Teacher Professional Development Project Research Articles

Differentiated instruction in an online ESL writing lesson: A single participant case study in Hong Kong

AbstractDifferentiated instruction (DI), an educational philosophy that aims to cater for learner diversity, has been advocated by scholars and teachers over the past two decades. Nevertheless, little is known about how teachers practise DI in online teaching, particularly in the context of English language teaching during the outbreak of the COVID‐19 pandemic. To fill this gap, this single participant case study aimed to delineate concrete ways of implementing DI during an online English writing lesson for English as a second language (ESL) learners in a Hong Kong primary school. To provide a thick description, multiple sources of data were extracted from a rich data pool of a two‐year longitudinal teacher professional development project which included lesson recordings, post‐lesson debriefing meeting recordings, and student work. The findings suggested that the case teacher employed various DI strategies (i.e., providing chances for all student participation, using multisensory pedagogical designs, using information technology) to cater for learner diversity during online English teaching. It is argued that despite the potential challenges, it could be feasible and manageable to employ some DI strategies to address learner diversity during online English teaching. This study contributes to DI theory and practice by deepening our understanding of implementing DI in the context of online English teaching and providing a valuable reference for educational practitioners. It also advances our knowledge of how technology could be leveraged to support DI implementation.

The multiplicity and dynamics of the interpreter’s roles in mediating cultural differences: a qualitative inquiry based on an international collaborative teacher professional development programme

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the role of interpreters in addressing cultural differences in the context of a cross-cultural collaborative teacher professional development project. Based on positioning theory, this study employed interpreter-mediated interactions and interviews to reveal the complex roles that interpreters played when interpreting culture-related terms. Findings revealed that interpreters' roles were shifting between those of transmitters of information, cultural insiders and constructors of shared understandings between interlocutors. Notably, the lack of training in this specialised field obliged interpreters to rely mainly on their personal experiences to judge which role they should play in the face of cultural differences.

Pedagogy in English-Medium Instruction (EMI): Some Recommendations for EMI Teachers

In the global educational landscape, policymakers mainly implement English-Medium Instruction (EMI) programs in higher education to maximize internationalization outlook and student mobility. EMI has brought numerous pedagogical dilemmas for EMI teachers since they were administratively requested to transform their monolingual disciplinary classes into EMI without consultation and proper professional development. Many EMI teachers reported having limited English ability to execute EMI pedagogy, holding marginalized views toward their English accents, and lacking pedagogical knowledge for EMI. This paper presents some recommendations for EMI teachers to implement EMI pedagogy based on the outcomes of a teacher professional development project. The suggestions are characterized as 4E: 1) Embracing EMI with the right attitudes (‘E’ in ‘EMI’), 2) EMI lesson planning, 3) Executing EMI lessons, and 4) Engaging in reflective practice.

Common ground is not enough: The situated and dynamic process of collaboration in a multiagency teacher professional development project

This paper uses Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) to examine the boundary zone of teacher professional development within a multi-agency collaborative project. It highlights different goals, histories, and commitments that collided and intermingled to create tensions, contradictions, and opportunities for expansive learning. Although a policy mandate, use of the English Language Arts-Common Core State Standards created a common goal, however, interagency participants acted under strikingly different conceptions of effective teacher professional development. In an era of increased collaboration among agencies, this paper reconceptualizes interagency teacher professional development, serving as both a cautionary tale and a vision for the future.

Identifying capital for school improvement: recommendations for a whole school approach to ESD implementation

The present study explores how school improvement in combination with a teacher professional development (TPD) project influenced the implementation of education for sustainable development (ESD) in five Swedish schools, when employing a whole school approach. Interviews were conducted with three teachers from each school. Shulman and Shulman’s four forms of capital for capacity building were used as a framework for the data analysis. The impact of the project on the schools’ pedagogical activities varied considerably between the schools. The transformative potential in ESD was realized to a greater extent in the schools characterized by high levels of moral capital – i.e. trust – than in the schools characterized by more individual and traditional ways of working. Three general conclusions concerning ESD implementation are drawn: 1) Prior to launching a whole school project for ESD, it is desirable to make an inventory of the capacity building capital at participating schools, and to identify contextual factors constituting external pressure on the building of capital. 2) The school improvement project and the TPD need to be locally adjusted to the available capital. 3) A strategy for adapting the project to the various external pressures needs to be developed.

