Education of the republic of uzbekistan termiz state university

2.2.Impact of professional development
Having assessed the level of unsatisfied demand for professional development among lower secondary teachers and the areas of their work for which they have greatest development need, the level and intensity of participation in professional development activities and the support on offer to teachers and the perceived barriers against taking more development, this chapter now turns to the question of the types of professional development activities that are most effective in providing the professional development teachers need.
TALIS asked teachers to report the impact of their development activities on their development as a teacher. Since TALIS reports teachers’ perceptions, these reports of perceived impact should be treated with some caution as indicators of the effectiveness of these activities. ⁸Nevertheless, if teachers feel that a development activity has had limited impact, this is likely to colour their decisions, and perhaps those of their colleagues, regarding future participation in that activity.
Table shows the percentage of teachers who reported a moderate or high impact for the types of development they had undertaken during the survey period. It is striking how positively teachers view the impact of these development activities and how consistent this is across all types of development activities. On average across participating countries, teachers reported that the most effective forms of development were “Individual and collaborative research”, “Informal dialogue to improve teaching” and “Qualification programmes”, all with close to 90% of teachers reporting a moderate or large impact on their development as a teacher. The development activities that were reported to be relatively less effective were attendance at “Education conferences and seminars” and taking part in “Observation visits to other schools”, though even for these activities around 75% of teachers reported a moderate or high impact.
In general, there is little variation in this pattern across countries with the exception of teachers in Belgium (Fl.), who take a far less positive view of the impact of their development activities. On average, the percentage of teachers who reported a moderate or large impact was around 20-30 percentage points lower than the international average for most activities. This is in the context of teacher reports indicating relatively low participation in professional development activities, relatively low demand for more professional development, and relatively low financial or work-related barriers to further participation (Tables 3.1 and 3.3). A possible interpretation of the combination of low participation and low demand may be a perceived lack of impact of professional development activities. This need not necessarily raise a concern about the quality of the development on offer but could indicate a teacher workforce whose preparation for teaching is well served through initial teacher training.
Teachers in Australia, Austria and Brazil also view the impact of most types of development less positively than in other countries. In Australia this is most notably the case for “Reading professional literature” (where high or moderate impact was reported by 66% of teachers, 16 percentage points below the international average). For Austria, the reported impact of attendance at “Educational conferences and seminars” was relatively low (18 percentage points below the international average) and in Brazil the impact of “Mentoring and peer observation” activities was 12 percentage points below the international average (Table 3.8).
In contrast, teachers in Denmark, Hungary, Lithuania and Poland rank the impact of the development they had undertaken across all types of development above the international average. Malaysia is more positive than the international average on all aspects except “Individual and collaborative research”, where the percentage of teachers reporting moderate or high impact was around the international average.
Education conferences and seminars, although seen as one of the less effective types of activities on average across countries, are considered particularly effective by teachers in Malaysia. Teachers in Lithuania found observational visits to other schools particularly effective, and teachers in Hungary reported a particularly strong impact of mentoring and peer observation (Table 3.8).
How does perceived impact relate to participation?
Given these varying patterns of impact, it is informative to compare impact and participation across the different types of activities. On average across the participating countries, the most obvious contrast between participation and impact is for “Qualification programmes”, which ranked second highest in the percentage (87%) of teachers who reported moderate or high impact resulting from their participation, yet the participation rate (25%) was the lowest of all development activities (Figure 3.15).
There is also a notable contrast between participation and impact for “Individual and collaborative research”, where impact ranked highest of the nine activities but only sixth in terms of participation.
It is not possible to learn from the TALIS data why these differences occur. However, it can be noted that both qualification programmes and research are relatively time-intensive and, as noted earlier, they are also activities which teachers were more likely to have had to pay for. It may not be possible for education systems to allow very high proportions of its teachers to spend a large part of their time on these activities and to finance them as well. The cost and time commitments are likely to present barriers for some teachers as well.
Yet it is striking that the two types of activities that teachers report as having the highest impact on their development are those that they are most likely to have to pay for and commit significant time to. In other words, it is through teachers’ own investment that, on average, they engage in the activities they have found to be among the most effective for their development. Even allowing for the fact that teachers are likely to choose to participate in and pay for activities which they expect to be effective, this is an important finding.
In contrast, courses and workshops and, to a lesser degree, education conferences and seminars have relatively high rates of participation when compared with their reported impact on teachers’ development. In these cases, while these activities may not generally require a large time commitment, the justification for high levels of participation might be questioned in view of the relatively lower impact that teachers report.⁹
The pattern of participation in different development activities seems to be more closely aligned with the impact reported by teachers in some countries than in others. A broad indication of this alignment can be obtained by calculating the correlation between rankings of participation by activity and rankings of impact by activity. The correlation is strongest in Lithuania (0.57 Spearman Rank correlation coefficient), followed by Mexico and the Slovak Republic (both 0.43). Arguably in these cases, participation is fairly well aligned with the benefits to be obtained from various categories of professional development. In contrast, there is a fairly strong negative correlation between participation and impact in Estonia (-0.37) and weak negative correlations in Hungary, Iceland, Ireland and Korea (around -0.1). In Estonia, a major contributor to this result is that the activities for which teachers were most positive about the impact – “Qualification programmes” and “Individual and collaborative research” – were the two activities with the lowest participation for teachers.