Providing continuous, personalized, high-quality staff development programs fosters the delivery of effective, comprehensive services to Head Start children and families. This article suggests directors follow the following staff development principles: draft a philosophy; define staff development; assess staff development needs; focus on the…

Describes the ESP Model for Learning program, a supervisor leadership program that ties training to the performance goals of the work unit. The ESP program's most critical component, the Supervisory Competency Assessment Process, is detailed. Concluding comments discuss what is being learned from the program's results, and the work-related…

To increase collegiality at a rural upstate New York high school, the principal scheduled informal sessions on various subjects (daily plans, objectives, clarity, and learning principles), based on Saphier and Gower's "The Skillful Teacher" (1993). He then discovered that teacher-led presentations worked even better. (MLH)

There are usually three reasons for hiring consultants: to inspire or motivate staff, to provide staff with new ideas, or to glean information from research and evaluation studies to make informed decisions and changes. To benefit from hiring consultants, administrators should know their speakers, consider timing, get their money's worth, verify…

This inservice primer for teachers, consisting of a case study and 10 true/false questions, distinguishes between protections guaranteed by two federal laws, Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Emphasis is on eligibility requirements, coverage for certain learning disabilities and health…

Employs hierarchical linear modeling to examine the relationship between professional development and the reformers' vision of teaching practice. Indicates that the quantity of professional development in which teachers participate is strongly linked with both inquiry-based teaching practice and investigative classroom culture. (Contains 39…

Teachers assigned to teach on an emergency credential are severely challenged by inadequate understanding of classroom management techniques and instructional methods. Also, California's Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment Program is not available to these teachers. This article outlines criteria for principals to include in an inservice…

Inservice, preservice, and prospective teachers and nonteacher controls (N=408) participated in a cross-sectional study of the development of beliefs about use of critical-thinking (CT) activities with different learner populations. Teachers' self-selection of their careers was associated with strong support for high-CT activities for both high-…

Discourse analysis of interaction in a course on language and literacy development elucidates and exemplifies how preschool teachers constructed new knowledge that can be assumed to contribute to the improved literacy instruction observed in their classrooms. An analytic framework rooted in sociocultural theory and interactional sociolinguistic…

For many administrators, the task of providing meaningful and timely inservice training for classroom and school safety is difficult. Staff development time is a scarce commodity in today's education environment; therefore, most inservice activities for faculty members center on academic issues. But during an emergency or crisis, a lack of…

This article examines the challenges of our work as multicultural teacher educators, explicating this perspective on what "taking a stand" means and the importance of infusing a praxis of multicultural education throughout the curricula of our professional teacher education programs. It is argued that as cultural workers/teacher educators, we have…

Teacher action research is in the emergent stages in Sudanese schools and needs to be well disseminated and actively supported from the Ministry of education. Although the teacher-as-researcher movement has been in existence for some twenty years, there is a reason to think that the majority if not all, of Sudanese class teachers remain…

Teachers who choose to participate in professional development to acquire new instructional methods or enhance their content knowledge are teacher-learners. For this study, data consisted of the reflective writings of 19 secondary mathematics and science teacher-learners in an 11-month professional development project. These writings provided a…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of Teacher Advisory Center (TAC) tutors in curriculum implementation of secondary schools in Chepalungu District. The study aimed at determining ways in which TAC tutors, participate in implementation of secondary school curriculum and to establish whether teachers in secondary schools…

The purpose of this study was to examine teachers' perceptions of moral education, to what extent teacher education, both pre-service and in-service, prepared teachers to deal with morality and moral education in their professional classrooms through a cross-sectional survey research design. The data were collected through a questionnaire that…