The Role of Experiential Learning in Teachers’ Professional Development for Enhanced Classroom Practices

Abstract

The main objective of this article was to explore how experiential learning theory can be adopted into teachers' professional development, as an effective approach to engaging teachers in classroom-enhanced activities. The inclusion or design of various experiential learning activities will promote pedagogical content knowledge and teaching skills that can enhance classroom practices. The theoretical framework of experiential learning enables effective classroom instructional delivery for all learning experiences in different contexts. The study purposefully selected 10 teachers, teaching Economics, from 10 high schools in Lagos, Nigeria. These teachers were observed in different classroom settings/teaching of selected topics from Economics, before and after a 3-day experiential learning-based professional development workshop. The teachers were further engaged in a focus group interview after the final observation. Findings revealed that experiential learning theory is critical to teacher professional development, as it enables teachers to learn better when engaged in experientially designed professional development, which can impact their classroom teaching thereafter. The study, therefore, encourages teacher educators or government bodies responsible for content design for teachers' professional development to integrate or structure the contents of teachers' professional development with experiential learning initiatives, to improve teachers' classroom pedagogies and teaching competencies for quality education.