Does It Make a Difference? Evaluating Professional Development

TL;DR: The authors provides an international review of the current state of teacher education, with chapters from an international group of teacher educators focusing on major issues that are confronting teacher educators now and in the next decade.

Abstract: The term, qualitative research, is derived from its reference to “quality” through detailed narratives and observations. Such research typically involves the examination of phenomena in social settings, in which researchers give voice to participants. Qualitative investigations occur in the natural world, focus on context, and employ multiple methods to gain an understanding of the participants under study (Rossman & Rallis, 2012). Researchers who “support a way of looking at research that honors an inductive style, a focus on individual meaning, and the importance of rendering the complexity of a situation,” typically engage in qualitative research (Creswell, 2014, p. 4). The use of words rather than numbers or statistics typically characterizes this form of inquiry

TL;DR: Concerns are presented that both preservice education and inservice professional development require substantial improvement if early childhood education professionals are to both recognize the role of technology in developmentally appropriate practice and develop skills in using it in classroom settings.

TL;DR: In this article, a provisional teacher professional development (PD) evaluation framework was developed for use in a study that set out to formally evaluate the impact of a PD initiative on teachers' professional learning in five urban primary disadvantaged schools in the Republic of Ireland.