This article describes the challenge of engaging educators in professional development (PD) that is timely and relevant to their work, and effective in stimulating instructional changes to improve student learning. The authors highlight the competing needs and goals for PD that create tensions among the external accountability demands, school…

Research over the last 15 years has reported that for professional development to be effective, in terms of changing teachers' knowledge and/or instructional strategies, it needs to be conducted taking into consideration the following factors: teachers' existing knowledge, experience and attitudes towards the professional development, school…

Research provides strong support for the promise of coaching, or job embedded professional development, particularly on improving teachers' classroom instruction. As part of a comprehensive professional development model, 71 middle school (grades 6-8) science, social studies, and language arts teachers were assigned to an instructional coach to…

This multiple-case study utilised inductive and deductive analyses of interactions of five coach-teacher dyads at two university-based literacy clinics to investigate procedural knowledge -- what coaches say and do -- to guide teachers toward greater instructional expertise. Using theories of situated cognition and positioning and framed within…

In this paper we examine American inservice teachers' instructional methods in reading comprehension following professional development (PD), illustrating the prolonged and significant gap between research and practice in the field of reading comprehension. We explore this gap from a conceptual change perspective, positing that some level of…

This research conducted in primary schools in Northern Australia evaluated the effectiveness of the web-based program ABRACADABRA (ABRA) as a tool to complement early childhood literacy instruction in an Australian and Indigenous context. A further component of this research was to monitor implementation fidelity. The ABRA training was built…