Throughout the entire professional career, every pedagogue is subject to professional development. The course and outcome of their professional development are influenced by many stimulating and hindering factors. Gaining and pondering experience by teaching influence professional growth. On the other hand, challenges, which pedagogues face at work, influence the course of professional development. In order to perform with quality, pedagogues, particularly special education teachers, must work consciously and flexibly, directed to specific needs and capabilities of the pupils, which often includes designing and production of teaching-learning materials.
In our research, we tried to discover, how the interviewed special education teachers went through the process of designing and production of teaching-learning materials and how did the process influence their professional development. We were interested in the influence of some stimulating and hindering factors. Our qualitative research was performed through half-structured interviews with 8 special education teachers, who have produced teaching-learning materials for their work, but differ from each other in duration of years of service and fields of education programmes, where they work.
The results of the research show, that the interviewed special education teachers design teaching-learning materials mainly due to specific needs of the pupils, which demands individualized teaching-learning materials, because of their beneficial effects on the learning process, or because their desired form is often unavailable or deemed too expensive. As their goal, the majority of interviewed special education teachers stated the encouragement of cognitive development. They view the required traits, skills and knowledge, needed to design teaching-learning materials, differently. Nearly all of them can sense the influence of the duration of years of service on the quality of the designed teaching-learning materials. They view their early years of professional career as period, in which their products had the best quality due to the proximity of their university education and ingenious ideas. However, in their early years, they also noticed many drawbacks of their products and of the process of production. Characterizations of teaching-learning materials, made by the interviewed special education teachers, differ widely, also in terms of specificity. The interviewed special education teachers get most ideas for their teaching-learning materials on the internet, followed by co-workers, colleagues and pupils. They take advantage of their pupils' feedbacks on use of teaching-learning materials in order to improve the designed teaching-learning material and learn new ways of using it. Nearly all interviewed special education teachers notice important differences between teaching-learning materials, designed during early and later periods of their professional careers. The differences between early and later periods were also noticed during the designing process, which they attribute to gained experience.
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