An Insider Perspective: Exploring Teachers’ Engagement with Professional Development in Cooperation with Practitioner Co-Researchers

This chapter reflects on some of the findings of a Research England1 funded project about how best to support teachers to overcome barriers to engage with professional development (PD). Teachers can find it difficult to take part in PD, due to a variety of factors, including but not limited to lack of finance, disruption to teaching and learning, difficulty of finding suitable supply cover, lack of awareness of opportunities, and unsupportive leaders or colleagues (Krille, 2020). The findings presented here suggest that money can help reduce barriers by paying for supply staff so that teachers can be released to take part in training, for example, but they also suggest that the support and backing of employers is a major factor in releasing teachers in ‘school time’ to access PD, which has additionally been affected in recent years by the diminished role of Local Authorities in providing training, the rise of Multi-Academy Trusts offering trust-specific opportunities, and the COVID-19 pandemic. The intentions of this project were to seek practitioners’ involvement in understanding how barriers to PD can be overcome, and why and how PD works when it works, partly by showcasing strategies and models adopted by the researcher-practitioners themselves.