Section archive - Professional Development

This article describes the process and outcomes of a project aimed at bringing together a set of diverse experts. The experts should generate a set of design recommendations for what should be considered when creating, sustaining, and assessing professional development systems to support the Common Core State Standards in mathematics.

This article reports on the experiences of teachers who have had Continuing Professional Development (CPD) in Europe. The findings of this study reveal, in all three countries, similar discrepancies between the activities in which these teachers engage and the value they place on individual professional development. In most cases, teachers interviewed in this study identified not just a huge variation in their experience of professional development. According to these teachers, their professional development would appear to be neither systematic nor particularly successful. Furthermore, accountability is checked by the sorts of appraisals mentioned by many of these teachers. In many cases these are based on targets and observations, which can be used to apply pressure on individuals to take part in staff development, or indeed be used by teachers as its justification.

In the context of the student-teaching practicum, interactions with cooperating teachers and pupils are believed to comprise the press for professional identity development, though theory-based explanations are often neglected in the literature, and findings are not always consistent. To address this issue, the authors used grounded theory to articulate a model explaining the relations among three constructs important to the process of identity development of student teachers. The findings are organized around a model that highlights the phenomenon of “negotiating who I am as a teacher”.

This study aimed to investigate the impact of a yearlong, online teacher professional development (oTPD) program, Prime Online, on teachers’ mathematics knowledge for teaching (MKT) and to examine the components of a PD program that impacted participants’ MKT. The analysis indicates latent growth modeling and focus group data indicated growth in participants’ content knowledge and initial growth in knowledge of students from pretest to midtest, with a decline at the end of the program. The authors conclude that that Prime Online has potential to provide teachers with ongoing, rigorous, high-quality learning opportunities for impacting their knowledge of mathematics content and pedagogy and of their students.