Enhancing teacher professional development through professional dialogue: An investigation into a university-school partnership project on enquiry learning

In pursuit of professional development, teachers are encouraged to participate actively in professional dialogue. It has been shown in the literature that professional dialogue allows teachers to converse about the challenges in their workplace, brainstorm solutions, share experiences, and consider alternative teaching approaches. Based on a two-year university-school partnership project on enquiry learning, this study aims at empowering teachers to cultivate students' ability in enquiry learning through professional dialogue. School visit reports, final reports of the project, lesson observation reports, and semi-structured interviews carried out at the end of the project were analyzed. The findings show that the university support team created the fundamental basis for professional dialogue by conveying information regarding enquiry learning, introducing new pedagogies, conducting lesson observations, and reviewing school-based teaching materials. In addition, the support team sustained the dialogue by promoting collaborative work, including analyzing students' assignments and configuring ways to address diverse student needs with the teachers. Given the stimulations through professional dialogue, teachers involved in this study were able to familiarize themselves with enquiry learning and to gain confidence in adopting new pedagogies to facilitate student learning.