They are Learning: Changes through Teacher Professional Development of Inquiry Curriculum Design and Implementation

The main goal of this High Scope Project centered on analyzing how the targeted vocational high-school teachers disenthralled themselves from the traditional settings to think and act anew during the inquiry curriculum design and implementation process. Ten teachers of a vocational high-school in southern Taiwan participated in this process and worked cooperatively with the theme of “Mechatronic” intelligent robot. A professional development program provided by the university research team was developed based on inquiry framework for equipping these teachers in designing the curriculum. Data were collected qualitatively and then analyzed by immersion and editing analytic techniques. After receiving the one-year professional development, a qualitative analysis on the targeted group of teachers’ inquiry curriculum design process. According to the data analyses, three themes regarding this inquiry curriculum development process were extracted about the progress of their conceptions and actions, where each theme had its own developmental focus: curriculum structure, content design, and instructional design. The findings showed that these teachers progressively moved from more teacher-centered thoughts to student-centered actions incorporating inquiry. They also worked together in designing and implementing an inquiry curriculum leading to a success of disenthralling the traditional standard-based and subject-matter trammels, which truly furnished their students’ learning with an interdisciplinary inquiry environment and obtained admirable outcomes. Implications derived from findings and discussions were proposed for the future study of implementing the designed curriculum and promoting teachers’ continuous growth.