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Pedagogical development programmes in Higher education: a systematic literature review.

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October 2, 2023

Every year, multiple higher education teachers are participating in courses to professionalise as teachers. In the Netherlands, for example in the University Teaching Qualification (also known as Basis Kwalificatie Onderwijs).

In the project of ELS PhD-candidate Marloes Vreekamp, it is aimed to gain more insight into the relationship between characteristics of the pedagogical development programmes (PDP) and the teacher development outcomes. During summer, the first article of this project was published online, titled “A systematic review to explore how characteristics of pedagogical development programmes in higher education are related to teacher development outcomes”.

Worldwide, higher education teachers are stimulated to professionalise themselves as a teacher. There is some consensus on some characteristics of high quality pedagogical development activities that stimulate teacher development (Desimone, 2009). However, it is not clear how these specific characteristics are stimulating specific teacher development outcomes. In this systematic review, 31 articles were analysed in order to gain more insight about what is already known about the relationship between PDP characteristics and teacher development outcomes. The Interconnected Model of Professional Growth (IMPG) ( Clarke & Hollingsworth, 2002) and curriculum spiderweb (Van den Akker, 2003) were used to analyse the studies, (see enriched IMPG). Results indicated that studies on PDPs’ effectiveness appeared to vary widely in terms of how PDPs were designed, as well as how and what effects were measured. Although more research is needed, this review resulted in an overview of indicated relationship between characteristics of PDPs and teacher development outcomes. This can help academic developers to design more evidence-informed PDP’s with a ‘theory of change’ (i.e. assumed relationship between PDP characteristics and the change in teacher knowledge and/or instruction) in mind (Van Veen et al., 2012). Moreover, this study showed that the enriched IMPG model was very useful to identify specific PDP characteristics and relationships with domains of teacher development. Please, see the full article for more details.

More information:
Marloes Vreekamp,Judith T. M.Gulikers, Piety R.Runhaar,& Perry J. Den Brok(2023) A systematic review to explore how characteristics of pedagogical development programmes in higher education are related to teacher development outcomes. International Journal for Academic Development, DOI:10.1080/1360144X.2023.2233471