Design professional development that is intensive, on-site, peer-based, responsive, and grounded in teachers' real classroom experiences¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · no claims cited

Description¶

The project's professional development program embeds known best practices from the in-service PD literature: it is delivered on-site at teachers' own schools, builds a critical mass of peers who learn together, begins with an intensive summer workshop followed by weekly or biweekly meetings across about three years, and stays grounded in classroom experience. "At every meeting, participants discuss their current problems, insights, observations, and ideas. This helps the teachers connect the content of PD with their practice." The program is kept highly responsive to participants' evolving needs, uses TEFA itself to teach TEFA, and shifts from facilitator-driven to teacher-driven collaborative action research in later years.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• A critical mass of teachers from one school or closely related schools, sustained multi-year funding and facilitator capacity, and channels for soliciting teacher feedback.

Constraints¶

• The article notes the fifth skill area of integrating TEFA with each teacher's context is idiosyncratic and hard to teach, and that PD responsiveness was limited when staff were backlogged with data.

Target Learners¶

• practicing secondary science and mathematics teachers

Target Learning Goals¶

• implementation of a new pedagogy
• sustained pedagogical change

Affordances¶

• Tefa Four Principles Question Cycle

Related Strategies¶

• Sustained, needs-based PBIS professional development with in-classroom coaching to build teacher capacity
• Multi-format teacher professional development for implementing the Facing History and Ourselves curriculum
• Brief initial training with extensive follow-up coaching and on-site facilitation for whole-school program implementation
• Weeklong initial teacher training with biweekly follow-up meetings for delivering the fraction intervention
• Combine summer professional development with school-year on-site coaching and provision of complete instructional materials
• Use summer programs as learning labs for teachers to practice new instructional strategies
• Shift the locus of professional learning to school sites and classrooms, connected to teachers' everyday practice
• Design teacher PD on differentiation to connect to daily practice, include active learning and collaboration, and sustain implementation through coaches and principals

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Ian D. Beatty, Allan Feldman, William J. Leonard, William J. Gerace, Karen St. Cyr, Hyunju Lee, Robby Harris. (2008). Teacher Learning of Technology-Enhanced Formative Assessment. NARST 2008 conference paper. https://eric.ed.gov/?q=Teacher+Learning+of+Technology-Enhanced+Formative+Assessment