Teacher PD – Final Paper

That’s it! Last deliverable of the quarter completed!

This was a big one: 67% of the grade.

Here’s the prompt and below my response:

Final Paper

For this paper you will study in-depth a professional development program (or set of programs with similar foci) of your choosing and write a paper describing and analyzing that program(s). Be sure to select a program for which research has been conducted and reports of that research are available. Your paper should address the following topics:

  • Nature of the professional development program
  • Underlying assumptions about teaching and teacher learning
  • Summary of research conducted on the professional development program (research questions, methods, findings, conclusions)
  • Your analysis of strengths and limitations of the professional development program
  • Your analysis of strengths and limitations of the research on the PD program
  • Suggestions for future program development and research

We anticipate that the papers will need to be 15-20 pages in length to adequately address the list above. They should be written in either APA or Chicago style. APA style, described in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, is the format used in the large majority of educational publications, including most of the readings for this course. Chicago style, described in the Chicago Manual of Style, is used in chapters from yearbooks of the National Society for the Study of Education.

Possible professional development programs to study:

(This list is a collection of suggestions, not an exhaustive or complete list. We encourage you to identify a PD program in your area of interest.)

  • Video Cases for Mathematics Professional Development; Learning and Teaching Geometry (Seago and colleagues)
  • Cognitively-Guided Instruction (original: Carpenter, Fennema, Franke & colleagues; more recent incarnations: Franke & Kazemi, Phillips & colleagues)
  • Video clubs (Sherin, van Es, and colleagues)
  • National Writing Project
  • Hollyhock Fellowship (CSET)
  • Partnerships for Reform in Secondary Science and Mathematics (PRiSSM; Nelson, Slavit & colleagues)
  • Project PRIME (Carlson & Gess-Newsome)
  • The Danielson Group: Promoting Teacher Effectiveness and Professional Learning
  • Online Teacher Professional Development (there are several programs; you might want to review a subset of them.)

Response: