Abstract: In this article, we discuss the latest renewal of interest in the U.S. in teacher research and other forms of practitioner inquiry, a movement that is now a little more than a decade old. We argue that part of what makes the current wave of interest a movement and not just the latest educational fad is that teacher research stems from several different, but in some ways compatible, intellectual traditions and educational projects. We identify five major trends that characterize the current U.S. movement: (a) the prominence of teacher research in teacher education, professional development, and school reform; (b) the development of conceptual frameworks and theories of teacher research; (c) the dissemination of teacher research beyond the local level; (d) the emergence of critique of teacher research and the teacher research movement; and (e) the transformative potential of teacher research on some aspects of university culture. Based on our own teacher research experiences and understandings of teacher re...

Abstract: Since World War II, efforts to improve schools have numbered in the thousands. Most efforts have concentrated on improving the curriculum materials used in schools or on "training" teachers in new instructional methods. Many of these efforts have gone under the banner of "building instructional capacity," a term that for decades has been featured prominently in conversations about educational reform. Unfortunately, three decades of research has found that only a few interventions have had detectable effects on instruction and that, when such effects are detected, they rarely are sustained over time. A review of research and professional experience with school improvement suggests several explanations for these disheartening findings. One is that schools are complex social organizations situated within, and vitally affected by, other complex social systems including families, communities, and professional and regulatory agencies. The larger social environment of schools constrains and shapes the actions of teachers, students, and administrators, often in ways that greatly complicate the work of school improvement. Challenges to school improvement are particularly acute in highpoverty settings where recruiting wellqualified teachers is difficult and where the emotional and health problems of students often deflects attention to educational issues or impedes work on them. As a result, many researchers now believe that school improvement involves much more than efforts to change interactions occurring within schools. To succeed, school improvement interventions also must attend to the complex relationships that exist among intervention agents, schools, and their social environments. Disciplines Curriculum and Instruction | Curriculum and Social Inquiry | Educational Administration and Supervision | Educational Methods | Education Policy | Teacher Education and Professional Development Comments View on the CPRE website. This report is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/cpre_researchreports/8 Instruction, Capacity, and Improvement David K. Cohen and Deborah Loewenberg Ball CPRE Research Report Series RR-43

Abstract: In this article, Mary Kay Stein, Margaret Schwan Smith, and Edward A. Silver identify and describe the challenges that practicing teacher educators and professional developers are likely to encounter as they design and implement new programs to help teachers learn new paradigms of teaching and learning amidst current educational reforms. The authors call attention to the fact that, just as teachers will need to relearn their teaching practice, so will experienced professional developers need to relearn their craft, which traditionally has been defined as providing courses, workshops, and seminars. This article focuses on two professional developers who engaged in long-term efforts to work with teachers in new ways, identifying the tensions that each actually faced. The cases illustrate the challenges that professional developers may encounter in supporting the transformation of teachers, including learning how to work with groups of teachers in school settings, expanding their repertoires beyond workshops...

Abstract: ContextThere is a growing consensus among medical educators that to promote the professional development of medical students, schools of medicine should provide explicit learning experiences in professionalism.ObjectiveTo determine whether and how schools of medicine were teaching professionalism in the 1998-1999 academic year.Design, Setting, and ParticipantsA 2-stage survey was sent to 125 US medical schools in the fall of 1998. A total of 116 (92.3%) responded to the first stage of the survey. The second survey led to a qualitative analysis of curriculum materials submitted by 41 schools.Main Outcome MeasuresPresence or absence of learning experiences (didactic or experiential) in undergraduate medical curriculum explicitly intended to promote professionalism in medical students, with curriculum evaluation based on 4 attributes commonly recognized as essential to professionalism: subordination of one's self-interests, adherence to high ethical and moral standards, response to societal needs, and demonstration of evincible core humanistic values.ResultsOf the 116 responding medical schools, 104 (89.7%) reported that they offer some formal instruction related to professionalism. Fewer schools have explicit methods for assessing professional behaviors (n=64 [55.2%]) or conduct targeted faculty development programs (n=39 [33.6%]). Schools use diverse strategies to promote professionalism, ranging from an isolated white-coat ceremony or other orientation experience (n=71 [78.9%]) to an integrated sequence of courses over multiple years of the curriculum (n=25 [27.8%]). Of the 41 schools that provided curriculum materials, 27 (65.9%) addressed subordinating self-interests; 31 (75.6%), adhering to high ethical and moral standards; 17 (41.5%), responding to societal needs; and 22 (53.7%), evincing core humanistic values.ConclusionsOur results suggest that the teaching of professionalism in undergraduate medical education varies widely. Although most medical schools in the United States now address this important topic in some manner, the strategies used to teach professionalism may not always be adequate.

