Facilitating Reflective Inquiries into Dialogic Practices as Part of Vocational School Teachers' Professional Development
Roč.30,č.2(2025)
Facilitating Teacher Continuous Professional Development: How, Why and by Whom?
Chiara Piccini
Elena Boldrini
Sara Hennessy
Ruth Kershner
The study was conducted as part of a project to integrate reflective inquiry around dialogic teaching practices into university courses for teachers of Vocational and Professional Education and Training (VPET) in Switzerland. The initiative employed a toolkit for this purpose known as T-SEDA. The study explored the challenges, need for support, and mutual roles related to lecturers' involvement in practitioner-led inquiry. A design-based research approach was implemented in two phases linked to in-service courses: the first with five teachers of different subjects, the second with 13 teachers of General Culture. The course monitoring tools (interviews, surveys, teachers' artifacts, and the researcher's logbook) generated data on the lecturer's facilitation and the teachers' learning experiences. Support needs were identified, materials were developed, and the importance of face-to-face supervision was recognized, especially for an initial dialogic activity to begin observation of practice. The findings highlighted a shift from the traditional lecturer role of trainer to a facilitator role, an increase in perceived agency on the part of VPET teachers, and the overall feasibility of integrating the T-SEDA approach into university-based courses for VPET teachers. The research resulted in the design of new courses, allowing for individualized and self-directed teacher professional development in the context of highly standardized VPET requirement frameworks. It has implications for the enhancement of a reflective approach in the professional development of VPET teachers, showing possible strategies and tools for balancing external guidance – mainly for the design of dialogic activities – and teacher autonomy when defining the focus of inquiry and interpreting collected data.
reflective inquiry; vocational and professional education and training; educational dialogue; T-SEDA framework; teacher professional development; university-based teacher education
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