Search results

It is vital in today’s society that teachers are proactively involved in educational change. Given that proactive motivation is a critical driver of proactivity, this study aims to investigate how teachers’ formal and informal workplace-learning experiences were connected with their proactive motivations to implement educational change.

The authors used a qualitative case study approach to describe the relationships between teachers’ formal and informal learning activities and their different proactive motivations. The authors collected data from 17 teachers via individual interviews and open-ended questionnaire and performed analyses using a continuous inductive and deductive coding process.

The authors found that informal teacher learning can trigger three types of proactive motivation, whereas formal teacher learning is mainly connected with the can do and energised to motivations. The authors also found that formal and informal learning complement and compete with each other in shaping the can do motivation. Moreover, the authors found that informal learning played the dominant role in the reason to motivation, whereas informal and formal learning were separately connected to the energised to motivation.

These findings indicate that greater attention must be paid to teachers’ informal workplace-learning experiences. Specifically, teachers’ informal learning experiences should be actively integrated into their formal workplace training to enhance their proactive motivation to educational change. Moreover, teachers’ learning preferences and teaching experience should be considered in the design of teacher-training programmes.

Based on the proactive motivation model of Parker et al. (2010), the authors have uncovered the mechanisms of workplace learning that drive teacher proactivity. The authors have examined the relationship between teachers’ formal and informal workplace-learning and proactive teaching. The findings will assist policymakers and administrators to identify effective means of motivating teachers to engage in workplace learning.

Most of the current literature investigates workplace-based formal and informal learning separately; thus, the relationship between these two types of learning remains unclear. This study aims to fill this research gap, drawing on self-determination theory to bridge teachers’ formal and informal learning and uncover the relationship between the two.

The participants of the study are 1,886 primary and secondary in-service teachers in China. Structural equation modeling and bootstrapping are used to test the proposed model.

The study reveals complicated influencing mechanisms of formal learning on different types of informal learning among in-service teachers. Teachers’ basic psychological needs, satisfaction and challenge-seeking behavior are found to play crucial mediating roles in this process.

First, this study suggests that different configurations of intervention strategies should be formulated depending on the foci for improving teachers’ learning. Second, this study indicates that only highlighting the importance of reflection, which is the approach currently used, is not sufficient to improve teachers’ daily reflective practice. Third, there is an urgent need to design training programs to improve teachers’ abilities to purposefully expand their job boundaries, which could not only benefit teachers’ performance but also contribute to school improvement. For policymakers and school principals, we suggest that more attention be given to the satisfaction of teachers’ basic needs.

This study contributes to the literature on workplace learning by connecting formal and informal learning and elucidating how teachers’ reported formal learning influences their informal learning activities via varied paths. The findings have implications for continuous professional development policy and training programs in the workplace.