking ownership of our professional learning ensures that we continue to reflect on our practices as teachers while challenging our thinking about student learning.

The cultural shift to focus on ‘learning’ is moving away from professional development, which traditionally encompassed ‘one-hit’, short-term sessions conducted with teachers at specified times.

Extensive educational research has shown that this type of approach can have minimal impact on teacher practice because it often does not meet the immediate needs of teachers, nor align with their existing knowledge and views about learning (Effective Teacher Professional Development - Darling-Hammond, Hyler & Gardner, 2017). Hence, it is often not immediately relevant to a teacher, resulting in minimal impact on teacher thinking and practice.

The Teachers Registration Board acknowledges the importance of teacher ownership of their learning, accepting a diverse array of professional learning:

• online learning (i.e., podcasts, videos, webinars)
• teacher formal study (i.e., postgraduate study)
• individual research (i.e., personal reading, site-based research projects)
• face-to-face workshops, and
• communities of teacher practice within schools/centres.

Further information along with examples of how to enter different types of professional learning into the teachers’ portal are available from: https://www.trb.sa.edu.au/types-of-PL