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 wellbeing as an additional characteristic of effective TPDPs. This additional characteristic may have practical and theoretical implications for designing and assessing TPDPs' effectiveness.