The role of VET Colleges in stimulating teachers’ engagement in team learning

Abstract

Secondary vocational education and training, here abbreviated as VET, has a central position in the Dutch education system. To ensure the smooth transition of students to the labour market, VET colleges have implemented competence-based education (CBE) programmes, which are designed to develop relevant professional competencies. VET colleges continuously work on the quality of their CBE programmes by designing and redesigning curricula and implementing new courses and qualification profiles, so that the CBE programmes continue to meet government and labour market demands. This challenging task is to a large extent the responsibility of teacher teams and requires intensive collaboration between teachers. Team learning is defined as teachers' collective engagement in processes that contribute to building and maintaining mutually shared cognition, leading to increased team performance. Team learning is however not always self-evident in teacher teams, because not all formal teacher teams can be characterised as real teams that consist of interdependent individuals who share responsibilities and see themselves and are seen by others as an intact social entity.