Professional
Growth and Development in Education
Some
considerations
As members of an education institution,
it is important to endorse the idea that organizations must be created around
the belief that every single individual wants to grow professionally. Educators
cannot live nor prosper in a teaching system where mediocracy is rewarded; as
pointed out by Laura Lewin, mediocracy in teaching cannot and must not exist (2020). Teachers have to hold on strong desires
to continue to grow as a professional; otherwise, they will get stagnated
and with no sense of achievement in their field and careers. Part of being a
top pedagogue is to grow professionally and keep oneself updated
Taken from Simply Psychology at https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html
Being a professional does not equal
with being a good educator. Institutions need to select and hire people who are
willing to continue to grow in their profession and beyond. Based on Lewin
(2020), organizations need to encourage their teachers to take responsibility
for their own professional growth and well-being. Seasoned, consolidated
professionals are no longer just driven by money to satisfy their basic needs; they
now aspire for their place in the field. If these professionals have already
crossed the borderline between basic necessities and psychological essentialities
in the Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, as posited by Lewin (2020), educators’
motivation is no longer bound to money; they look for a sense of belonging to a
group of other professionals and colleagues in the same field and a sense of
accomplishment at a personal and professional level in their teaching careers.
Institutions crave for teachers in the self-fulfillment
needs phase. McLeod (2020) states that people in this level are in the
search for “achieving [their] full potential, including creative activities.”
These individuals are now beyond the exchange of information that takes place
in training sessions; these people are ready to get training, implement the new
knowledge in the classroom, and then evaluate the results of the implementation
(Lewin 2020). For good, committed educators, it is not enough to know about
what they teach; for Lewin (2020) these professionals promote social and emotional
intelligence among their learners, feel comfortable with new teaching methods,
and are up-to-date with technological advancements in and for education. With
this type of educators, a sense of purpose and movement from potential to
materialization of training in the classroom is sensed and can be measured in
the classroom. And if these people who are being trained eventually leave the
company is not the problem; the problem is those who stay in the institution
with no desire for training and growth (Lewin 2020).
Training teachers on a given area does
not guarantee that they have learned how to implement new information (from a
training session) and then evaluate the results of an implementation in their
teaching. A professional training program in an institution needs to aim at
providing instructors with new knowledge; then this new input is transformed
into skills that can improve their teaching process. Finally, institutions want
these skills in teachers to turn into competencies that can be later on seen
all across their teaching and in their student learning. But most importantly,
as stated by Lewin (2020), none of this would work if educators have the wrong
attitude towards professional development. Just because you train them does not
mean teachers will learn how to apply new knowledge within a learning setting.
References
Lewin, L. (2020, Octubre 2020). Cómo
Armar un Programa de Desarrollo Profesional. Escuela para Directivos -
Laureate Languages. Buenos Aires, Argentina: ABS International.
McLeod, S. (2020, March 20). Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.
Retrieved October 7, 2020, from SimplyPsychology.Org:
https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html
Professional Growth and Development in Education by Jonathan Acuña on Scribd
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