Professional development is vital to help teachers gain skills and knowledge to teach about current environmental and societal issues. For climate change education, educators may need information paired with content-specific teaching strategies in order to build confidence to incorporate the topic into their curriculum. We applied educative…

We describe a long-standing weeklong K-12 STEM teacher workshop that shifted to a virtual platform in 2020. We re-engaged former participants during this STEM Institute with goals of (1) modeling ways to connect best practices for STEM education gained in previous workshops to a virtual environment, (2) providing space for teacher reflection on…

Large distances and small budgets had made it challenging for Florida Project Learning Tree (PLT) to conduct in-person workshops with volunteer 4-H leaders to disseminate the PreK-8 guide. An online version of a PLT workshop was developed to overcome these barriers. Formative evaluation data suggested that the program effectively introduced PLT to…

On the weekend of December 13, 2008, 4,000 House Meetings in our nation convened to plan service events. In Jacksonville, Florida, four such House Meetings were held. Of the four, two became official links in Organizing for America, President Obama's grassroots organization. Of the two, one strove to become a learning organization. At the heart of…

Technology leadership is a strong part of principal leadership, which is essential to the successful technology integration in schools. However, research is limited in the area of principals' technology leadership and their professional development needs. Therefore, the purpose of this descriptive study is to examine Miami-Dade County elementary…

This paper describes a study aimed to identify most common impediments related to the introduction of an open-source mathematical software package GeoGebra. We report on the analysis of data collected during a three-week professional development programme organised for middle and high school teachers in Florida. The study identified challenges…

This paper details the motivation, background, and analysis for studying the effect that an Increasing Achievement on Algebra Assessment (IAAA) workshop for a group of Florida high school teachers had on student performance in state-wide testing. The main focus of the workshop was to provide participating teachers with both instruction and…

This article describes an effort to create a teacher learning community in which university and local school teachers worked together to improve the teaching of writing at elementary and secondary levels. I describe how a university's National Writing Project (NWP) engaged in developing a cadre of selected teachers to share understandings about…

This issue of the SubJournal highlights three different substitute teacher programs and how they succeeded in enhancing their programs. These articles provide guidelines to how two school districts and one regional education service center met these challenges. A list of references follows each article. Articles in this issue include: (1) St.…

Given the increasing pressures of high-stakes accountability associated with state mandates and No Child Left Behind (U.S. Department of Education, 2002), linking teacher preparation within professional development schools to the goal of school improvement has become essential. This article illustrates the University of Florida's efforts to…

Continuing professional development is an important activity for most teachers in the K-12 system, and it is even required of some teachers in order to maintain certification (Maldonado, 2002). Professional development programs are predicated on the assumption that the teachers who receive the training will in turn positively affect student…

Outcomes of a staff development program based on the whole language philosophy that was implemented in a rural Florida elementary school are presented in this practicum report. Two surveys of 29 and 35 faculty, respectively, indicated needs for faculty cohesiveness, a unified purpose, and an update of language arts teaching skills. A staff…

A survey of 104 Florida public library administrators resulted in a 70% response rate to a questionnaire investigating the value of a variety of types of activities associated with professional development. Presented as a poster session, this report indicates that the following professional and continuing education activities were considered the…

Outcomes of a teacher-teaming program that was implemented among seventh-grade teachers at a Florida middle school are described in this practicum report. Training sessions on effective teaming practices were initiated to address the lack of effective teaming practices among the seventh-grade teachers. Eight seventh-grade teachers participated in…

The development and implementation of a program to facilitate communication and improve working relationships between elementary school staff members is described. Methodology involved observation of inservice faculty training sessions and a participant survey. The program was based on three components: a series of faculty inservice workshops,…