Taiwanese Technical Education Teachers’ Professional Development: An Examination of Some Critical Factors

Source: Teaching and Teacher Education, Volume 27, Issue 1, January 2011, Pages 165-173.
(Reviewed by the Portal Team)

The goal of the current study was to probe into the influences of task autonomy (TA), organizational learning (OL), and group cohesiveness (GC) on innovation of professional development (IOPD) by technical education teachers, and their relationships.

The authors conducted a questionnaire survey on 265 full-time teachers of 14 Taiwanese technical educational junior colleges.

Two conclusions are shown as follows:
1. Technical education teachers perform well in TA and GC, and their performance of OL and IOPD are acceptable
2. The teachers’ TA, OL, and GC reveal positive relationships with IOPD. TA and OL show positive prediction for IOPD

Based on the research results, this study proposes three suggestions, as follows:
1. The construction of level-based cooperation, and the reward of technical education to stimulate technical education teacher’s TA, GC, and IOPD
2. Encouragement for technical education institutions to construct cultural and collaborative groups for innovative learning techniques that enhance OL
3. TA and OL of technical education are treated as evaluation indices. GC can be an observation index that evaluates the teachers’ IOPD, and functions as the criterion for effect improvement

In theoretical implications, this study suggests that TA, GC, and OL are critical factors to IOPD.