Online Professional Development for High School Computer Science Teachers: Features That Support an Equity-Based Professional Learning Community

In rural, geographically dispersed school districts, access to high-quality face-to-face professional development (PD) is challenging. Our study developed and compared the effectiveness of an online PD for middle-school science teachers working in remote, rural areas of Kansas with an evidence-based traditional face-to-face PD with the goal of supporting change in teachers’ conceptual understanding and self-efficacy in utilizing Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), change in instructional practices, and overall student content learning. Fifteen rural middle-school science teacher participants were randomly selected to participate in the online or traditional PD, then taught the Toward High School Biology curriculum to their 504 middle-school students. Findings aligned with our hypothesis that online PD is as effective as traditional in improving student content knowledge related to the curriculum. Teachers’ instructional practices in using Next Generation Science Standards improved, as did their use of student-centered instruction and making science relevant to the lives of their students. Our study supports the importance of designing PD that effectively and economically brings teachers in isolated and diverse rural communities together.

Purpose While it is particularly important that professional programs help teachers become members of a community of practice, especially in crisis situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a lack of research about strategies to effectively encourage the development of a community of practice and to support teachers’ transformation of their way of teaching. Thus, this paper aims to report on lessons learned from a blended professional development (PD) program for elementary and middle school teachers in Japan focused on computer programming education. In particular, the authors explored how application of the creative learning principles in the blended teacher PD may have helped to nurture a community of practice among teachers in Japan, and how the creative learning principles may be a valuable framework for designing online or blended teacher PD to support teachers’ transition into emergency remote education. Design/methodology/approach This paper reports on the lessons learned from two iterations of blended teacher PD situated within a larger design-based research project on applying creative learning pedagogy in teacher PD. Creative learning is a learning approach focused on engagement in personally meaningful projects by tinkering with materials and learning from peers. A total of 26 teachers and coaches participated, all of whom work in elementary or middle schools across Nagano prefecture in Japan. Participant experiences were evaluated based on a pre-survey and a post-survey conducted before and after the in-person kick-off camp; observation notes taken; a final report submitted by each teacher; a debrief meeting at the end of the program; and semi-structured interviews with three selected participants after the program concluded. For this paper, the authors focus on two participants who fully and actively engaged in the program, and they introduce their stories to highlight the outcomes from the PD. Findings The results highlight how a blended PD designed to support creative learning of teachers provided teachers with opportunities to gain help from other teachers and cultivate their expertise. The results also illustrated that how a community of practice emerged from the PD program, providing teachers with moral support when they tried new lesson designs. This paper offers several recommendations for designing professional learning experiences for instructional designers and professional developers that incorporate remote learning technologies. Originality/value While an increased number of studies have shown the values of online and blended communities of practice for teacher PD, there are still limited insights on different strategies to support teachers in transforming their teaching practices. They generally do not provide teachers with opportunities to continue learning with and from one another beyond the program itself. This study examined the teachers’ experiences in a unique PD that implemented a creative learning approach into a blended learning environment for teachers.

In Online Professional Development for Teachers, the authors look closely at exemplary online professional development programs, compare them carefully with one another, and draw helpful conclusions about them--both for those who develop online programs and for teachers and administrators in search of professional development programs that make a difference. How can professional development for teachers be more efficient and effective? This essential question lies at the heart of this timely and useful book. In an era marked by a heightened emphasis on school reform, the education and professional development of teachers is widely regarded as the keystone to educational improvement. Recently a bewildering array of online professional development programs has arisen. But how effective are these programs and how do they compare with one another? A book that brings clarity and insight to this burgeoning and influential field, Online Professional Development for Teachers will be of great value to researchers, policymakers, administrators, and teachers as they work to make the most of online professional development.

This past five years has seen a drastic reform takes over in English Language Education. The reform prompts a significant change in the field of teaching, learning and the assessment system. To note, the recent implementation of CEFR-aligned Classroom-Based Assessment (CEFR CBA) demands teachers to be a comprehensive implementer in assessing students within their teaching and learning practices. As this enactment is concerned, teachers’ professional development (TPD) program plays the crucial roles to ensure teachers are well equipped with the content and pedagogical knowledge in the new policy. TPD has become an important professional learning medium for teachers in the aim of increasing their professionalism to enact educational change. Hence, this study was conducted to explore the enactment of teachers’ professional development program within two main contexts which are at the meso (school) and macro (education department) level. This study revealed that the enactment of TPD program for CEFR CBA was largely transmissive but lacking the sense of practicality to ensure the dispersion of knowledge can happened throughout the entire cascade system. Several challenges like the uncertainty to conduct in-house training, non-option teachers, participants engagement and limited time was discovered to become the factors which impede the effectiveness of TPD to serve its purpose in coaching and mentoring teachers to implement CEFR CBA. The findings of this study have the implication on the program designers and providers to better equip TPD which can address the needs of teachers at the micro level.

