Section archive - Professional Development

In this article, the authors examine specific learning outcomes—notably, increases in teachers’ knowledge, changes in their practice, and the impact on student achievement—as a result of teachers’ participation in a situative-based, adaptive professional development (PD) program. The findings suggest that participation in the Problem-Solving Cycle (PSC) model of PD can support at least modest improvements in teachers’ knowledge and classroom instruction within a relatively short time frame. This study of the PSC highlights one way to examine the effectiveness of adaptive PD using longitudinal data and quantitative analyses. Based on those analyses, the PSC does appear to have the potential to substantially affect teachers’ knowledge and instruction and, perhaps, their students’ achievement.

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”.