Abstract: This article examines technology professional development for preservice and inservice teachers. It reviews the current status of technology in our schools, what we know about professional development in the area of technology, and research on efforts to increase preservice teacher use of technology in appropriate ways.

Abstract: This paper reports the results of a literature review on the subject of beginning teacher induction, presenting a conceptually oriented discussion of the induction literature. It examines the multiple meanings associated with induction as a phase in learning to teach, a process of teacher socialization, and a program for beginning teachers. The paper begins by underscoring the special character of the first encounter with real teaching and highlights the pivotal position of the induction phase in a broader continuum of teacher preparation and development. The report goes on to discuss induction as a process of teacher socialization and of initiating teachers into their new role. It also examines beginning teacher induction as a process of situated learning. The paper explains induction as a formal program for beginning teachers, offering a brief history of the process; defining induction programs; noting characteristics of quality programs (e.g., a developmental stance toward beginning teachers, a supportive context, and mentoring); and describing programmatic dilemmas or tensions (e.g., individualistic versus collective orientations and retention versus quality). (Contains 97 references.) (SM) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document.

Abstract: Introduction On the brink of the twenty-first century, our nation continues to struggle with the challenge of becoming a multicultural society. Although our society takes pride in the opportunities for mobility offered to its citizens, inequities based on racial and ethnic differences continue to exist. This study focuses on continuing inequities for professors in higher education. Today, with race-based scholarships under scrutiny, affirmative action losing support, and efforts to achieve diversity and equity in higher education contested, there is an urgent need to reexamine the issues of successful recruitment, retention, and development of faculty of color in the academic workplace. Myths about minorities in academia abound. Among those noted by Wilson (1987), Olives (1988), Nakanishi (1993), and Smith, Wolf, and Busenberg (1996) are: the Asian American experience in academia is "exemplary" and devoid of any racial/ethnic bias; minority women are "prime hires"; because of high demand/low supply, minority PhDs are flooded with job offers; there are no qualified minorities; and minorities possess unexceptional credentials. Wilson (1987) laments: "Myths die hard, even in the face of incontrovertible data. . . . Americans . . . do not like to admit that some intractable problems resist solution because we do not want to solve them or, perhaps worse, because we hope they will go away" (p. 13). Statistics detail dismal participation and completion rates for African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans in the American educational system. Low representation rates for people of color among tenure-track and tenured faculty ranks follow this pattern. Even though the record appears far better for the Asian Pacific American population, they reported exclusion as a fact of their working lives in this study, a finding that echoes reports in other published work. This article presents a comprehensive study of African American, Asian Pacific American, Native American, and Latino faculty in eight states that were members of the Midwestern Higher Education Commission (MHEC) from 1993 to 1995: Illinois, Kansas, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Missouri, and Minnesota. We present critical perspectives that emerge from our data with the hope of contributing to a comprehensive understanding of successful recruitment, retention, and development of faculty of color in higher education. These perspectives come from interviews with faculty of color themselves, from statistical data collected for our study, and from a comprehensive analysis of data presented in the literature. A thorough examination of these data reveals not only the continued underrepresentation of faculty of color in the nation's colleges and universities but, equally significantly if more subtly, the persistence - and the personal and professional effects - of a decidedly chilly work environment. Challenges to the successful recruitment, retention, and development of faculty of color include significant barriers within academia itself that discourage people of color from becoming productive and satisfied members of the professoriate. Our findings and analysis show that the predominant barrier is a pervasive racial and ethnic bias that contributes to unwelcoming and unsupportive work environments for faculty of color. However, it is important to note that ours is a study of successes. We interviewed faculty of color who currently have faculty positions. Despite the high probability of failure facing students of color who prepare for the professoriate, all faculty interviewed for this study, as well as faculty quoted in the literature, have earned tenure-track and tenured positions in higher education. Many are administrators. They have not left higher education. Positive workplace experiences strengthen the commitment of faculty of color to remain in academe. Their achievement is reason for pride; yet the fact is that this elite and successful group of scholars, even among those who are not only tenured but who also hold high-level, high-profile academic appointments, still experience continued exclusion and isolation. …

Abstract: Professional development for faculty in higher education takes many forms, from self-directed activities to organized programs of learning. Described in this article is a comprehensive definition of continuing professional development followed by a conceptual framework for thinking about those factors that support or impede our professional development. We conclude with a case study of one professor's career development, noting where various factors in the framework have played a part.

