The Impact of a Professional Development Program on Urban Teachers' Lesson Planning Using Urban Geologic Sites

Abstract

This study presents how a professional development program (PD) of K-12 teachers affects participants` use of the earth system approach and their perceptions of using the urban environment for their science teaching and lesson unit development. This study utilized mixed methods to collect and analyze the data. Eleven urban teachers` pre-post lessons (45 lessons) were analyzed quantitatively using a lesson plan analysis tool, modified by the author, and their lesson reflections were analyzed qualitatively. The findings of this study show that the PD program influences the teachers to choose more topics and content knowledge based on the earth system approach and to assess the topics and content knowledge with more appropriate methods. Specifically, the teachers use more urban environmental factors/topics in their post lesson to teach the environmental topics of urban area. However, according to the statistical analysis of pre-and postlesson plan scores, the accuracy of the earth system knowledge that participants used in their lessons did not change significantly (p