New Trade and Industrial Teachers' Perceptions of Formal Learning versus Informal Learning and Teaching Proficiency

Trade and industrial (T&I) teachers enter the classroom as content level experts who may have acquired their content expertise through a combination of formal industry training and informal on-the-job experiences. When they make the career transition from industry to teaching, they must acquire professional teaching competencies. Like the content competencies, these teaching competencies may also involve both formal and informal learning experiences, particularly because the majority of T&I teachers are employed by schools and begin teaching while simultaneously attending alternative teacher preparation programs. For new T&I teachers, formal teacher training in the area of pedagogy before entering the school workplace is the exception rather than the norm. The purpose of this study is two-fold. First, this study aims to add to the body of research in informal learning by focusing on the school workplace rather than the corporate workplace. Secondly, this study builds on an exploratory study which discovered that informal workplace learning takes place with novice T&I teachers. The current study was designed to learn more about which teaching competencies new T&I teachers learn formally versus which they learn informally, and the relationship of the learning method to the teachers' perceived proficiency in core teaching competencies. (Contains 3 tables and 1 figure.)