Facilitating professional development in teacher learning groups: development and validation of the ‘value creation questionnaire’

Abstract

Increasingly, teacher learning groups (TLGs) are considered valuable for teachers’ professional development. In TLGs, (student) teachers and teacher educators learn collectively through social interactions regarding jointly experienced practice issues. However, collective learning in TLGs may not emerge spontaneously and requires facilitation to achieve desired collective learning outcomes. An important way to facilitate collective learning is creating awareness of the value this may bring. Therefore, the ‘Value Creation Questionnaire’ (VC-Q) is developed in the present study. It can map the value creation and initiate group discussions of TLGs. This article describes the validation of the questionnaire (n = 290) using successive confirmatory factor analyses, resulting in an instrument with good psychometric properties. The final version of the questionnaire contains 19 items, measuring five factors that match the original values of the Value Creation Framework: Immediate Value, Potential Value, Applied Value, Realised Value, and Reframed Value. The VC-Q is suitable for quantitative research to gain more insight into the conditional and outcome variables of social learning. Future research can broaden the individual perspective of the VC-Q and incorporate theoretical dimensions regarding the collective side of value creation.