Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
Similar to Professional Development in Education
Similar to Professional Development in Education (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Professional Development in Education
- 1. EMBRACING BOTH PERSONAL AND FORMAL KNOWLEDGE WITHOUT BEING BOWLED OVER BY EITHER THE NATURE OF EVIDENCE Joyce, Bruce; Calhoun, Emily. Models of Professional Development: A Celebration of Educators. SAGE Publications. Kindle Edition.
- 2. There is a good deal of useful knowledge that we can consider as we seek to develop effective staff development 1. Personal Experience and Knowledge 2. Pooled Professional Knowledge and Experience 3. Information From Descriptive Studies 4. Educational Practice-Oriented Research: Design, Inferences, Warrants
- 7. RESEARCH IN FIELD SETTINGS
- 8. SIZE OF THE STUDY SMALL STUDIES ARE PREFERRED TO LARGE STUDIES FOR PRECISION AND BECAUSE THEY CAN GENERATE SUBSTANTIAL TRAINING AND STUDY IMPLEMENTATION THOROUGHLY.
- 9. HELEN TIMPERLEY INTERNATIONAL ACADEMY OF EDUCATION 15 (1), 61-74
- 10. SHIRLEY M. HORDE JOURNAL OF STAFF DEVELOPMENT, 30(1), 40-43.
- 11. Timperley, H. (2008) Teacher professional learning and development. International Academy of Education 15 (1), p.26-27 Chart from: Thinking process for our reflective questions
- 12. DISCUSSION QUESTION #1 IN THE PAST FEW YEARS, PLC’S HAVE BEEN PROMOTED AS CRITICAL IN STAFF DEVELOPMENT AND IMPROVEMENT IN STUDENT SUCCESS. DO YOU FEEL THIS TO BE THE CASE IN YOUR EXPERIENCES?
- 13. DISCUSSION QUESTION #2 WHAT DO WE AS TEACHERS NEED TO LEARN TO PROMOTE THE LEARNING OF OUR STUDENTS?
- 14. DISCUSSION QUESTION #3 WHAT IS YOUR OPINION OF SCHOOL BASED PD DAY SESSIONS? ARE THEY AN EFFECTIVE AND EFFICIENT USE OF TIME? SHOULD THEY BE VOLUNTARY OR REQUIRED? SHOULD STAFF HAVE OPTIONS FOR WHAT TO FOCUS ON? SHOULD STAFF PROFESSIONAL GOALS DRIVE THE PLANNING OF PD DAYS? SHOULD BOARD AND ADMIN PRIORITIES DETERMINE THE TOPICS?
- 15. DISCUSSION QUESTION #4 IF YOU WERE TASKED WITH CREATING AN EFFECTIVE AND USEFUL STAFF DEVELOPMENT SESSION AT YOUR SCHOOL, WHAT WOULD YOU FOCUS ON? WHY? HOW WOULD YOU STRUCTURE THE PROGRAM?
Editor's Notes
- Districts, schools, and teachers need to focus on the outcomes they want and measure them—LOOKING FOR GAIN—in the most direct way possible. If they get large gains, that is good. Factors other than the treatment may be at work, but there are no uncontaminating controls in education. Schools exist in a cultural ocean that is more like the restless sea than a placid pond. 1 .Programmatic research is the formulation of sets of studies designed to develop the fullest knowledge possible in an area. 2. Nonprogrammatic research is less ambitious and may consist of a single study or evaluation.
- The products of personal experience are very important. We carry them with us as we live and work. We develop principles that guide our planning and action in teaching and administration. As individuals, we do not—certainly should not—believe that we have the only ideas that might work, but they are our ideas The models of professional development that work by generating professional learning communities depend heavily on the benefits of pooled knowledge and skill. In learning communities we react to the ideas and practices of others, borrowing some and rejecting others. Optimally we reflect on our personal knowledge and bounce it off the frames of reference that are developed as formal inquiry takes place and tests the products of our experience. Evaluations of initiatives in schools and school districts need to focus on the nature and effects of curriculums, ways of teaching, and the social climate provided to the students. The evaluations of professional development models need to concentrate on resulting teacher behavior before proceeding to incorporate measures of student learning. Frequently staff development "evaluations" consist of the use of opinionaires after workshops or meetings of professional learning communities. There is little correlation between attitudes toward sessions and the use of new practice. Actual change has to be studied..
