Networking of Professional Development Teachers (PDT): Processes, successes and challenges

‘’An abstract can offer a valuable opportunity to inform a wide audience, to capture potential readers, and to expand your own interactive professional network. Whether others will pursue their reading may depend largely on their assessment of your abstract’’. (Wolcott, 1990 cited in Silverman, 2000; p. 223). Professional Development Teachers (PDTs) have a demanding role in their respective education systems and their role perception in general is not confined to only a practicing classroom teacher but more than that. This study seeks to explore as how PDTs, in a semi-private education system, came to work together to benefit their own system schools from their expertise and learning from the graduate programme at AKU-IED. The study looks into the processes, successes and challenges of a team effort or network structure of the PDTs in a semi-private education system. The significant purpose of this network is building capacity and facilitating the process of teaching and learning in the system schools. The study will delve into how this effort leads to school improvement and what were the facilitating factors and challenges of this teamwork structure. Literature from the perspective of network structure, professional development and school improvement provides a theoretical framework. The study aims to investigate and capture the reactions of the research participants in their natural setting. To conduct this study a semi-private education system was identified where the PDTs were found working together. Research data is collected by means of interviews, observations, shadowing (non-participatory observations) and document analysis. The result of the systematic data collection and analysis enabled the researcher to derive the themes, which describe the network process. The themes contributed to and link with some theory enabling conclusions to be drawn from the research. Finally the implications of the study are discussed together with recommendations and suggestions. Working together is a facilitative approach as well as a challenging task and there is a need to set some common vision that leads to some purposive structure formation. To realize the vision, identifying the potential group of people and designing a progress plan are important factors along with the basic requirements of resources, opportunities and rewards/incentives