This study focused on preservice secondary teacher's use of the Understanding by Design (UbD), framework to create effective, engaging lessons for their future secondary level students. The subjects consisted of 69 secondary pre-service secondary education majors at a Texas University who were enrolled in a required course for admission into the…

Educators by definition are now required to utilize a variety of student data to shape the decisions they make and design the lessons they teach. As accountability standards become more stringent and as teachers face increasingly diverse student populations within their classrooms, they often struggle to adequately meet the needs of all learners.…

The purpose of this replication study was to examine the impact of the Teacher Study Group (TSG) professional development in vocabulary on first-grade teachers' knowledge of vocabulary instruction and observed teaching practice, and on students' vocabulary knowledge. Sixty-two schools from 16 districts in four states were randomly assigned to…

Profile analyses were used to investigate differences in the self-efficacy growth of teachers with more and less mathematics background as the teachers participated in professional development across two summers. Professional development activities were associated with increases in teachers' self-efficacy; however, without considering mathematics…

This article reports on two studies using "Language Muse[superscript SM]" (LM), a web-based, teacher professional development (TPD) application designed to enhance teachers' linguistic awareness and to support teachers in the development of language-based instructional scaffolding for English language learners (ELL). In Study 1,…

For the past five years, teachers from four Houston-area school districts have joined together in a professional learning community (PLC) to improve their science teaching. Through the University of Houston-Clear Lake (UHCL) Regional Collaborative for Excellence in Science and Mathematics Teaching, the teachers strengthen content knowledge and…

One hundred forty-nine teacher candidates participated in a yearlong study to investigate what a well-prepared early childhood teacher candidate knows about teaching and learning. This study provides findings on assessments used to determine candidates' knowledge of pedagogy at program entry and exit. The general question this study explored was:…