A Profile of Elementary School Teachers Involved in a Professional Development School

Abstract

This exploratory study identifies the characteristics of elementary school teachers who were involved in professional development school (PDS) activities at one PDS site. It describes 42 teachers' level of involvement in the PDS partnership using both a subjective (respondents' self-report) and an objective (university team's assessment, based on the number and types of PDS activities in which teachers had engaged) measure of involvement. Using survey data collected at the end of the second year of the PDS's implementation, the researchers calculated univariate descriptive statistics, cross-tabulations, and correlation coefficients to profile who participated in the PDS and the extent to which they did so. They found that, on both measures of level of involvement, most of the teachers were somewhat or highly involved in PDS activities. While the two indicators are moderately, positively, and significantly related to each other, they yielded different results when they were analyzed in relation to four other sets of variables. The findings point to the need to explore more fully the characteristics of those teachers who do participate in PDS partnerships in order to develop more effective strategies to involve teachers in such collaborative arrangements and to achieve PDS purposes.