Recent research on teacher professional development (PD) underscores the importance of the coherence of PD with standards, curriculum, and assessment. Teachers' judgments of the coherence of PD with larger system goals influence their decisions about what ideas and resources they appropriate from PD. Little research, however, has examined how…

The purpose of this case study was to examine a beginning elementary teacher's development of identity for science teaching from her first year at university, her field experience, and through her first year of teaching. Several kinds of data were collected over a period of 5 years through different sources: interviews, journal entries,…

There is growing interest in the professional development of teacher educators as the demands, expectations, and requirements of teacher education increasingly come under scrutiny. The manner in which teacher educators learn to traverse their world of work in the development of their knowledge, skills, and ability is important. This article…

Studies show that changes in teacher education around the world occur slowly and are difficult to implement. This study aims to contribute to the discussion on the major resources for and obstacles to developing teacher education and finding novel solutions to overcome the obstacles. Resources and obstacles were investigated in the context of…

This study explores the interaction between transformative processes in which a group of teacher educators became a professional development community (PDC) and the individual progress of these instructors through the professional development course on the topic of thinking education. Twelve teacher educators who participated in one of three…

In this article, the authors examine the effect of a National Writing Project professional development model on a group of middle school writing teachers. The authors examine how contact with other professionals in intensive week-long sessions as well as mentoring from the professional development coach affected the teachers’ concept of themselves…

This article reports on a qualitative study that investigated the identity construction experiences of one group of beginning English language teacher educators in Hong Kong. Drawing upon a theoretical framework that incorporates both identity-in-practice and identity-in-discourse, and using in-depth interviews, a narrative approach was adopted to…

We describe the process and outcomes of a project aimed at bringing together a set of diverse experts to generate a set of design recommendations for what should be considered when creating, sustaining, and assessing professional development systems to support the Common Core State Standards in mathematics. Although the recommendations were…

This study employed a randomized experiment to examine differences in teacher and student learning from professional development (PD) in two modalities: online and face-to-face. The study explores whether there are differences in teacher knowledge and beliefs, teacher classroom practice, and student learning outcomes related to PD modality.…

Many educational researchers across the United States have found that inquiry-based learning (IBL) supports the development of deep, meaningful content knowledge. However, integrating IBL into classroom practice has been challenging, in part because of contrasting conceptualizations and practices across educational fields. In this article, we (a)…

The study reported in this article examines how teachers read and respond to their students' Stanford Achievement Test 10 (SAT 10) scores with the goal of investigating the assumption that data-based teaching practice is more "objective" and less susceptible to divergent teacher interpretation. The study uses reader response theory to frame…

For several historical and cultural reasons, the United States has long pursued a strategy of improving teaching by improving teachers. The rarely questioned logic underlying this choice says that by improving the right characteristics of teachers, they will teach more effectively. The authors expose the assumptions on which this logic is built,…

This study used text-related, video-based case materials to assess teacher candidates' readiness to communicate with families. Participants (N = 141) rated their efficacy for home-school communication and then responded to a description of a classroom-based challenge regarding one student's behavioral and academic performance. Next, they evaluated…

The increasing cultural, linguistic, and developmental diversity of today's classrooms demands more inclusive approaches to schooling, but classroom teachers often report feeling unprepared for inclusive education. This article reports some lessons learned from the Inclusive Practice Project, a teacher education reform project that has developed…

In this randomized controlled study, 20 second- and third-grade teachers participated in practice-based professional development in strategies instruction in either story or opinion essay writing, using the Self-Regulated Strategies Development (SRSD) instructional model. These teachers worked in schools collaborating with a local university to…