The expectations and evaluations of mathematics teachers about professional development programmes

This paper aims to identify considerations and expectations of secondary and high school mathematics teachers about professional development programmes. This study adopts descriptive method. 102 high school and 112 secondary school, working within the curriculum of the National Ministry Education were applied for this research. In order to determine the expectations and evaluations of teachers about professional development programmes, they were applied an open-ended questionnaire and the results were evaluated via content analysis. According to the results, very few of professional development programmes were prepared upon teachers' expectations which shows that not much of the content of professional development programmes is based on the needs of the teachers. While the percentage of evaluations of secondary school teachers are(%42 efficient, %38 inefficient), the evaluation of high school teachers are (%51,9 efficient, %19,3 inefficient). Teachers thinking the programmes as efficient put positive contribution to the improvement of their job (%22,7) and being able to follow the developments (%17,1) are among their reasons. The reasons of inefficiency on the other hand are different between the grades. While secondary school teachers point the issue of theoretical teaching and insufficient importance given to the professional development programmes (%26,3), high school teachers harp on the issue of the trainmen's not being competent enough. It's also worth to give attention that participation to the programmes by both secondary and high school teachers is quite inadequate. According to the mathematics teachers to get efficiency, the content should be prepared according to their considerations, programmes should be functional in terms of time, content and appliance, it should let the participants attend actively and trainmen should be competent. As a result, we believe that taking into consideration the research results will definitely contribute to preparation and applying process of the professional development programmes for mathematics teachers.