Sustainable Teacher Professional Development Through Professional Learning Community: PLC

Abstract In Thailand, in-service teachers’ professional development has been implemented through the Professional Learning Community (PLC) program for more than four years to develop teachers’ sustainably. The sustainable development program has spread across the country in the Thai Teacher Council network. The research goals are as follows: (1) to evaluate the causes and results of the Professional Development Program in the form of a Professional Learning Community conducted by the Teachers’ Council of Thailand and (2) to analyze factors affecting success and sustainability of the teacher professional development project. Within the study, 490 samples have been collected from the relevant parties. The respondents have completed the questionnaire and participated in the interview. The research results have revealed that the project is essential for teachers and education personnel. They change the teaching and learning approaches, as well as positive thinking skills; moreover, the students also increase academic achievements.

Accuracy of Elementary Teachers’ Representations of the Projects and Processes of Engineering: Results of a Professional Development Program

ABSTRACTWith the growing adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards across the United States, elementary teachers are being called upon to incorporate engineering into their science instruction, creating a need for ways to help elementary teachers better understand what engineering is and how to accurately communicate it to students. The present study examines the effects of a teacher education and professional development project in which elementary student teachers and their cooperating teachers were teamed with engineering graduate students to incorporate engineering into grades 3–5 classrooms. By working alongside experts in engineering for a 16-week semester, the project aimed to help participating elementary teachers better understand what engineering is and what engineers do. To assess teachers’ conceptions of engineering, we administered the Draw-An-Engineer Test as pretest and posttest. An important contribution of the present study is our development of a novel approach to analyzing responses from that instrument that is appropriate for adult populations and that also addresses multiple known shortcomings of drawing tasks. We found that from pretest to posttest, teachers’ responses became clearer with respect to the processes that engineers use in their work, and they became more likely to represent flowchart models of “the engineering design process.” The teachers’ focus on process, however, was not shared by the engineers, indicating that the engineers were not simply conveying their own understanding of engineering to the teachers. Rather, the teachers constructed their own understanding of engineering work that deviated in certain ways from the views of the engineers.

Mathematics and science attitude inventory: validation for use in a Spanish-speaking context

Research and evaluation focused on students’ attitudes towards science and mathematics require the availability of culturally appropriate instruments in the language of the studied population. We present the translation and adaptation of the Mathematics and Science Attitude Inventory for its use with Puerto Rican Spanish-speaking secondary school students, within the evaluation of a teacher professional development project. We used a cross-cultural translation and adaptation model that frames these processes in the context of establishing validity and reliability of a measure by assessing the equivalence of the original version and the translated one in various dimensions: semantic, content, technical, criterion, and conceptual. Results obtained provide evidence of the equivalence between the English and Spanish versions of the inventory, as well as the reliability and validity of both versions for our context. The feasibility and utility of the cross-cultural model used were also demonstrated. This model is a valuable guide for the translation and cultural adaption of research and evaluation instruments in diverse languages and cultures.

What Students Learn from Engineering Instruction: Perspectives from Elementary Teachers

ABSTRACTEngineering design activities are a common way for teachers to incorporate engineering into their science classrooms, as called for by current science policy documents in the United States. However, little is known about how teachers prioritize different learning objectives during engineering design lessons. Understanding teachers’ thinking on this subject is important for teacher educators because teachers’ beliefs about learning goals influence their teaching practices. This study presents elementary teachers’ views on what their students learned during engineering instruction, most of which was in the form of design activities, over the course of a semester. The teachers were participants in a teacher education and professional development project aimed at supporting elementary science and engineering instruction. The results indicate that most teachers described student learning in terms of developing design skills and practices, whereas very few discussed their students’ learning of engineering concepts. Interestingly, teachers also frequently discussed students’ learning of the nature of engineering, suggesting that they highly prioritized this outcome.

