| Professional development (PD) can be an opportunity to address issues that commonly impede educators' efforts to develop their professional skills; build supportive relationships; and leverage teachers' past experience; current expectations, and future goals to impact practice and theory. However, opportunities for such learning are often limited; teachers engage in broadly disseminated in-service meetings that are divorced from individual classroom contexts, or voluntarily participate in PD seminars and workshops during the summer months, on weekends, or after school. This research asserts that professional development is not a summer job. Rather, PD should be valuable to teachers, engaging them in continuous discourse that is directly relevant to their individual classroom contexts, and valued by others (including administrators, accreditors, and students) who expect continued improvement among teachers in settings that tend to remain static in structure and routine. By analyzing the derivation, evolution, and iterative refinement of new design principles for Participatory Professional Development (PPD), this three-article dissertation explores (a) the nature of PD as a "problem" and the "challenges" that seem to hinder its reform; (b) the ways in which a Research-Practice Partnership affected its practitioner-participants, and (c) the affordances and constraints of using the Design-Based Implementation Research (DBIR) framework to organize intersectional professional development research. This dissertation does not intend to present Participatory Professional Development as a panacea for PD research, nor does it claim to have "solved" the "professional development problem." Instead, it offers a new perspective on a rich field of research that may help educational stakeholders more directly support and encourage continuous and accessible professional development that is valuable and valued. PPD is one design framework. The lessons learned from its inception to its final cycle may be useful for others aiming to design professional development environments that value teacher insight and relationship building in a pragmatic, sustainable fashion. |
