Tutorship and peer roles in in-service teachers and educators professional development

Abstract

Recent debates on continuing professional development for educators and teachers highlight a “new culture” regarding professionalization, attentive to lifelong learning and the changes which “actions, actors and contexts” are constantly subjected to (Pirard, Barbier, 2012). If, on the one hand, international research shows a faceted and sometimes “fragmented” landscape made up of actions, investments and policies related to educational settings, on the other there is increasing interest in significant and “promising” factors that promote the implementation of “good practices” and in-service training models. In preschools in particular, “the [basic, in-service] professional qualification and the continuing professional development opportunities are often not in line with uniform standards” (Pirard, Barbier 2012, p. 1). This raises questions about
the possibility for improving professional development opportunities in terms of sustainability and updating skills throughout the teachers’ professional lives. In this article, we highlight some in-service professional development models, focusing on the role of tutorship and peer learning, their different meanings within the international context, how peer learning models are practiced and how they could be implemented with a view to promoting lifelong training
opportunities for educators and teachers.