Professional development as a collaborative endeavour of networked learning in higher educational settings

University teachers continue to strive to take up mobile and blended learning technologies in their teaching practices and universities continue to support this work through professional development courses for university teachers. At Mid Sweden University, two projects have recently been carried out with the objective to develop higher education practices supported by mobile and blended learning technologies in teaching in practice. Professional development for university teachers was expected take place using an iterative design comprising five features: participating in a competence development course, planning trials, conducting trials, evaluating teaching and participating in a pedagogical seminar. In this paper, the preliminary results of the final interviews with 12 teacher educators will be presented. The interviews were carried out to explore beliefs regarding changes in teaching practices, following the completion of teacher professional development project. The results showed that the teacher educators in this study experienced change in the use of mobile and blended learning in their teaching through dialogue, collaboration, dissemination and networked learning. Three themes were identified. The first theme was collaboration. Here, the teacher educators expressed beliefs which could be related to collaboration for learning to use mobile and blended learning technologies in their teaching, supporting conditions for networked learning. This involved working and planning new technologies in new courses together. In the second theme, sharing is caring, the teachers in the study expressed helping each other out and supporting each other in the work to learn and use new technologies in their teaching. Support through pep talks and taking on learning new technologies as a group was one example of gaining knowledge about new technologies. In the third and final theme, the teacher educators’ expressed beliefs regarding dissemination as a way to share knowledge and experiences. Beliefs expressed here included learning through seeing what others were working with and exchanging knowledge. The teacher educators’ in this study also expressed the need for continued learning through collaboration and dissemination, as networked learning in their community of practice. How universities continue to provide professional development to support teachers’ continued work together in communities of practice through networked learning will be of importance. These efforts in professional development will provide possibilities to push forward change in teachers’ use of mobile and blended learning in their teaching practices.

Integrated teaching project: A sustainable approach to teacher education

In this paper, the authors discuss the conceptual and theoretical underpinnings of the Integrated Teaching Framework and the rationale behind its development as a road-map for teachers and teacher educators. It is further explored in the paper to what extent a sustainable teacher professional development project, which is grounded in this framework, displayed intellectual merit and broader impact. Outlines of the programs developed within this particular project are provided as evidences. Given short-term seminars or workshops in Turkey are generally accepted as the norm, revealing the details of long-term sustainable professional development programs is considered to be noteworthy for teachers, teacher educators, principal investigators of similar projects, and policy makers in Turkey and elsewhere.

Developing a collaborative model in teacher education – An overview of a teacher professional development project

The article discusses the development of an educational model intended to support teachers’ professional development in science education. In this research and development project, LumaLähetit, pre-service teachers, in-service teachers, and teacher educators formed teams to collaboratively plan teaching and produce material for inquiry-based and integrative science instruction in primary schools. The results are based on three design cycles of the model. Thus far, ten schools, 24 in-service teachers, 30 pre-service teachers, and 560 pupils have participated. The results, which are based on the qualitative content analysis of participants’ open answers to a questionnaire, indicate that the developed collaborative model for science education supported preservice teachers and in-service teachers’ professional development in many ways. Several processes mediating the embodiment of the designed model were identified, especially during the second or third design cycles. Participants reflected on theory and practice. They experienced increased knowledge about inquiry and integrative approaches, collaborated in teams to some extent, and found this to be supportive during the project. Also, pre-service teachers appreciated the opportunity to teach in the schools. In general, careful goal setting, collaboration between the participants, and guidance by teacher educators during the initiation of the project were found to be crucial to the further success of the project. The results highlight a need for further research in order to better meet to the challenges of team teaching, inquiry-based instruction, and integrative teaching. The designed model was developed between the cycles and must be further developed in the future, especially in terms of supporting collaboration and clarifying theoretical concepts during the project.

