Teachers working in early care and education programs are engaging in professional development activities, many times without a foundation in child development or early childhood education. It is difficult for teachers to apply what is presented in professional development experiences to their classroom. The use of children's projects, the topic…

In October 2005, the Technology for All Americans Project (TfAAP) came to an end, having far exceeded its goals. TfAAP delivered a philosophical basis of the need for technological literacy (ITEA, 1996); content, student assessment, professional development, and program standards for technological literacy (ITEA, 2000/2002; 2003), and practical…

Rapid advances in information technology are reshaping the learning styles of many students in higher education. Many faculty will find such a shift in instruction difficult, but through professional development they can accommodate neomillennial learning styles to continue teaching effectively as the nature of students evolves. Beyond this…

In recent years professional developers have reached a consensus about what constitutes effective professional development, referred to in the literature as "learner-centered professional development." InterMath is a professional development project that was developed to address the recommendations for high quality professional…

The question what contribution action research can make to the professional development of teachers is not easy to answer. It depends firstly on the context in which action research takes shape and secondly on the conceptual principles on which educators and teachers base their view of what good action research is. In order to be able to use…

Maxima was an intervention project that focused on assisting teachers to establish more inquiry-based, gender-inclusive, and culturally relevant learning environments. The authors grounded the project by using sociotransformative constructivism as a theoretical framework to steer the implementation of three guiding concepts for professional…

This study assessed the influence of a 3-year professional development program on elementary teachers' views of nature of science (NOS), instructional practice to promote students' appropriate NOS views, and the influence of participants' instruction on elementary student NOS views. Using the VNOS-B and associated interviews the researchers…

This article investigates three teachers' conceptions and use of inquiry-based instructional strategies throughout a professional development program. The professional development program consisted of a 2-week summer inquiry institute and research experience in university scientists' laboratories, as well as three academic year workshops. Insights…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present a framework for resilience education that can be used by teachers in schools. The paper seeks to identify a common language for exploring the concept of resilience. Design/methodology/approach: The paper presents an overview of the construct of resilience as it appears in the literature. It provides…

Background: Cole and Knowles (2000) suggest that making sense of experiences and understanding personal-professional connections are the essence of professional development. These researchers posit that through personal life-history exploration, teachers make known implicit theories, values, and beliefs that underpin teaching and being a teacher.…

This study examined the assessment literacy of primary/junior teacher candidates in all four years of their concurrent program. Candidates from each year of the program completed a survey pertaining to self-described level of assessment literacy, main purposes of assessment, utilization of different assessment methods, need for further training,…

Science testing, as mandated by the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, has refocused attention on the quality of the K-8 science curriculum and instruction in many districts around the country. It has become clear that to improve quality, and meet NCLB requirements, elementary and middle schools must develop different teaching approaches and…

Teaching has moved gradually from being seen as an art or craft to an evidence-based techno-rational profession. However, within Steiner-Waldorf schools, teachers are largely autonomous and seen, like their pupils, as always "coming into being", through the development of an objective imaginative faculty. This perspective is derived from Steiner's…

The research objectives were to identify the middle level mathematics teachers' conceptions of mathematics teaching and learning and ascertain changes in their conceptions and instructional behavior at the end of a three-year professional development (PD) project. These changes were studied through the qualitative analysis of their reflective…

This paper explores how and to what extent digital multimodal text production can play a role in project work. The focus is upon describing and understanding how teachers and learners view multimodal text production as part of a learning process. Group-based project work has been used extensively in Norwegian schools since the 1970s. One criticism…