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The study aims to examine the issues relating to workplace learning at the upper secondary school level. This study is based on the two questions. How should the professional/peer-learning community or PLC be developed and deployed to help strengthen in-service teacher training? The second question is what are the success factors which contribute to the continuity of the PLC within the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) context?

This study, considered as a case study, is based on BMA’s in-service teaching training program which took place from August 2014 until September 2016. Observations and interviews represent the key tasks undertaken for this study. Observation focuses on the PLC adaptation for a teacher network and key activities relating to actual teaching and learning. Interviews with teachers and students help evaluate the suitability of the PLC’s use as a component of in-service teacher training for workplace learning. The application proposal to international funding helps outline how the data from the observation and interviews should be grouped and analyzed.

The PLC’s implementation involves a network of teachers (those teachers who traveled to Finland for pedagogical training), the selection of a common theme (i.e. a polluted waterway reflecting environmental phenomena) allowing various different subject teachers to work together and actual teaching and learning across schools with students through project work. The results of the interviews demonstrate that a PLC is a potential alternative for BMA’s in-service teacher training. The PLC allows teachers to share their experience and knowledge while simultaneously strengthening students’ life skills through the PLC’s applications.

The case study demonstrates the process through which the PLC is successfully deployed. The BMA applied the PLC alongside and in collaboration with the actual student teaching and learning, instead of separating them because the PLC was regarded as training. PLC is dependent on: the willingness of the teachers to work together, their ability to come up with a common topic that they can link their knowledge, enable several subject teachers to work together, an effective planning process to gradually involve the students in problem-based learning and public recognition to demonstrate their success.

The PLC appears to benefit workplace (or school) learning and development for both teachers and students. Additionally, the use of the PLC in this case study points to an alternative for future in-service teacher training at BMA schools. When compared with the existing practice of sitting in a room and listening to an external expert without much interaction, participating teachers feel that the PLC helps them become more motivated, through experience and knowledge sharing.

The contribution to research is the knowledge on the PLC’s implementation for in-service teaching training (as part of workplace learning). Moreover, the PLC should be applied simultaneously with actual teaching and learning through project work. Three notable lessons learned from comparing the effectiveness of the PLC use between BMA and Finnish schools point to the importance of pre- and in-service teacher training with the focus on continuous dialogue and open communication, familiarity with integrated lesson plan and teacher autonomy.

Teacher education pedagogies face the complex challenge of attending to standards of professionalism while being sensitive to the local changing needs of professional learning. Encounters between these two aspects of professional work are manifested, for example, through the relations between innovative, “against the grain” pedagogies and standardized criteria and accountability to policy issues and measurement. This chapter characterizes various “contact zones” across participants, contexts and contents, called for by the four categories of pedagogies (working with multimodalities, partnerships and community learning, teacher assessment, and vehicles for dissemination) that comprise this volume of International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies (Part C). The four categories of pedagogies join five earlier categories of pedagogies (teacher leadership, diversity, family, social justice, and technology), which are found in International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies (Part B). These go in with yet another five categories of pedagogies (teacher selection, reflection, narrative knowing, teacher identity and mediation and mentoring), which are found in International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies (Part A).

With critical reviews of previous studies in workplace learning, this paper aims to investigate workplace learning for pre-service teachers’ practice and quality teaching and learning in technical vocational education and training: key to professional development.

The study adopted multistage sampling technique to select sample for the study. Empirical analysis was adopted to analyse the data collected from technical vocational education and training pre-service teachers.

The result of the study revealed that the constructs of social learning theory had a stronger linkage with the constructive teaching than traditional management.

This study emphasizes the need to adequately train pre-service teachers on instructional delivery processes, building strong relationship with learners and build the ability to organize and execute necessary actions required to successfully carry out a specific educational task in a particular context.