Looking to the Future: Components of a Comprehensive Professional Development System for Adult Educators

INTRODUCTION In professional development, practitioners are active participants in determining their own learning needs, and in designing and implementing appropriate learning activities. After being used almost exclusively by professors, doctors, attorneys, and the like in describing continuing education requirements for advance certificates or recertification, professional development is slowly working its way into the education arena. As it happens, this concept is especially suitable for the adult education field, which has long-recognized that practitioners' sense of ownership in their own professional growth is a key element in producing long-term effects on instructional behavior. With the future structure of Federal programs supporting adult education services still uncertain, it is essential that alternative sources of support for professional development be identified so the field can be ready for all contingencies. If such funding sources are to be attracted, a professional development system that has broad-based support, and that can demonstrate its effectiveness, must be developed. By achieving consensus about what an ideal professional development system should "look" like, the adult education field will have both a goal to strive for and a model plan to present to state policy makers responsible for allocating funds and determining program priorities. This paper, therefore, describes three components of such a professional development system (see Figure 1): • An intergovernmental infrastructure supporting professional development. • The availability and delivery of multiple professional development activities and approaches that are based upon the systematically determined needs of both instructors and programs. • Ongoing evaluation activities that are an integral component of professional development services. With expected policy and programmatic changes, it is essential to establish and maintain an intergovernmental infrastructure that can support and institutionalize professional development; and such an infrastructure should involve stakeholders from all levels of government, as well as from other service delivery areas. Furthermore, the objectives of professional development activities, specifically the competencies that instructors should possess, must be specified so that practitioners and decision makers will have a clear understanding of the intended outcomes of those activities.