When testing dominates decisions about instruction in public schools, complex interactions significant to how students actually learn are often ignored. Teachers who critically interrogate conflicts between institutional policies and practices, such as testing and instruction, position themselves as informed, active, and professionally responsible…

This paper takes up two important issues in the professional development of university teachers: the controversy surrounding reflective inquiry and its purported benefits for professional development and the lack of research on what teachers learn from reflective inquiry and how that affects and/or changes their professional practice.…

In its recent report on the Graduate Teacher Programme (GTP), an employment-based route to Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) in England, the Government's Office for Standards in Education found that, although almost all trainees meet the standards required to qualify, too often they do so at an adequate level, rather than achieving the high levels of…

This article reports on research aimed at investigating teachers' views on their professional learning and its influencing factors. Data were gathered by means of a questionnaire (n = 627) and semi-structured interviews with teachers and head teachers in 18 schools located in northern Portugal. Findings suggest that the more formal contexts of…

This article describes a year-long professional development project that brought together a group of high school English teachers around multicultural literature they would be teaching to their students. The teachers all taught together in a culturally and economically diverse high school context in the USA. One objective of the project was to…

For NSTA, 2001-2002 was a productive year as they worked to fulfill their mission and meet the presidential goals of "Learning Science and the Science of Learning." They enhanced many of their traditional offerings while bringing several new popular programs and initiatives to fruition. As always, they aimed to give teachers a variety of rich…

Many researchers have addressed the professional development of teachers and the importance of the field experience component in the process of teaching effectiveness (Kowalchuk, 1999). A phased development model or paradigm used to address teachers' professional development and stages of effectiveness have been noted. Conceptual models of Field…

Finding examples of exemplary social studies teaching in elementary schools is often challenging due to teachers' responsibilities for teaching many different subjects, their preparation as subject-matter generalists, the sixty-year prevalence of teacher-centered social studies instruction, and the institutional pressure to "cover" the…

This article focused on the training needs of serving teachers for the enhancement of school performances. It sought to achieve this by involving a selected group of teachers and head teachers in the completion of a questionnaire. The questionnaire was reinforced by interviews conducted on a few teachers and head teachers. The study concluded that…

In this article (the edited keynote address to the NAEYC 15th National Institute for Early Childhood Professional Development in June) Bowman defines the four different kinds of standards-for programs, content, learning or performance, and professional development-and explains her beliefs about them. Regarding content and learning standards,…

The Integrative Themes in Physiology (ITIP) project was a National Science Foundation-funded collaboration between the American Physiological Society (APS) and the Human Anatomy and Physiology Society (HAPS). The project goal was to create instructional resources that emphasized active learning in undergraduate anatomy and physiology classrooms.…

This article examines and compares teachers in a national sample of middle level schools to those in a selected group of highly successful middle level schools. The context within which they work, their preparation, their level of implementation of middle level best practices, and their involvement as teacher leaders are discussed. Results show…

This study examined the impact of a time efficient self-study method for providing practicing teachers with job-embedded professional development targeting specific classroom management skills. The training method employed print packets and videotapes that provided models of effective classroom management strategies for instruction-giving, praise,…

This paper proposes different strategies for teaching social studies in an integrated manner using Main Street as a laboratory. The paper consists of two parts. Part One is devoted to a discussion of the empirical study; the second part focuses on strategies for integrating Main Street into the K through 12 setting. Although data are presented…

The article includes part of a research study on experimental work in teaching science (Santos, 2002): a teacher with ten years in the profession received teacher training. It goes on to describe the training programme, which lasted six months and is included in the practice-oriented training paradigm (Kennedy, 1987), along with a reflective…