The Potential of Mobile Phones to Transform Teacher Professional Development to Build Sustainable Educational Futures in Bangladesh

Futures thinking is used by governments to consider long-term strategic approaches and develop policies and practices that are potentially resilient to future uncertainty. English in Action (EIA), arguably the world's largest English language teacher professional development (TPD) project, used futures thinking to author possible, probable and preferable future scenarios to solve the project's greatest technological challenge: how to deliver audio-visual TPD materials and hundreds of classroom audio resources to 75,000 teachers by 2017. Authoring future scenarios and engaging in possibility thinking (PT) provided us with a taxonomy of question-posing and question-responding that assisted the project team in being creative. This process informed the successful pilot testing of a mobile-phone-based technology kit to deliver TPD resources within an open distance learning (ODL) platform. Taking the risk and having the foresight to trial mobile phones in remote rural areas with teachers and students led to unforeseen innovation. As a result, EIA is currently using a mobile-phone-based technology kit with 12,500 teachers to improve the English language proficiency of 700,000 students. As the project scales up in its third and final phase, we are using the new technology kit — known as the 'trainer in your pocket' — to foster a 'quiet revolution' in the provision of professional development for teachers at scale to an additional 67,500 teachers and nearly 10 million students.

Plans for Embedding ICTs into Teaching and Learning through a Large-Scale Secondary Education Reform in the Country of Georgia

Integrating ICTs into international development projects is common. However, focusing on how ICTs support leading, teaching, and learning is often overlooked. This article describes a team’s approach to technology integration into the design of a large-scale, five year, teacher and leader professional development project in the country of Georgia. The main goal of this project was to improve student outcomes via changing core pedagogical practices such as formative assessment, higher order thinking, and student-centered learning. In this article, we describe the background of the project, detail the country and sector context, the project team composition, the technological approach used in the development plan, and offer an analysis of how the proposed technology interventions push teachers and leaders to use technology to improve tasks and improve the teaching and learning experience. The full text of the article can be found at 10.18275/fire201502011047

Dialogic peer coaching as teacher leadership for professional inquiry

Purpose– Dialogic peer coaching as leadership can enable teachers to influence each other's professional learning. The purpose of this paper is to shift the emphasis from the role associated with the designated title of leader to the purpose and relevance of teacher leadership in the context of dialogic peer coaching.Design/methodology/approach– The research was undertaken as a small qualitative case study embedded in a school-based, teacher professional development project. Nine groups of peer coaches from five unrelated schools engaged in a formal process of collaborative inquiry over two years. Interview data from 13 volunteer teacher participants were analysed using the constant comparison method and themes determined.Findings– The study revealed that there was growth in teacher leadership capabilities as they become dialogic peer coaches to each other.Practical implications– Through their collaborative peer coaching dialogue teachers have the transformative space to articulate their thinking. They can engage in dialogic feedback where they are positioned as experts in their own practice.Social implications– The teachers in this study are positioned within communities of practice as co-constructers of knowledge and co-learners. On the basis of the findings the authors suggest that this can support the development of high capacity leadership in schools. This stance contrasts with a technicist approach to teacher professional learning in which teachers are situated as absorbers or recipients of knowledge constructed elsewhere.Originality/value– The research reported in this paper addresses three key elements of leadership: individual development; collaboration or team development; and organisational development. It outlines a means by which teacher leadership can be strengthened to address these elements in schools.

The Texas Earth and Space Science (TXESS) Revolution: A Model for the Delivery of Earth Science Professional Development to Minority-Serving Teachers

ABSTRACTThe Texas Earth and Space Science (TXESS) Revolution was a 5-y teacher professional development project that aimed to increase teachers' content knowledge in Earth science and preparing them to teach a 12th-grade capstone Earth and Space Science course, which is new to the Texas curriculum. The National Science Foundation–supported project was designed around six principles that proved to be critical to in its success: (1) model best practices in workshop presentations, (2) use authentic Earth science data and cybertechnology to teach up-to-date content, (3) provide ongoing training to cohorts of learners over a 2-y period, (4) involve geoscience consortia and programs that can provide proven content for classrooms, (5) use ongoing evaluations to guide future workshops, and (6) provide opportunities for leadership development through participation in research and curriculum development projects. The project served 177 science teachers by supporting them with the pedagogical, technological, and scientific tools to teach modern geoscience. TXESS Revolution teachers directly impacted more than 29,000 students, of which about 69% are nonwhite, by exposing students in Texas to the geosciences and planting the seeds for them to pursue geoscience as a field of study. Using a train-the-trainer approach, TXESS Revolution teachers shared their professional development with other Texas teachers, strengthening Earth science education at all K–12 levels throughout the state, an impact that extends beyond preparation in Earth and space science.