Abstract: In this article we articulate a methodology for studying mathematics teacher development in the context of reform. The generation of accounts of teachers'practice, an adaptation of the case study, provides an approach to understanding teachers' current practice and to viewing their current practice in the context of development toward envisioned reforms. The methodology is an alternative both to studies that focus on teachers' deficits and to teachers' own accounts of their practice. Conceptual frameworks developed within the mathematics education research community are applied to the task of investigating the nature of practice developed by teachers in transition. We characterize this methodology as explicating the teacher's perspective from the researchers' perspectives.

Abstract: At the heart of adult learning lies reflection, a much used but rarely defined term in the worlds of educationists. The purpose of this article is to examine its limitations and possIbilities for l...

Abstract: (1999). Inclusion of Students With Emotional/Behavioral Disorders: A Survey of Teachers in General and Special Education. Preventing School Failure: Alternative Education for Children and Youth: Vol. 43, Inclusion Revisted: Is It Really the Right Thing to Do?, pp. 103-111.

Abstract: Students' motivation to learn is related to their epistemological beliefs. Faculty can promote student motivation by designing learning activities that facilitate student development of more sophisticated epistemological beliefs.

Abstract: Book Review The Postmodern Educator. Arts-based Inquiries and Teacher Development Diamond, Patrick and Mullen, Carol. (Eds.) 1999. New York: Peter Lang. 466 pages. ISBN 0820441015 (paperback) Educational Research in Transition Take a strip of paper and join its both ends so that you wind one end upside down before fixing it together with the other. You have constructed the central metaphor of Diamond and Mullen's book The Postmodern Educator, the double-faced Mobius strip that symbolizes the dualistic and endless movement of artistic knowing. Learning is constructing a threedimensional spiral: moving to the beginning of a new cycle on the other side of the strip and changing the point of view. The editors of this book, flooded with metaphors, describe themselves as educator detectives around the autopsy table questioning the tradition of empirical research and creating new methodology. They are accompanied by phenomenological humanists, subjective particularists, representatives of critical theory, poststructuralists, contextualists, constructivists, narrativists, postmodernists, and arts-based inquirers. Their aim is not to bring heretics to trial or to detect the causes of a crime but to understand the situation. To proceed in the metaphoric line of the editors, the book is about composing new melodies, about a journey along a slippery lakeshore, in labyrinths, galleries, stairways... The conceptual keys of the research then become narrativity, experiential inquiry, participation, openness, and pluralism. Instead of promoting the enlightenment story of progress, the authors prefer open-ended and contradictory texts, networks and complexity in posing questions. The book comes out in a time of fracture and transition in educational research and in society at large. It is a contribution to the discourse on the paradigm change, and it reflects upon the effects of the postmodern state of teacher education and scholarly work. The editors characterize their standpoint to postmodernism as reaching for something that does not yet exist. On the other hand, they consider their book a palimpsest, like parchment bearing traces of several layers of revised texts. From the intertextual point of view, there is nothing new in the book; it leans on the works of others, as in pastiche. The task of reviewing the book came to me in the middle of intensive debate on the nature of the so-called artistic research in Finnish art colleges. Are our communities of arts and education prepared to carry out postmodern demands for change: Could a dissertation be a poem, a performance, or a painting? My position in the debate is that of a Finnish art teacher educator and a researcher whose postgraduate studies included 2 years in the United States. I decided to write my review according to the methods of the authors, i.e. through listening to the contradictory voices it provoked in myself. Teacher Researcher as Artist The authors are socially active educational researchers and their main goal is integrating arts into research. Awareness of both this premise as well as the backgrounds of the authors is worth noticing to understand the book. Most of the chapters are written by the editors, Australian born Patrick Diamond and his former student Carol Mullen who is nowadays working in the USA. The book is largely based on Professor Diamond's research classes at the University of Toronto in Canada. The other authors are five professors, one kindergarten teacher, four high school teachers, and a puppeteer. They hail from the USA, Australia, and Canada. One of the education professors is the only writer who has studied any visual arts. The editors emphasize the nature of art as a representation of reality. Unlike in correspondence theory, everything we know is transformed by language and power structures. The quality of experience often emerges only after being represented in artful form. …

Abstract: Faculty should learn to use constructive criticism to improve teaching, as we do in the case of research.

