Participation in a professional development group :perspectives of staff at a specialist further education college

Abstract

Background: The government is keen for young people to remain in some form of education or training, at least until the age of 18. The government believes that the FE sector is central to transforming the life chances of young people and adults and to the prosperity of the nation (Department for Education and Skills, 2006). At present, the field of educational psychology is mainly funded by local authorities (British Psychological Society, 2009; Neville, 2009) and organised to address the needs of children and young people with the profession largely limiting itself to school age contexts. Research indicates that there are very few school and Educational Psychology Services around the world with a service that incorporate post-school aspects (Jimerson, Oakland, & Farrell, 2007; MacKay, 2009). The past 30 years have witnessed tremendous growth in training research, particularly in the last decade. There is now a wealth of research indicating that investing in teacher learning and professional development improves the quality of teaching. Research on the impact of CPD in education has also looked at the professional development of support staff, models of professional development (Starkey et al., 2009) and the range of initiatives in - iv - professional development to support school improvement (Van Kraayenoord, 2003). A review of the literature has found very little research into the area of post school Educational Psychology Services. Hellier (2009) reported that the provision of post school Educational Psychology Services is a new field of practice. Aim: The main aim of this study was to explore the perceptions and views of staff, from a specialist further education college, who had taken part in meetings to determine whether there is an impact on staff development by analysing their how they talk about the process and how they felt participating in the meetings. Method: Qualitative research methodology was adopted and a Grounded Theory approach was used. Focus group interviews were conducted with two groups of staff who had participated in Professional Development Group meetings to gather their views and opinions of the intervention. A semistructured interview schedule was used to guide the focus group interviews. The focus group interviews were transcribed and Strauss and Corbin’s (1990) Grounded Theory approach was adopted to analyse the data. Findings: The findings from this study indicate that the Professional Development Groups could be described as Communities of Practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998) which support Conversational Learning (Baker, Jenson, & Kolb, 2002). The findings also identify the conditions needed to support Conversational Learning. Implications of the results of this study, plus reflections regarding the research process are also discussed. - v - Keywords: teacher support groups, professional development, grounded theory, adult learning, conversational learning.