"There is so much you can learn": child care teachers' perceptions of their professional development experiences

The purpose of this study was to explore the professional development of child care teachers through their descriptions and perceptions of their training experiences. Influenced by frameworks on professional thought and beliefs (Clark, 1988), the following questions guided this study: How do child care teachers working in for-profit centers describe their professional development experiences? Specifically, what sources, contents, formats and amounts do they describe? What perceived relationship of professional development to their classroom practice do they describe? How do they describe the relationship of professional development to issues in the field such as quality and teacher turnover? And what insights can they provide in regards to pre-service and in-service professional development? The sample included 18 child care teachers working in 6 for-profit centers. Data were collected through interviews, and analyzed using qualitative research techniques including comparative analysis. The findings are described in four thematic sections: “Sink or Swim”: (Entry Training Experiences); “Very Good, For the most Part”: (Inservice Training Classes); “It Can Only Make Things Better”: (Importance of Training); and “Everything Under the Sun”: (Professional Development Needs). The teachers’ provided rich descriptions about their experiences both in training classes and within their centers. For many of these teachers, a lack of preservice and minimal inservice training opportunities led to reliance on their own abilities and learning from others in their environment. Training classes were seen as positive experiences overall, however many teachers reported instances of impractical content and disengaging formats. While the majority of these teachers thought that “training is important”, their descriptions revealed a limited influence on practice. Further, while many teachers saw relationships between training and important issues in the field like program quality, these described relationships were tempered by their perceptions of the role that personal characteristics play in how teachers relate to training. In addition, the teachers provided their own ideas about how to meet the professional development needs of child care teachers. The findings of this study have many implications for the field in terms of designing and structuring professional development opportunities for child care teachers to better meet their needs within their particular contexts.