This paper describes outcomes of a series of teacher professional development grants that put teachers in the driver's seat of their own professional learning. Teachers used grant funds to build a team, select a focus for their teams' professional growth, and take actions that they felt would be most effective in helping them improve their…

The Professional Development Leadership Academy supports states in transforming systems of professional development. This paper investigates accountability considerations that are necessary to determine the impact and results of professional development from a state systems perspective. The five areas of focus that comprise the Academy knowledge…

The problems that pervade professional schools are not dissimilar to those of undergraduate education. Graduates emerge from both with questionable levels of preparation; also, similar problems exist in professional development and curriculur improvement. However, three major differences are found between these two levels of education with respect…

This paper describes Virginia Polytechnic and State University's efforts to effectively adopt emerging technologies on a general basis. The various systems that come into play in this context are discussed, including the macro-system (the university itself) and sub-systems (departments and programs). Introduction of a compensating sub-system,…

This paper presents an alternative, nonlinear view of technology adoption among teachers participating in The WEB Project, a Technology Innovation Challenge Grant. It is based on a number of new theories, including activity and systems theory, and upon previous evaluations of large scale educational technology programs by RMC Research Corporation,…

A detailed list of questions for writing one's autobiography as a college teacher are presented, and suggestions for synthesizing the fragments of one's working life with several devices for self-improvement are offered. The list of questions was derived from some general systems research models of career development and the learning relationship.…

As the accountability movement has brought forth renewed interest in the quality of teaching and new demands for faculty evaluation, it could be expected that the relationship between the two would have created the foundation for a rigorous program of faculty evaluation. Instead, educators continued a fruitless search for qualities and behaviors…

Two kinds of efforts at instructional improvement in higher education, student evaluation of teachers and faculty development programs on campuses, fall short of reaching their theoretical goals. Student evaluations are neither reliable nor valid measures of a teacher's instructional effectiveness. Some of the items included in such questionnaires…

This paper focuses on the Purdue University (Indiana) Continuing Engineering Education (CEE) experience in producing distance education over the past 20 years. Discussion includes the role of several educational theories in the formalization of distributed learning; the importance of effective communication in delivery of distance education;…

This paper discusses a reform project (The Professional Development System: Collaboration for Quality Education) collaboratively developed by the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and the Brunswick and Duplin County (North Carolina) public school systems. The project takes a systems approach to changing the way teachers are educated and…

Continuous quality improvement (CQI) models, which were first applied in business, are critical to making new technology-based learning paradigms and flexible learning environments a reality. The following are among the factors that have facilitated CQI's application in education: increased operating costs; increased competition from private…