ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the importance of professional development in providing high-quality learning and teaching in schools. It aims to help teachers to prepare for the responsibility they have to support pupils’ learning through adopting, from the start of their career, a planned approach to professional development. The chapter considers professional development beyond teachers’ initial teacher education (ITE) programme and focuses particularly on the transition from ITE into their first post and the early years of their teaching career. Teachers are busy getting to know their classes, planning units of teaching from the school’s schemes of work, preparing lesson plans, teaching, setting and marking homework, undertaking pastoral activities with their tutor group and getting to know the rules, routines and procedures of the school. Teachers professional development planning should involve consideration, not only of their teaching, but also of how they may want to develop; for example, some new teachers take on posts of responsibility very early in their careers.
