Professional development is important for all teachers to improve in their teaching, and even personally. In my internship centre, I have found out that the teachers have to cover about 20 hours of professional development courses each year. When I asked my host teacher about the kinds of professional development courses that she has attended, she mentioned that it was mostly boring and it is not effective in improving the way that she teaches. This caused me to be curious about professional development programmes in different preschools. After some discussion with my group, I realised that there are different requirements for professional development in different preschools. Therefore, we have come up with the inquiry questions to find factors that influence teachers in attending courses.

During internship, I realised my center will send teachers to different Professional Development courses and teachers are given 2 hours of P.D time each day to develop themselves professionally. However, when i told this to my course mates, they were surprised as their center do not have this culture. This sparked my interest in wanting to know more about Professional Development in different Preschool in Singapore. After sharing and discussion on what each of our Center did with the group, we brainstorm of the ideas regarding Professional Development. After much discussion, we have decided that we would like to focus on how Professional Development will affect teaching methods in school. However, after interviewing the Center Principal, the group and I have a different concept towards Professional Development. Thus, there are a change in the inquiry question.

The topic of Professional Development was discussed for my internship and I have always been curious about how teachers can further develop themselves during the course of work. I understand that different centres have different methods of sending their teachers for Professional Development. By working together with my group members, we formulated our initial inquiry question to find out more about the chosen centre’s needs. Professional Development can be a broad topic of inquiry by itself so we narrowed down our inquiry to find out about the various factors that affect the educators in the centre when they attend Professional Development courses.

This topic is relatable to us as preschool teachers are always looking for opportunities to improve themselves. We researched more about this topic to understand the courses available for early educators in Singapore. I found out about Professional Development Programme (PDP) and modules for it such as "Developing the Leader in Me". This programme was interesting to me as not all teachers are able to sign up, as they have to be nominated by their company. It made me wonder how often early educators attend Professional Development courses. I understand the manpower needs in our sector from practicums and internship, but did not ponder about the implications it would bring to other aspects of this sector.