RESEARCH PAPER
Sustainable professional development for STEM teachers in Saudi Arabia
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1
Faculty of Education, King Saud University, Riyadh, SAUDI ARABIA
2
Faculty of Education, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, AUSTRALIA
Publication date: 2022-11-02
EURASIA J. Math., Sci Tech. Ed 2022;18(12):em2189
KEYWORDS
ABSTRACT
This paper responds to the call for the need to develop professional development practices for
leaders, supervisors, teachers, and student guidance within the framework of international
standards, particularly in line with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s (KSA) vision 2030 (KSA, 2019).
The current study aims to identify the obstacles and challenges for implementing sustainable
professional development methods for teachers in KSA, who had participated in a ten-month
Australian cross-national STEM professional development program. In addition, the teachers also
participated in an immersion in Australian schools that lasted for 11 months. This paper reports
on a sample of 22 male and female teachers coming from primary and secondary KSA schooling
contexts. The participating teachers in the study were those who had participated in the Australian
STEM immersion professional learning program in 2019-2020. Drawing from previous studies
(Ermeling & Yarbo, 2016; Greene, 2015; Kayi-Aydar & Goering, 2019; Piqueras & Achiam, 2019),
we have proposed a framework involving four methods for sustainable professional development
for STEM teachers: professional learning communities, communities of practice, action research,
and the outside expert. A mixed-methods research design was applied including three methods:
individual interviews, open-ended questions to identify the proposed plan of STEM teachers’
implementation of the sustainable professional development methods. Also, a questionnaire to
identify obstacles to the implementation of sustainable professional development methods from
the viewpoint of STEM teachers was also employed. The results showed that the most prominent
obstacles to the implementation of the sustainable professional development methods by STEM
teachers in the Saudi educational system where there is no coordination in the school meetings
schedule for the members of the professional learning STEM education community, there is no
clear plan for communities of practice of STEM education, teachers’ overload teaching duties, lack
of coordination between schools to benefit from STEM experts. Implications of our study reside
in developing teachers’ ongoing STEM professional development opportunities through
execution of a sustainable model of collaborative teacher communities in KSA. Suggestions for
curriculum stakeholders and administrator’s coordination and supporting teachers’ ongoing
participation and implementation of professional development programs are discussed.
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