Martin Krabbe Sillasen

What’s in it for me?: – How does a professional development programme meet science teachers’ career expectations?

This chapter presents a case study of the Danish professional development programme (PDP) QUEST that examined how teacher PDPs are optimised to target the individual teachers’ needs for professional development. The relation between teachers’ foreground and the aims of QUEST was investigated in this Danish case, where a balance between top-down and bottom-up processes sought to integrate local and individual intentions of the participating teachers in the overall programme. Thus QUEST was designed to address all teachers’ professional development needs as much as possible to maximise their learning outcomes. But does QUEST actually achieve this? That depends on how you assess outcome! Using theatre play as a metaphor for organising the chapter, we present the text in three acts: A standard systemic assessment approach provides a positive answer concerning teachers’ learning outcomes (act 1). However, using narrative inquiry as an assessment tool provides a different picture of the participating teachers’ individual learning outcomes (act 2). We combine data regarding the teachers’ participation in collaborative elements in the PDP and the teachers’ individual reflections on these elements related to their individual career foregrounds (act 3). Narrative inquiry with the participating teachers revealed (at least) four different career foregrounds: (1) increasingly convergent foreground; (2) mutually enriching but parallel individual and systemic foreground; (3) open-ended foreground, which keeps different career options open; and finally (4) challenged foreground that limits options for fulfilling the objectives of the PDP and makes the participant want to change teaching tasks.