Research On Teachers’ Action Learning

Teachers’ professional development is faced with quite a lot of opportunities as well as challenges in this educational transformation era. Teachers’ qualities elevation, which is a deciding factor in the global curriculum reform, has been an important perquisite of educational quality improvement. Therefore, it has been already acknowledged that teachers’ quality improvement can be achieved by their in-service learning. However, traditional teacher learning, with relatively single learning methods and outdated learning content, mostly lays emphasis on teachers’ acquisition of theoretical instead of practical knowledge. As a result, this kind of passive learning’s contribution to teachers’ professional development is quite limited.Action learning, aiming at resolving realistic difficulties, is an adult learning method based on learners’ prior experience and critical reflection. Although it was originally used in the training of entrepreneurs, it is now widely used it other areas. In order to deepen the theoretical research of teacher learning and enhance teachers’ professional development as well as educational improvement in practice, this research systematically probes into teacher learning from the perspective of action learning with some useful advice and recommendations concluded. The dissertation, using high school English teachers as case example, mainly deals with three problems of what is teachers’ action learning, why action learning is necessary for teachers and how teachers can implement action learning in daily work as well as in their professional training courses. Taking all these into consideration, an action learning based professional development paradigm for teachers is finally constructed in this research with its theoretical and practical value also discussed.The doctorate dissertation consists of seven chapters with their respective content as follows:The first chapter is the introductory part of the dissertation with its emphasis on explaining the research causes, background, content and general design as well as specific research methods. Also in this chapter, some important research concepts such as teacher learning, action learning, teachers’ knowledge and professional development have been illustrated. In addition, the researcher points out the relationship among the above concepts from a theoretical perspective.The second chapter is literature review which includes three parts, namely, academic reviews of teacher learning, action learning and teachers’ action learning. Although the research on action learning has a history of more than six decades, its implementation and practice on teachers still lags behind and deserves further investigation.The third chapter is the theoretical study part of this research which discusses the content, characteristics, process and types of teachers’action learning. Also, theories underlying teachers’ action learning are to be listed and introduced in depth to help understand action learning’s impacts and values on teachers’ development. The above analysis, coupled with the empirical studies in the next chapter, contributes together to prove the terminal research conclusions of this dissertation.As mentioned, the fourth chapter is the empirical study part of this research which carries out questionnaires, interviews, observations and real material analysis on some high school English teachers. The goal of this research part is to investigate the status quo (with existing problems in particular) of English teachers’ action learning. Therefore, teachers’ professional development paradigm based on action learning will be constructed, using this part’s empirical results.The problem of how teachers carry out action learning in workplace is dealt with in the fifth chapter. Through the above research, the author concludes classroom observation, teaching cases analysis, cooperative action research and collective lesson preparation as specific methods of action learning for high school English teacher. Besides, implementing school-based research and constructing PDS (Professional Development School) can be regarded as general and common ways to boost teachers’ action learning since they reflect the ideals of learning from and in actions.The sixth chapter demonstrates the crucial and innovative points of this research. Based on the previous theoretical and empirical studies on teachers’ action learning, this chapter summarizes and constructs an action learning-based teachers’ professional development paradigm. Certainly, the content and practical values as well as the mechanism of teachers’ action learning have also been discussed in this chapter. This paradigm reveals that teachers’ action learning is composed of a complicated system which can be influenced by many external and internal factors such as teaching environment, evaluation systems, school management, teachers’ reflective and critical abilities as well as communicative skills.Chapter seven, the last but not least part of this dissertation, summarizes the main conclusions and points out some defects of the research. Also, further research details have been directed in this part.To sum up, this dissertation records a systematic research on high school English teachers’ action learning with its conclusions and implementations applying to teachers (other subject teachers as well), teacher educators and education administrators. In a word, the research has great value in improving teachers’ learning effects and their professional competence as well.