Determinants of teachers' formal and informal learning.

Are our teachers able to keep up with changing insights and knowledge within their domain, are they ready for innovative didactical approaches and technological innovations? According to Dirk van Damme, The Head of the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) of the OECD (2014) teachers in Europe do not show sufficient expertise to cope with these challenges. It is assumed that teachers’ formal and informal learning leads towards a higher expertise in their works. Most of the rare studies looking into informal learning of teachers were performed in higher education and with low number of participants (e.g. van der Heijden, Boon, van der Klink, & Meijs, 2009; Van der Rijt et al., 2012). In addition, age-related variables such as future time perspective, i.e. people’s perception of the number of opportunities and limitations are ahead in their (working) life (Lang & Carstensen, 2002), career phases (e.g. Huberman, 1989; Sammons et al., 2006), collegial network (Borgatti & Cross, 2003) and learning climate (Schneider, Ehrhart & Macey, 2013) seem to play a role in teachers’ learning and were not taken into account. Next, researcher such as Williams (2003) and Richter et al. (2011) indicated that especially teachers in their mid-career phase are believed to learn more in an informal way, while early-career teachers prefer formal learning and teachers in later career are less interested in learning. This study investigates the teachers’ (in)formal learning. Questionnaires examine personal and contextual determinants of informal and formal learning, such as background characteristics, career phases, future time perspective, collegial network and learning climate, but also school subject of the teacher and socio-economic level of the school. Furthermore, interviews examine why these relations between the variables under study are found or lacking. A special focus will be placed on the characteristics of followed learning activities