Year-long Professional Development Research Articles

Examining the Schoolwide “Spread” of Research-Based Practices

We investigated what had transpired in two elementary schools four years after we first began supporting one of the schools' efforts to restructure its special education program and three years after we provided a year-long professional development program to eight elementary and special education teachers. We had continued providing ongoing informal support during the years since, and wished to determine the extent to which the practices had “spread” to other teachers in our original school and a second school. Furthermore, we wished to learn why teachers who had not been a part of the original professional development program chose to learn and sustain use of the practices. A secondary interest was to discern how and why teachers adapted the practices. We found that 93% of the 98 teachers in the two schools had tried at least one of the practices and more than half continued to use one or more of the practices on a regular basis.

Teachers' Mini-Case Studies of Children's Mathematics

This article reports findings from a five-day summer institute conducted with 27 practicing primary-grade teachers. The institute was part of a year-long professional development project that supported teachers' thinking about children's arithmetical understanding. From Quicktime movies that contained excerpts of six children's interviews, pairs of teachers developed mini-cases about the children's arithmetical understanding. At the end of the institute, the teachers presented their mini-case studies to the group. Teachers developed two types of hypotheses: hypotheses about children's thinking and hypotheses about what it means for children to know and do mathematics. After providing examples to clarify the two types of hypotheses, we address the challenges we faced in developing multimedia inquiry-based environments that facilitated teachers' thinking about children's arithmetical thinking.

Sustaining Research-Based Practices in Reading

This study examined the extent to which the reading instructional practices learned by a cohort of teachers who participated in an intensive, yearlong professional development experience during the 1994-1995 school year have been sustained and modified over time. Teachers learned three multileveled practices—partner reading, collaborative strategic reading, and making words—that promote gains in reading for students from a wide range of achievement levels. Teachers were observed and interviewed 3 years later to determine the extent to which they continued to implement the practices, the ways in which they modified them, and factors that influenced their sustained use of the practices. With the exception of one teacher, all the teachers sustained one or more of the three practices at a high rate.