- Evaluation and research are not identical. When a teacher, faculty, or district makes a change in practice with goals in mind, it needs to try to find out whether those goals were achieved.
- Designing studies of educational treatments in field settings involves careful efforts to build in controls, including clarifying the treatment and its rationale designing and implementing adequate professional development studying implementation—verifying that the teachers have learned the treatment, can use it, and do use it; studying effects formatively if possible; and studying effects against a baseline. Frequently this involves measuring performance before, during, and at the end of the period of study. Using these controls is straightforward but takes energy and, despite best efforts, almost always is flawed.
- http://edu.aru.ac.th/childedu/images/PDF/benjamaporn/EdPractices_18.pdf
- http://www.earlychildhoodleadership.com.au/dloads/rsc/professional%20communities%20Hord2009.pdf
- Collegial interaction that is focused on student outcomes can help teachers integrate new learning into existing practice. Collegial communities have been promoted as a means of improving teaching, but research typically reveals only a weak relationship between participation in such communities and improved student outcomes. Yet findings from many studies suggest that participation in a professional community with one’s colleagues is an integral part of professional learning that impacts positively on students. The resolution of this apparent contradiction appears to be that if teachers are to change, they need to participate in a professional learning community that is focused on becoming responsive to students, because such a community gives teachers opportunities to process new information while helping them keep their eyes on the goal. As an intervention on its own, a collegial community will often end up merely entrenching existing practice and the assumptions on which it is based. The research literature contains many examples of situations where teachers were given the time and resources to meet together to solve a problem or learn about new curricula or pedagogical practices but where this aim was thwarted by norms of politeness and the absence of challenge. As is the case for all other areas of professional learning, the effectiveness of collegial interaction needs to be assessed in terms of its focus on the relationship between teaching practice and student outcomes. Samples of student work, student achievement profiles, and the results of student interviews are all resources that can be used to help maintain this focus.
- What students need to know and do is used to identify what teachers need to know and do. Most models of professional inquiry focus on structures and processes. Missing from such models is the nature of the content or understandings to be developed and the skills to be refined (specified through an inquiry process) and the relationship between teacher inquiry and student outcomes. Professional learning approaches that focus primarily on building new knowledge and skills are suitable when teachers’ existing understandings are congruent with the new information and therefore can be integrated readily into their existing practice. But when teachers’ personal theories about students, valued curricula, and effective teaching practices differ from those being promoted in the professional learning, a different approach is needed. In the case of mathematics and science, for example, old curricula usually emphasize computational and factual knowledge while new curricula typically emphasize reasoning and problem-solving skills. This kind of change involves more than learning new knowledge and skills. It requires that teachers understand both the limitations of the current emphasis and the new ways of deciding what knowledge is valued.
- These are compulsory to attend and are rarely focused on teacher learning goals or needs but rather on administration (school or board Level) priorities To make significant changes to their practice, teachers need multiple opportunities to learn new information and understand its implications for practice. Furthermore, they need to encounter these opportunities in environments that offer both trust and challenge. In any learning situation, learners may be present physically but lack commitment to the learning process. In the case of teachers’ professional learning, participation is sometimes made voluntary as a way to minimize this problem. The research evidence, however, does not support this approach. Prior commitment does not guarantee greater engagement, and both voluntary and mandatory teacher participation have co-occurred with positive and negative outcomes for students. The circumstances that initially lead to participation bear a complex relationship to further engagement. Administrative and peer pressures can influence volunteering. Furthermore, participating teachers—whether or not they are volunteers—rarely believe that they will need to engage in in-depth learning or make substantive changes to their practice. Those who provide the professional development typically do believe this but do not disclose it. So learning is likely to prove uncomfortable even if the participants have volunteered. The research evidence shows that learning important content through engagement in meaningful activities, supported by a rationale for participation that is based on identified student needs, has a greater impact on student outcomes than the circumstances that lead teachers to sign up. These two dimensions determine whether the teachers engage in the learning process sufficiently to deepen their knowledge and extend their skills in ways that lead to improved student outcomes. Initial engagement can be promoted by identifying specific issues that teachers recognize as real and then offering a vision of how they might be solved. Ongoing, subsequent engagement is promoted by worthwhile learning activities and by opportunities to negotiate the meaning of existing and new theories and explore their differing impacts on students.