Teaching outdoor and adventure activities: an investigation of a primary school physical education professional development p

Features of professional development.
There is some agreement that no single 
approach to professional development will be effective for all teachers all of the time, 
instead a variety of learning experiences is required (Fishman, Marx, Best & Tal, 
2003a). Lifelong learning or the continuing professional development of teachers is 
important. Much of current provision falls short of what is required, or cannot cope 
with the scale and complexity of the task (Sugrue, 2002). Professional development 
literature, in the main, focusses on the effective features of professional development 
and these provide an evidence base in the current study for considering what is required 
when designing a professional development programme so that it might ensure success.
Although physical education is orientated to the development of the body and mind, it 
approaches learning through the body, through movement, exercise, play, sport and 
dance, unlike academic subjects which deal mainly with the development of the mind.
Together with the differences in the social organisation of the classroom, which result 
from the ecology of gyms, open fields or school yards, as opposed to regular 
classrooms, create very different professional development needs for the teacher of 
physical education. As context and teaching methodologies are very specific for the 
teaching of physical education, compared to other subjects such as Mathematics or 
English, this makes the job of facilitating effective professional development a 
challenge for all providers. All this coupled with the fact that this is only one of the 
subjects that the primary generalist teacher must contend with, classifies these teachers 
as having very special and specific professional development needs.
Both Wayne and colleagues (2008) and Desimone (2009) state that there are 
core features of effective professional development which should be included in 
professional development programmes and tested to allow us understand their 

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importance. Desimone (2009) identifies content focus (activities that focus on content 
have been proven to increase teacher knowledge), active learning (observing experts or 
being observed, feedback and discussion), coherence (learning is consistent with 
teachers’ beliefs and school policy), duration (sufficient time spent on activity and the 
activity spread over time is required), and collective participation (teachers from the 
same class grouping, school or area to allow for interaction and discourse) as the five 
critical features of professional development (p. 184). The following section explores 
these features.