Teachers Change During Professional Development Experiences
Research Team:
Faculty: Dr. Mark Bloom, Dr. Judy Groulx and Dr. Molly Weinburgh
Graduate Students: April Sawey, and Valerie Wielard
Project
Since 2003, TCU has been awarded a Teacher Quality Enhancement Grant to provide 110 hours of professional development to in-service biology teachers over one calendar year. Each year twenty teachers from a pool of applicants have been select to participate. Participating teachers attend an intensive summer institute and follow up academic year events including Saturday workshops and classroom observations. This provides the opportunity to help teachers acquire new knowledge and skill as well as proving a ‘laboratory’ for studying the effectiveness of this model of professional development, how teachers incorporate new content/pedagogy into their teaching, and how teacher change effects student achievement.
The current research is exploring the effectiveness of the long-term professional development as a way to increase content knowledge, pedagogical skills and understanding of nature of science. The research team is using qualitative and quantitative methods as they try to more fully understand the impact of professional development on biology teachers.
For more information contact Dr. Weinburgh.