Abstract:

Personal and professional growth like teachers’ professional development has entrenched in teachers’ daily lives and is incorporated into the classroom context and constructed through experience and practice as a sustainable, recurring cycle of goal setting, planning, implementation, and reflection (Caena, 2011; Korthagen, 2017). According to Guskey (2002), high quality professional development is the main component of almost every recommendation for modern education development, which aims to change teachers’ practice in the classroom, their attitude and beliefs as well as students’ achievements. Systematic and consistent analysis of personal experience creates conditions to realize the content of personal activities identifying the fields of success and improvement, foreseeing the perspectives of personal and professional growth.

The path of one teacher’s personal and professional growth by reflecting, revealing the tendencies of expression of personal and professional development is presented. The research material of the selected case consists of reflective diaries completed every month by one teacher four years in a row (2015-2019) at a particular school that applies the system of teachers’ personal professional development. The content of reflective diaries is based on formulation of a specific goal for one academic year and constant reflection on one’s activities, reflecting the experiences of personal and professional growth in order to achieve the intended goal. The collected data (reflections’ texts) are analyzed by applying deductive and inductive content analysis. Deduction is related to the Conception of Professional Development by Evans (2014) and the Model of Professional Growth by Clarke, Hollingsworth (2002).

The research results reveal the tendencies of expression of teacher’s professional growth followed by personal development. Reflection and conscious enactment, as fundamental conditions of personal professional growth, reveal the episodes of personal changes creating a cycle of successive chains. Changes occur through mediating processes of reflection and conscious enactment in four different spheres that compose teacher’s world: the personal sphere (teacher’s knowledge, beliefs, attitudes), the practice sphere (professional experiments), the consequences (the essential results) and the external sphere (the sources of information, stimulus or support). In addition, the results reveal the tendencies of teachers’ change through the alteration of teacher’s practices in the classroom and students’ learning outcomes, resulting in the changes of teacher’s beliefs and attitudes that lead to more successful future professional practices and their results.

References:
[1] Caena, F. (2011). Literature Review: Quality in Teachers’ Continuing Professional Development. Brussels: European Commission.
[2] Clarke, D., Hollingsworth, H. (2002). Elaborating a Model of Teacher Professional Growth. Teaching and Teacher Education, 18(8), 947-967.
[3] Guskey, T. R. (2002). Professional Development and Teacher Change. Teachers and Teaching, 8(3), 381-391.
[4] Korthagen, F. (2017). Inconvenient Truths About Teacher Learning: Towards Professional Development 3.0. Teachers and Teaching, 23(4), 387-405.
[5] Evans, L. (2014). Leadership For Professional Development And Learning: Enhancing Our Understanding of How Teachers Develop. Cambridge Journal of Education, 44(2), 179-198.

Keywords:

Reflection, personal and professional growth, professional development, teacher, case study.