Framing Professional Learning: An Action Research on Teachers' Pedagogical Empowerment of Design-based Learning for Innovative Teaching

Abstract

In this innovation era, offering support for teachers’ innovative teaching has been an important but neglected issue. Based on teacher learning theory, the purpose of this study is to explore a teaching empowerment team’s design of professional learning for elementary school teachers who learned Design-Based Learning[DBL]. The team attempted to empower teachers based on the reflections of the collaborative action research through participatory observation, interviews and document analysis. The findings indicated that the teaching empowerment team regarded participatory learning as a fundamental rationale to elicit teachers’ professional autonomy. The team also guided teachers to make sense of the key elements of DBL by experiential activities and used a DBL exemplar curriculum as protocol. Consequently, the teacher community in an elementary school tried to deconstruct teaching habits and redefined their teaching roles. The teachers collaborated with students to develop contextual pedagogical competencies, and found that presenting learning outcomes in real context made professional growth possible. A teacher empowerment framework for innovative teaching and future studies was further proposed: through parallel learning for pedagogical transformation, the team and teachers might work together to develop a sustainable professional learning pathway based on the connoisseurship and evaluation of student learning performance.

Keywords

• Design-Based Learning
• innovative teaching
• in-service teacher
• professional learning