Students’ Metacognitive Strategies in the Mathematics Classroom Using Open Approach

This paper describes a study investigating students’ metacognitive behavior and abilities in the mathematic class using the open approach. Four 1st grade students, ages six to seven years, served as a target group from the primary school having participated since 2006 in the Teacher Professional Development Project with innovation of lesson study and open approach. The research was based on Begle’s conceptual framework (1969), focusing on observing the nature of occurrences in order to describe emerging facts in the class. In addition, the data were examined by triangulation among three sources: video recording, field notes, and students’ written works. Data analysis rested upon 4 open approach-based teaching steps (Inprasitha, 2010). The study results showed that the open approach-based mathematic class helped students exhibit metacognitive behavior and abilities relevant to the four teaching steps: 1) posing open-ended problem, 2) students’ self learning, 3) whole class discussion and comparison, and 4) summarization through connecting students’ mathematical ideas emerging in the classroom.

Teacher Development Program to Enhance Learning Competency for Small Primary Schools in Thailand

The main aim of this research is to develop a teacher development program in order to enhance learning competency, utilizing research and development process. Since teachers’ competencies have the potential impact on students’ learning, therefore teachers have to develop themselves in order to excel and augment their competencies in learning management and teacher empowerment, consequently will lead to students’ effective learning. It is essential to improve students’ learning since reformation in learning is the main core of educational reform. Factors affecting students’ learning are learning process, contents, theory and teachers’ learning management. Researchers employ five phases to collect comprehensive data. Firstly, researchers study context, problems and suggestions in teacher development. This is followed by documentary study and experts’ input. Then, researchers examine and improve the program in parallel with producing learning documents. Next, researchers develop the program assessment tools and finally implementing the developed program in 30 schools in Khon Kaen. Results reveal that majority of the teachers (83.30%) satisfied with the development process. Teachers have upgraded their knowledge, skills and competencies in learning management. Findings from supervision outcomes showed teachers’ performances are ‘very good’. Related to teachers’ assessment and feedbacks from the four aspects, namely support, promotion, syllabus analysis and organization also indicate as at high rank. Furthermore, there are at least three school projects which categorized as ‘quality’ are ‘Collaborative action for teacher professional development project’, ‘Applying cognitive load theory for instructional design project’ and ‘Show and share for learning process modification and the assessment of students’. Teachers who have witness performance, are able to promote as ‘master teacher’ because they have academic leadership and being able to contribute and assist other teachers.

Re‐sourcing mathematics teaching through professional development

In any education system, curriculum alone cannot fulfill reform demands imposed onto teachers to help learners make meaning of subject contents they learn. This paper revisits the notion of resources as explored in a mathematics teacher professional development project that focused on algebra learning. As a way to promote the use of manipulatives in teaching and learning algebra, the project introduced algebra tiles to participating teachers and investigated how the tiles facilitated the enaction of algebraic meanings. The participating teachers learned different ways of helping learners interpret and solve algebraic problems, with the use of algebraic tiles.

Redesigning and aligning assessment and evaluation for a federally funded math and science teacher educational program

This paper examines the redesign of evaluation components for a teacher professional development project funded by the National Science Foundation. It focuses on aligning evaluation instrumentation and strategies with program goals, research goals and program evaluation best practices. The study identifies weaknesses in the original (year 1) program evaluation design and implementation, develops strategies and tracks changes for year 2 implementation, and then reports enhancement of findings and recommendations for year 3. It includes lessons learned about assessment and evaluation over the project lifespan, with implications for research and evaluation of a range of related programs. This study functions as a classic illustration of how critical it is to observe first principles of assessment and evaluation for funded programs, the risks that arise when they are ignored, and the benefits that accrue when they are systematically observed.