Chapter 6: STEAM Educators Professional Development

If educators wish to continuously excel in the art and science of teaching, they need to undergo professional development to constantly upgrade their professional knowledge, skills, competence and effectiveness. As defined, professional development refers to many types of educational experiences or specialized activity designed for educators to improve and update knowledge, skills, and competence related to the practice of teaching. In this component of the entire STEAM program, sampled Philippine Higher STEAM educators experienced being capacitated in a variety of ways. Training orientation and workshop brought them concomitant, practical experiences of working with other STEAM educators to craft their Lesson Exemplars in their respective disciplines anchored on the details of the Philippine STEAM Education Model. This activity simulates knowledge generation, where each STEAM educator crafted a specialized flow of enacting a particular STEAM discipline. Knowledge sharing began in the National Forum on STEAM education, where all STEAM educators (core researchers and participants) shared their generated knowledge on these topics: Philippine STEAM education models, Proficiency Indicators and scoring system, designing lesson exemplars, Philippine STEAM educators proficiency, and documentations of the conduct of lesson exemplars.