There has been increased attention to the importance of teachers and teacher quality in developing and sustaining successful education systems for some time now (Barber and Mourshed in How the world's best performing school systems come out on top, McKinsey & Company, New York, 2007; Darling-Hammond et al. in Empowered educators: how…

The authors of this article are engaged in an ongoing pilot implementation and study of the Los Angeles Unified School District's (LAUSD) Educator Growth and Development Cycle, known as EGDC. LAUSD implemented the EGDC pilot in the 2011-12 school year, focusing on a small subset of volunteering school administrators and teachers. The district's…

Recognizing that student achievement is intrinsically linked to high-quality teaching, Jodi Peine offers an invaluable guide that helps educational leaders strengthen teachers' instructional practice with an individualized and robust professional development process. The author provides administrators and staff developers with step-by-step…

Project EFFECT is a program for implementing educational change that is currently being used by the St. Louis Board of Education. After initial inservice training, the faculty of a school develops a plan for improving the school program. Subsequent phases are outlined for the inclusion of parental advice, implementation of the program, and…

Describes the "Industry Exploration Tour," which provides vocational educators with hands-on experience to learn the needs and wants of industry as they relate to preparing people for work. (Author/JOW)

The results relating to staff development, contained in a Rand Corporation survey on change agents, are summarized in this paper. The researchers discovered that successful staff development program implementation was characterized by three major components: local materials development, online planning, and concrete, ongoing training. Their…

Describes how the California Professional Development Reform Initiative (CPDRI) developed a framework for professional learning. The final CPDRI document, Designs for Learning, is organized around 10 design elements which comprise a system for ongoing professional learning for teachers. Sidebars present: the California Standards for the Teaching…

The purpose of this case study is to describe the challenges one coach faced during the initial implementation of a coaching initiative involving 33 teachers in an urban, high-poverty elementary school. Reading coaches are increasingly expected to play a key role in the professional development efforts to improve reading instruction in order to…

This sourcebook contains a collection of articles on educational topics and is designed to be used as a resource for inservice teacher programs at the secondary level. The first section is devoted to curriculum theory and contains writings on the theoretical underpinnings and relevant background for practical work with students. Inservice is the…

This book helps school administrators redesign the professional development model to better reflect the relevant issues and realities of today's schools. Using the metaphor of architecture, the book outlines innovative ways to create and implement such a transformation and highlights the rationale behind why these changes are so crucial. It also…

This paper discusses how the University of Minnesota's College of Education and Human Development (CEHD) is meeting challenges related to the changing nature of professional development programs, focusing on programs featuring a system of shared decision making on matters of design and governance of program elements. After a commentary about CEHD…

Interest in educational reform is a side benefit of recent school criticism. Unfortunately, where the cause of educational failure is understood to be teachers, educational reform has become teacher reform, which most often means that greater effort will be placed on controlling teacher behavior. (LC)

Staff development programs should be established by using a set of assumptions grounded in research and best practice. The article examines faulty assumptions that guide too many programs, then presents 14 new assumptions that should guide effective practice and successful staff development. (SM)

This document looks at educational reform related to teacher incentives policy through legislative and state education agency perspectives. It includes an overview of national issues pertaining to teacher incentives, a narrative report on the status of teacher incentive policies in the seven state region serviced by the North Central Regional…

The QUILT (Questioning and Understanding to Improve Learning and Thinking) program tested the hypothesis that well-designed staff development would positively affect teachers and students. QUILT increased and sustained teacher use of classroom questioning techniques to produce higher levels of student learning and thinking. QUILT participants…