BỒI DƯỠNG CHUYÊN MÔN CHO GIẢNG VIÊN SƯ PHẠM – NGHIÊN CỨU TRƯỜNG HỢP TẠI TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC SƯ PHẠM THÀNH PHỐ HỒ CHÍ MINH

Abstract

Studies of teacher educators as well as their professional development have been focused since the 1990s. It has been challenging for universities of education over the world to establish effective and appropriate professional development policies and activities for lecturers. In order to explore professional development of lecturers at Ho Chi Minh City University of Education (HCMUE), online questionnaires were sent to all lecturers at the university to ask about their working environment, formal and informal professional education. In this paper, we will mainly discuss the formal professional education including types, barriers and effectiveness of professional development of teacher educators at HCMUE. Descriptive statistics have been considered as the main method for data analysis in this study. Seventy one responses from the lecturers were collected, and the results showed that there were various types of formal professional development of the lecturers at the HCMUE; the lecturers had to face with the common barriers such as: lack of time due to workload, lack of funding and lack of suitable opportunities. The findings also revealed that the most valuable professional development activities of the lecturers normally had been ones that they were free to take them as well as paid tuition by themselves for. Furthermore, the research offers some recommendations for the management boards at universities of education in terms of proposing policies related to teacher educators’ formal professional development.