A Professional Development Program for Beginning High School Teachers

Abstract

This paper presents a professional development program for beginning high school teachers. The program was designed after identifying, characterizing and evaluating the professional training needs of beginning teachers, using quantitative and qualitative methodologies via interviews and surveys. With a framework in personalized education and in constructivist theory-both related to professional development for such teachers-and in adult transformative learning theory, the program promotes personal pedagogy which guides teachers to clarify the meaning of their role in the twenty-first century. The program fosters a model of formative learning that is more related to the knowledge of the beginning teacher regarding the reality of teaching and learning, the pedagogical subject, the school environment and capacity to act on the educational situation, than to specific disciplinary contents. The contents on which the program is structured are oriented to the systematic observation of pedagogical practice, to the knowledge of adolescents and their learning as a reason for it, to teaching in diversity and to the significance of being a teacher of secondary education.