The area of teachers’ continuing professional development (CPD) is of growing interest internationally. In Oman, where this issue is given a lot of attention, the Ministry of Education spends a lot of money each year to provide many CPD opportunities for in-service TESOL teachers. However, the effectiveness of these initiatives and the impact they have on teaching and learning is questionable. This has been reflected in a number of research studies which have been conducted locally and which focus on various issues relating to teachers’ CPD but these studies have not addressed the issue critically. Given this, the current study attempts to critically examine the CPD system in the in-service TESOL context in Oman, and to improve the Government’s applied CPD strategy through suggesting a participatory model of CPD in Education. The study is situated in the critical paradigm and followed a multi-methodology transformative design using mixed methods to develop an understanding of the investigated issues from a macro and micro level. The study started with a quantitative phase using an online questionnaire and 331 English teachers and Senior English teachers responded to it. Phase two of the study was comprised of a case study to look in detail at the CPD system in Oman. Three schools were chosen for the case study with 18 participants/teachers. Semi-structured and focus group interviews as well as observations were used to collect data at this stage. The same 18 participants joined the action research (phase three) stage of the study to introduce them to the participatory model of CPD. This phase included three workshops and online discussion sessions, following this one focus group interview and 6 individual semi-structured interviews were conducted to see teachers’ reaction to the intervention; the participatory model.

The area of teachers’ continuing professional development (CPD) is of growing interest internationally. In Oman, where this issue is given a lot of attention, the Ministry of Education spends a lot of money each year to provide many CPD opportunities for in-service TESOL teachers. However, the effec...