The Determinism of Professional Development Needs in Continuous Teacher Training

Abstract

The need for professional development is a gap that could be bridged by a proper training that is meant to foster both demonstrated and expected competences of an individual or a group. Nowadays it is necessary to distinguish between the socially generated needs for professional development and the individually generated ones. Some of them include certain needs which are seemingly unrelated to professional competences, but which can influence the individual learning process: the need for self-training, the need to interact with other teachers, the need for leisure time, the need to study at a personal pace. It is obvious that a more thorough analysis is definitely required prior to courses in order to tailor them to each individual‘s professional development set of needs. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to provide a deeper and more realistic analysis of professional development needs, which can lead to a better insight into a more effective benchmarking of continuing professional training. The taxonomy featured in this paper is a tool that can be used by providers of continuing professional training to such an extent that they are enabled to optimise their course content and approach. Furthermore, this framework which relies on genuine professional needs empowers teachers to reflect on their own development priorities when they are supposed to select a suitable training programme provided by different educational suppliers.