Teachers' experiences throughout professional training with the help of facilitators

Abstract

The importance of facilitator support is given particular emphasis within the modern conceptions of professional teacher training. Starting with the premise that perceiving teachers' perspective is of vital importance for understanding this process, the goal of our research was to examine the experiences of teachers throughout continual professional training for the application of innovative teaching methods with the help of facilitators. By applying qualitative thematic analysis, we have examined audio recording transcripts created during 18 individual conversations that the facilitators conducted with three teachers from a primary school in Belgrade. The results of the research show that the experiences of teachers in this process are overall positive and that it prompted them to reconsider existing practices and implicit pedagogical beliefs, and introduced positive developments in their work. The individual work of facilitators with teachers founded on trust demonstrates potential when it comes to encouragement and maintaining teachers' motivation for implementing innovations and undergoing further professional training. We have highlighted the key implications of the obtained findings and provided guidelines for further research in the area.