Abstract: There is arguably no area more important to distance learning administrators than that of training and support for distance educators. Many educators have reached a level of understanding and experience in which they are highly confident in their ability to deliver quality instruction. When they are faced with adopting techniques that seem to curtail their abilities to immediately interact with students and require the utilization of new technologies, they are understandably fearful that their instruction and subsequent evaluations will suffer.

Abstract: A supportive teaching culture provides various forms of informative feedback about individual teaching effectiveness without threatening individual teachers. This supportive approach stimulates motivation to achieve excellence in teaching.

Abstract: As is now well documented, the numbers of children of color, poor children, and children with identified disabilities are on the rise in the United States, and in some places “minority” groups are now the majority of the school population (National Education Goals Panel, 1997). At the same time there is mounting evidence that the present educational system is failing to serve disproportionately large numbers of children who are not part of the mainstream (Christensen & Dorn, 1997; Darling-Hammond, 1995; Kozol, 1991). In response, there have been many calls for reform of public schooling and of teacher education (Banks, 1997; Dilworth, 1998; Rice-Jordan, 1995). A number of scholars have argued that we need teachers (and teacher educators) who enter and remain in the teaching force not to carry on business as usual but to work for social change and social justice (Ayers, Hunt & Quinn, 1998;Cochran-Smith, 1995, 1998;Oakes & Lipton, 1999; Skrtic & Sailor, 1996).

Abstract: This work was produced in whole or in part with funds from the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education, under contract number RJ96006301. The content does not necessarily reflect the position or policy of OERI or the Department of Education, nor does mention or visual representation of trade names, commercial products, or organizations imply endorsement by the federal government.

Abstract: THE REPORTED WORK is part of an ongoing qualitative study of faculty uses of the Internet at our institution. The goal of the present work is to categorize the functions of course Web sites from both researcher and faculty perspectives. Using a qualitative content analysis approach, we first analyzed the functions of 25 publicly accessible course Web sites. We then interviewed a subset of the sites’ authors. We found that all sites performed course management functions which were valued by instructors; that a small subset also demonstrated easily implemented, successful, and pedagogically interesting uses of the Web; and that pages in our sample conveyed implicit and explicit social information to students about the class and instructor through four primary channels. We describe these findings and discuss their implications for teaching practice and for further evaluation research.

Abstract: In this paper we propose a model of postgraduate supervision which broadens the traditional focus on “expertise” to include support for the student and the capacity to balance creativity with criticism in supervision. Based on this model, we report results of a survey of postgraduate students in the Faculty of Agriculture at UWA investigating the desirable characteristics of a supervisor. We find that students clearly rank nonexpertise-related characteristics of supervision which provide support and which balance creativity with criticism as more important overall than expertise-related characteristics. We use these results to argue for staff development opportunities to be enhanced to enable academics to receive training in these areas of supervision competence which are ostensibly unrelated to expertise.

Abstract: The author defines the activities that distinguish successful development programs and describes a survey administered in 1998 to faculty development officers at 250 randomly selected community colleges. Based on responses from 130 colleges, the author profiles those responsible for faculty development, summarizes the extent that each development activity is used, and articulates the need for concerted faculty development efforts at community colleges.

Abstract: Researchers in reading acquisition over the past several years have routinely recommended that teachers in the primary grades increase the amount of instruction in phonological awareness and the alphabetic principle; however, most research with this focus has occurred in clinical settings. This study discusses the involvement of kindergarten teachers in developing practical application of the knowledge base in real classroom situations that included children with a wide range of ability. The project investigated two intensity levels of professional development, and focused on the efficacy of the activities for promoting children's early reading progress. Children whose teachers learned to implement phonological and print awareness activities performed better than children in control classes on phonological and literacy measures, with those in classes of teachers with more intensive professional development achieving the highest literacy outcomes.

Abstract: In this study we addressed 2 questions: (a) How can we document opportunities to learn aligned with the NCTM Standards? (b) How can we support elementary teachers' efforts to provide such opportunities? We conducted a study of the effect of curriculum (problem solving vs. skills) and professional development (subject-matter focused vs. collegial support) on practices and learning. From analyses of videotapes and field notes, we created 3 scales for estimating students' opportunities to learn. Analyses of fractions instruction in 21 elementary classrooms provided evidence of the technical quality of the indicators and indicated that support for teachers' knowledge may be required for a problem-solving curriculum to be beneficial.