In this study, researchers designed and implemented a 1-year professional development (PD) program that focused on supporting teachers in evaluating and selecting digital learning contents. Participants in this investigation included 109 teachers who consented to the study amongst a total of 171 teachers from five school districts across central Ohio. In addition to their participation in the PD program, they completed surveys, interviews, and self-reflections in this mixed-method study. The results revealed that teachers’ perceived TPACK increased over time throughout the PD program, suggesting that training teachers to evaluate digital contents can be an effective PD model to improve teachers’ capacity in learning technology integration. The PD program was especially effective for teachers with less prior experience in technology integration or related training. Mathematics teachers, in comparison to teachers from other disciplines, began with low TPACK; however, these initial differences gradually diminished over the course of the PD program. In terms of their motivation in digital content evaluation, teachers’ expectancy for success increased significantly while their task values remained medium high. The qualitative analyses provided additional insights and revealed design suggestions for success in future PDs.

The present paper is an attempt to explore professional development practices for teachers in secondary schools of Pakistan. Research has attempted to discover the better ways for professional development of teachers in secondary schools in addition to many other factors like continue training, in service education, workshops etc. counseling and incentives are also very important factors to discuss here because in Pakistan teachers face many problems while getting professional development so counseling, incentives are necessary for continuous professional development of teachers. Otherwise many lose heart due to a lot of problems faced by them during professional development trainings. The purpose of the study is to explore the term professional development, to make teachers able to manage the class more efficiently and also increase the level of learning throughout their career and also find the hindrances in professional development programs of teachers in secondary schools of Pakistan and to provide the better solution to overcome the hurdles by providing different training programs batter than that provided in the past. So for these purpose schools of Pakistan we took a sample for the collection of relevant data. Our study is also helpful to explore how we can make the professional development programs more effective and professional development is helpful for teachers and what are their purpose to design these programs moreover explore the challenges they are facing recently and what issues arises related to it and how could we minimize these. Researchers have applied qualitative technique in order to collect and interpret data. Semi structured interview were conducted from ten teachers of public and private schools. Moreover hundred questionnaires are also filled up from both of the schools, in which we use the liker scale. This study also explores practical implications and what adoptions can be utilized in order to improve the professional development program of public and private school teachers in Punjab. From research it has concluded that professional development programs are not so effective because programs are characterized with inflexible curriculum which ignored teacher’s needs. In other sense there is no connection between their professional development and every day class room needs. Secondly due to the time constraints mostly teachers are not interested in these programs, they just take in to get certificates. Thirdly teachers have no input while planned training topics there is lack of teacher’s involvement in planning and training process. At the end there is no proper plan for follow up and transferred activities to class room practices. Professional development of teachers must be planned, funded and supported. Teachers must be encouraged to participate in training programs. There should be proper co-ordination in professional development programs, so that logical sequence of experience should be followed. Key words:Professional Development, Enhancement, Issues, Secondary education, Appraisal, Learning

