| Abstrakt: |
Examining psychological and neurological aspects of the Self-Determination Theory led scholars to theorize that professional well-being is essential for teachers' satisfaction and personal-professional growth. However, teacher professional development programs primarily focus on promoting student achievement and only partially and indirectly address teachers' professional well-being. In particular, the absence of teachers' voices in this discrepancy is noticeable. This study aimed at confronting teachers' perceptions about their professional well-being needs with how actual practices in effective teacher professional development programs address these needs. Well-being components )competence, relatedness, autonomy, and aspirations( were implicitly identified within 20 interviews with expert STEM teachers. The findings show that teachers attribute importance to their professional well-being in all components. In particular, aspirations for personal-professional growth, indicated by all teachers as most important, were not evident at all in effective teacher professional development programs. The findings emphasize the need to establish professional well-being as an additional characteristic of effective teacher professional development programs. This additional characteristic may provide an answer to psychological and neurological needs in the context of teachers' learning processes and therefore may have practical and theoretical implications for planning and evaluating the effectiveness of professional development programs for teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
