From teacher professional development to teacher personal-professional growth: the case of expert STEM teachers

Following Self-Determination Theory, scholars theorize that professional well-being is essential for teachers’ satisfaction and personal-professional growth. However, teacher professional development programs (TPDPs) primarily focus on promoting student achievement and only partially and indirectly address teachers’ professional well-being. The lack of teachers’ voices in this discrepancy is noticeable. This study aimed at confronting teachers’ perceptions about their professional well-being needs with how actual practices in effective TPDPs address these needs. Well-being components (competence, relatedness, autonomy, and aspirations) were thematically identified within 20 interviews with expert STEM teachers. The findings show that teachers attribute importance to their professional well-being in all components. In particular, aspirations for personal-professional growth, pointed out by teachers as the most important, were totally ignored by effective TPDPs. The findings emphasize the need to establish well-being as an additional characteristic of effective TPDPs. This additional characteristic may have practical and theoretical implications for designing and assessing TPDPs’ effectiveness.