Continuing Professional Development Strategies: A Model for the EFL Teachers’ Success

Document Type : research article

Authors

1 Department of English, Islamic Azad University, Torbat-e-Heydarieh Branch, Iran

2 Department of English, Islamic Azad University, Torbat-e-Heydarieh Branch, Iran.

3 Department of English, Islamic Azad University, Mashhad Branch, Iran

Abstract

Throughout the past decade, evaluating teachers’ success has become a crucial issue due to the increased motivation on teacher accountability. Thus, the purpose of the present study is to determine the significance of Continuing Professional Development programs and EFL teachers’ success in the Iranian institutional context based on students’ perspectives. For this purpose, a CPD model was suggested and verified using PLS-SEM. A total number of 316 English-major institutional teachers in Iran completed the CPD questionnaire. Besides, about 30 percent of their students, 828 students, are asked to fill in teachers’ success questionnaire, which intended to check students’ opinions on how successful they measured their teachers in teaching. The proposed PLS-SEM model effectively fitted the data using SmartPLS statistical software. Results specified that practice of CPD strategies had a strong direct predicting power on EFL teachers’ success. The results, specifically, highlight the importance of not only CPD strategies concerning “updating” activities and “reflecting” ones, but also high loadings of other strategies such as those relating to “decision making” and “collaborating”.

Keywords


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