Transformative Personal Development: Helping Teachers to Thrive on Discontinuous Change

Many professional development opportunities offered to serving teachers address potential performance improvements or responses to change that are essentially incremental in nature. However, some challenges and opportunities particularly those relating to new technologies, involve addressing a more discontinuous change process. The Transformative Personal Development (TPD) model is derived from in-depth evaluations of one such change process, the introduction of digital interactive whiteboards in schools. This provided an opportunity to examine in some detail how teachers who had successfully adopted the technology, had acquired the capability so to do. The paper also refers to work in progress that will assess the applicability of the TPD model to other contexts where the change process also has a significant element of discontinuity, such as the introduction of hand-held devices in the classroom, the design and implementation of new learning spaces and the possible uses of “Second Life” in Higher Education.