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Novice–expert interaction plays an important role in teacher professional development for Chinese vocational education and training (VET). Both Chinese and international research shows that expert-teachers’ support is associated with the improvement of novice-teachers’ teaching. However, insights into how exactly novice teachers learn with the help of expert teachers are lacking. The learning processes of four novice VET teachers were explored in the context of a professional development project. Data were collected by semi-structured interviews with novice teachers and recordings of novice–expert interactions. A learning model was constructed based on the interconnected model of professional growth. The results showed that novice teachers internalised comments from expert teachers by active reflection and practice. Moreover, this study suggests that teachers’ professional development is a complicated long-term process, and that during their development the support from expert teachers is an important external source for novice-teachers. Expert-teachers’ support not only provides feedback and suggestions for alternative teaching methods, but also encourages and maintains novice-teachers’ learning. The results are discussed in relation to the cultural (Chinese) and educational context (VET)

In various types of teacher professional development (TPD) programmes, peer feedback is commonly used as an effective learning activity for teachers, because it can provide valuable learning resources and triggers participants’ reflection and behaviour change. However, previous studies usually focus on the entire TPD programmes, instead of studying teacher peer feedback specifically. This dissertation set out to provide both an integrated framework for the practices of teacher peer feedback and an in-depth understanding of teacher peer feedback in the Chinese vocational education context. In total, five studies are included in the dissertation. The first study is a literature review that aims at modelling the implementation of peer feedback and providing fundamental information for future studies. The next four empirical studies are conducted in the Chinese VET context, and they separately focus on the effect of a peer feedback-based programme, teachers’ learning mechanisms through peer feedback, participants’ evaluations on feedback, and the characteristics of expert feedback.

The studies reported in this thesis were situated in the context of an innovation of Dutch secondary school biology curricula. As in any innovation, the practical knowledge of teachers determine the outcomes through the decisions they make while planning and teaching their lessons. The aim of the studies was to clarify the relation between teacher knowledge and the decisions they make while designing innovative lessons, in order to be able to effectively support teacher professional development. The results show that the design decisions teachers make when planning their lessons are guided by personal rules-of-thumb, which are strongly associated with desired lesson outcomes, such as having fun, having students understand the relevance of biological concepts, or triggering preconceptions. Such rules-of-thumb and desired outcomes can be represented in the form of a so-called goal system. Especially the core goals in such a system predict the way a teacher will interpret and implement an innovation. The studies further show that innovative lesson design can be effectively supported by a combination of model lessons and heuristics. More extensive design models, on the other hand, seem to be less effective, because such models fail to align with teachers’ preferred design routines.

In light of the argument that many teacher professional development (PD) initiatives are not adapted to meet what teachers say they want to learn, we were interested to learn about teachers’ self-directed learning. The studies in this thesis therefore aimed to address what, how and why teachers want to learn and how this relates to their years of teaching experience and their workplace context. For this purpose 31 teachers from two secondary schools were interviewed and a large-scale questionnaire study with 309 teachers was conducted. From the interview studies we could deduct teachers’ professional learning goals, their professional concerns, the relation between them, and teachers’ perceptions of their workplace as a learning environment. The questionnaire study produced data on teachers’ preferences for learning domains and learning activities and their reasons to learn. The results showed that teachers’ learning was mostly aimed at improving their teaching practice, but also at professional learning in a broader sense, and about issues currently encountered at the school. Learning about communication and classroom organization was a topic mentioned by early- and late-career teachers. Mid-career teachers had learning goals aimed at extra-curricular tasks and at new challenges besides the goals related to their teaching practice.