This article reports findings from a larger study aimed at identifying the perceptions of teachers across four municipalities in Sweden on continuing professional development. It focuses on beginning teachers?, namely those who are in their first five years of their career. This study has been undertaken amidst growing concern that current models…

This article examines the tactical (counter) politics of inclusive and 'norm-critical' approaches in Swedish sex education, focusing on the enactment of this critical agenda in sex education practices and how teachers interpret and negotiate the possibilities and pitfalls of this kind of work. The analysis draws on participant observation in sex…

During the past decade, early childhood teachers have been faced with new needs to develop their content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) for different science subject areas. In order to meet these challenges there is a strong need for professional learning programmes for early childhood teachers that focus on the development of…

Video is increasingly used to support in-service teacher professional development (TPD). Advances in affordability and usability of technology mean that interest is set to develop further. Studies in this area are diverse in terms of scale, methodology and context. This places limitations on undertaking a systematic review; therefore the authors…

This study aimed to explore lower secondary teachers' negotiation of the meaning of laboratory work in a professional development program. A total of 15 in-service teachers participated in the program. In the program, tensions between key ideas concerning traditional way of addressing laboratory work -- with emphasis on subject content and skills…

A review and bibliography of staff development in higher education in several countries is presented. Contents are as follows: Australia by Geoff Foster and Ernest Roe; Britain universities by John Nisbet and Ray McAleese; Britain polytechnics by Harriet Greenaway and Derek Mortimer; Canada by Bruce M. Shore; Denmark by John Conrad; The Federal…

The aim of this study is to increase knowledge about, and describe how, participants consider their own learning process and development during in-service education, and to consider how they attempt to implement their new knowledge in pre-school after completing the training programme. The sample consists of nine newly qualified pre-school…

Describes teacher professional development in Sweden, highlighting organization of the Swedish educational system, the 1977 Higher Education Act, the 1988 teacher education program, inservice teacher education, and current professional development issues (teacher accountability, teacher career structure, teacher work culture, teacher view of…

Local responsibility for school development in Sweden has led to new possibilities for teacher improvement. This paper looks at using the potential of action research generated by the decentralization for the inservice training of teachers. Decentralization offered opportunities for inservice development work through special funding for projects,…

Describes a project that looked for new forms of inservice training that would be more in line with teachers' own ideas about developing their method of teaching. The process emphasizes letting teachers control their own inservice training and letting the problem, not the method, guide teacher development. (SM)

Focusing on 35 Swedish school management areas (Sweden's basic organizational unit), this study examines the relationship between centrally introduced school reforms and the local school management areas' response to those reforms. Recognizes the importance of following local school developments in order to understand the political management of…