Self-directed learning for teachers’ professional development

Abstract

The study entitled “Self- Directed Learning for Teachers’ Professional Development” is an attempt of the researcher to find out the awareness of the secondary level English teachers towards the self-directed learning for their professional development. The next objective of the research was to find out which of the strategies under self-directed learning were practiced by the secondary level teachers of English. Similarly, the research has another purpose that is to find out which of the strategies of the self-directed learning is mostly adopted by the secondary level English teachers. The finding of the research is based on the data collected from the sixty secondary level English language teachers teaching in private and public schools in the Kathmandu Valley through questionnaires. The major findings of the research show that most of the teachers were aware of self-directed learning for teachers' professional development. However, only about fifty percent of the teachers practiced different strategies of self-directed learning such as self-monitoring, action research, journal writing, analyzing critical incidents and teaching portfolios. Similarly, it was concluded that most of the teachers took self-monitoring as effective strategy of self-directed learning for teachers' professional development. The thesis consists of four chapters. The first chapter consists of introduction, the general background, theories of professional development of teachers and general introduction of self-directed learning, objectives of the study and the significance of the study. The second chapter deals with the methodology of the research. The chief tool of data collection was a set of questionnaire. This chapter presents the limitations of the research, too. The third chapter deals with the rigorous analysis and interpretation of the collected data. The data were analyzed and interpreted by using simple statistical tool: tables, pie charts and histograms. The fourth chapter presents the findings and recommendations of this research.References and appendices form the concluding part of the thesis.