Capturing the dynamics of VET teachers' workplace learning with diaries

To understand more about the emergence of learning experiences from engagement in professional (reflective) learning in the workplace, the aims of this article are to conceptualize professional learning as an ongoing process during a teacher's career, which is rooted in a teacher's choices for action, and to provide an example of how to measure that process situatedly, and how to analyse its temporal pattern. The starting point is the dynamic analysis technique Recurrence Quantification Analysis (RQA). We conducted a diary study, in which 18 VET teachers filled in daily and monthly logs over a period of 5 months. On the basis of these measurements, time-series of occasions of reflection-intensity and sumscores of learning experiences were generated, and these data were analysed with categorical RQA and correlations. The results indicate that teachers can further their development if they intend to do so, and that they require a certain amount of sensitization to their respective environments in order to pick up the information they need for their learning processes to progress. A basic requirement to formulate and sustain a certain intention, and also to spot challenging details in one's environment, would seem to make experiences explicit by being motivated to free some time for reflection. The study shows the utility of measuring densely, and it provides an example of how novel techniques can be adopted to tap into professional learning as a dynamic and situated process.