This chapter describes Clemson University's Laptop Faculty Development Program and its assessment, offering the program as one model for designing faculty development to successfully implement laptop mandates. The chapter also acquaints readers with the many types of in-class, laptop-based activities that meet best-practice criteria for effective…

Since China initiated its modernization program in the late 1970s, professional development of secondary teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) has been given much prominence because of the perceived important role that English can play in the modernization drive. This article provides a critical overview of secondary EFL teacher…

This study reports on a 5-year project to improve urban, middle-level student achievement through the implementation of two initiatives. First, teachers at a participating New York City middle school engaged in weekly curriculum-planning workshops to reformulate classroom curricula into interdisciplinary, discovery-oriented activities. Second,…

Planned Approach to Healthier Schools (PATHS) is a multicomponent school program that aims to establish and sustain a social norm consistent with physical activity and healthy nutrition in the school community. The PATHS components include: (1) a professional development and wellness program for faculty and staff; (2) ongoing social-marketing…

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) is now a cornerstone of education policy in the UK and elsewhere. If policy aspirations translate successfully into practice, then (funded) CPD opportunities will abound and teachers will be 'developed' in a logical and structured way from the moment they enter the profession until retirement. As a result…

This special issue of the "Journal of Postsecondary Education and Disability" presents information on faculty development regarding students with disabilities in postsecondary settings. Each of the articles relates to the work emanating from the Demonstration Projects to Ensure Students with Disabilities Receive a Quality Higher…

This article describes a valuable lesson that university mathematics faculty members learned from fifth grade and middle school teachers in a professional development workshop. The goal of the workshop was to show how models for whole number operations could be linked to models for rational numbers and to connect the traditional algorithms to the…

To help students learn science concepts, Pharmacology Education Partnership (PEP)--a science education program that incorporates relevant topics related to drugs and drug abuse into standard biology and chemistry curricula was developed. The interdisciplinary PEP curriculum provides six modules to teach biology and chemistry principles within the…

While politicians and the media have devoted a great deal of attention to the "problem" of school violence, classrooms teachers remain an underutilized source of information and inspiration about the frequency of school violence, its causes, its consequences, and appropriate interventions. In essence, teachers have been given little, if any,…

This article describes a gerontological enrichment model for institutionalizing and sustaining curricular change utilizing Rogers' (1995, 2003) diffusion of innovations approach to organizational change. The goal of the project, funded by the John A. Hartford Foundation, is to transform the social work curriculum at a major state university so…

"Hands-on Current Electricity" gives K-8 teachers the opportunity to experience inquiry learning about current electricity by (1) experimenting with current electricity through a variety of activities, (2) discovering preconceived mental models of electricity used to understand their observations, (3) creating new mental models that have greater…

This article discusses the creation of a teacher as researcher learning environment in one small rural Idaho elementary school through the Internet. At the request of five elementary school teachers from the same rural school district, the researcher, a university professor, created an online course, "Teacher as Researcher," which provided…

The Toronto school district combines professional learning in literacy with learning about change to give staying power to literacy-driven reform. Using literacy as the basis for large-scale reform can be challenging without equipping staff with the skills they need to cope with and implement such broad-scale change. Teach both skills at once and…

Fort Mill (S.C.) Elementary School developed a partnership with Winthrop University to help teachers improve how they taught writing after finding many teachers had never completed a college-level writing course and most felt they weren't very knowledgeable about assessing student writing. The results are improved student learning and professional…

This article arises from an initiative set up by four Beacon Schools to enhance the professional development of teachers and hence raise pupil attainment in all schools in the local education authority. The initiative provided opportunities for teachers to work in cross-institutional interest groups, with the aim of sharing good practice and…