Exploring Teachers' Experiences of Translating Professional Development into Classroom Practice in Public Schools of Quetta

Abstract

While professional development (PD) has received widespread endorsement as the key means of improving the teaching process in Pakistan's public school sector, very little information is available on how individual teachers incorporate their training back into their own classrooms after a workshop concludes. The present qualitative study aims to understand how 20 teachers in public schools in Quetta, Balochistan, perceive the Transfer of PD from a training venue to classroom practice. Data collection was carried out through semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 20 teachers operating in a range of diverse environments, including multigrade rural schools. The collected data were subjected to an analysis based on Braun and Clarke's method of reflexive thematic analysis through a process of developing 283 Initial codes, thirty focused codes and six themes with eighteen sub-themes. The analysis reveals that PD-to-practice is not just a simple process of knowledge transfer but rather a process of translating PD. When PD is contextually relevant, appropriately modelled, and offered with regard to teachers' professionalism, it becomes usable. However, it still has to work within a school system characterized by testing and inspections, staff shortages, and a lack of program implementation continuity. As a result, teachers modify, blend, and simplify their PD knowledge, keeping only portable, low-cost techniques and neglecting resource-intensive ones, using their informal relations within the teacher's community and in the community as a whole to compensate for a lack of institutional support. The process of translating PD is kept alive thanks to professional pride and visible improvements in learners, but it also takes a certain emotional toll and remains vulnerable to any drifting away in the absence of institutional anchoring.