Evaluating a Professional Development Framework to Empower Chemistry Teachers to Design Context-Based Education

Abstract

Even experienced chemistry teachers require professional development when they are encouraged to become actively engaged in the design of new context-based education. This study briefly describes the development of a framework consisting of goals, learning phases, strategies and instructional functions, and how the framework was translated into a professional development programme intended to empower teachers to design context-based chemistry education. The programme consists of teaching a pre-developed context-based unit, followed by teachers designing an outline of a new context-based unit. The study investigates the process of teacher empowerment during the implementation of the programme. Data were obtained from meetings, classroom discussions and observations. The findings indicated that teachers became empowered to design new context-based units provided they had sufficient time and resources. The contribution of the framework to teacher empowerment is discussed.

Keywords:

• Chemistry education
• Teacher professional development
• Empowerment
• Designing

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the contribution to this research study by the participating teachers and the curriculum leader. We also wish to express our gratitude to Dr. Fred Lubben and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive and helpful feedback.

Notes

All names used in this research study are pseudonyms.