Abstract: This qualitative case study explores how collaborative teacher research serves as a professional development model for practicing teachers. The purpose of the study is to examine how participation in a collaborative teacher research group affected three French teachers' understandings of one state's foreign language standards, and to look at how those understandings were realized in a collaborative teacher research (CTR) project. This article specifically focuses on the results emanating from how the three French teachers individually and collaboratively interpreted and implemented foreign language standards while participating in CTR. Data were collected from workshops, journal entries, classroom observations, lesson plans and materials, workshop evaluations, the teachers' research, and e-mail conversations. Results show that the teachers learned about the standards primarily from collaborating with their students. Introduction New Visions in Action (NVA), sponsored by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) and the National Foreign Language Resource Center (NFLRC) in Iowa, is moving forward a national agenda for foreign language education in an effort to meet goals set forth in the national K-12 foreign language standards (Met, 2000). These standards provide a vision of instruction for which teachers need a high level of language proficiency, extensive cultural competence, a repertoire of approaches that are learner centered and focused on communication, and knowledge about implementing strategies for working with diverse learners who have not traditionally enrolled in foreign language classes (Phillips, 1998). Foreign language pedagogy, described in the manner of the National Standards (1999), will not be realized without sustained professional development for practicing teachers. Past professional development programs have been criticized for their one-shot structure, top-down approach, and failure to address the specific needs of foreign language teachers, resulting in little or no effect on classroom instruction. This professional development paradigm is changing. Current literature discussing professional development concurs that it must be long term, collaborative, content specific, job embedded, inquiry based, and focused on the needs of teachers and the goals we are setting for our students (Alien, 2004; Clair, 2000; Diaz-Maggioli, 2003; Klonsky 2002; Kreeft Peyton, 1997; Lewis, 2000; lieberman & Miller, 2000; McCarthy & Riley, 2000). Further, teachers must be actively involved in both its design and implementation (Bartz & Keefe Singer, 1996; Darling Hammond, 1997; Glisan, 1996; Kreeft Peyton, 1997). The Teacher Development Task Force-one working group of the NVA project-is in the process of establishing a national framework that defines effective professional development for foreign language teachers. Part of the work of the task force involves identifying criteria for the creation and evaluation of professional development programs and subsequently identifying and showcasing exemplary program models. Empirical data from studies investigating the effectiveness of professional development programs are needed to inform the group's ongoing work. NVA has, in particular, called for research on the effectiveness of alternative professional development models (Curtain, 2000). Action research offers a viable solution. Although this type of research, from here on referred to as collaborative teacher research (CTR), is recognized for promoting teacher development and change in teaching practice (Anderson, Herr, & Nihlen, 1994; Burns & Hood, 1995; Freeman, 1998; McNiff, 1993), and as an insightful means for contributing to the knowledge base of teaching (Allwright; 1993; Somekh, 1993; Stenhouse, 1981) we are only beginning to know how foreign language teachers carry out this type of research (Burns, 1999). In addition, while collaboration is the critical component of successful teacher research, it has tended to be promoted and conducted in an individualistic way (Burns, 1999). …

IntroductionIn regional Australia and New Zealand, museums and art galleries are increasingly becoming primary sites of cultural engagement. They are one of the key tourist attractions for regional towns and expected to generate much needed tourism revenue. In 2017 in New South Wales alone, there were three million visitors to regional galleries and museums (MGNSW 13). However, apart from those (partially) funded by local councils, they are often run on donations, good will, and the enthusiasm of volunteers. Regional museums and galleries provide some paid, and more unpaid, employment for ageing populations. While two-thirds of Australia’s population lives in capital cities, the remainder who live in regional towns are likely to be in the 60+ age cohort because people are choosing to retire away from the bustling, growing cities (ABS). At last count, there were about 3000 museums and galleries in Australia with about 80% of them located in regional areas (Scott). Over the last 40 years, this figure has tripled from the 1000 regional and provincial museums estimated by Peter Piggott in his 1975 report (24). According to a 2014 survey (Shaw and Davidson), New Zealand has about 470 museums and galleries and about 70% are located outside capital cities. The vast majority, 85%, have less than five, full-time paid staff, and more than half of these were run entirely by ageing volunteers. They are entrusted with managing the vast majority of the history and heritage collections of Australia and New Zealand. These ageing volunteers need a diverse range of skills and experience to care for and interpret collections. How do you find the time and budget for professional development for both paid staff and volunteers? Many professional development events are held in capital cities, which are often a significant distance from the regional museum—this adds substantially to the costs of attending and the time commitment required to get there. In addition, it is not uncommon for people working in regional museums to be responsible for everything—from security, collection management, conservation, research, interpretation and public programs to changing the light bulbs. While there are a large number of resources available online, following a manual is often more difficult than learning from other colleagues or learning in a more formal educational or vocational environment where you can receive timely feedback on your work. Further, a foundational level of prior knowledge and experience is often required to follow written instructions. This article will suggest some strategies for low cost professional development and networking. It involves planning, thinking strategically and forming partnerships with others in the region. It is time to harness the power of modern communications technology and use it as a tool for professional development. Some models of professional development in regional areas that have been implemented in the past will also be reviewed. The focus for this article is on training and professional development for workers in regional museums, heritage sites and keeping places. Regional art galleries have not been included because they tend to have separate regional networks and training opportunities. For example, there are professional development opportunities provided through the Art Galleries Association of Australia and their state branches. Regional galleries are also far more likely to have one or more paid staff members (Winkworth, “Fixing the Slums” 2). Regional Museums, Volunteers, and Social CapitalIt is widely accepted that regional museums and galleries enhance social capital and reduce social isolation (Kelly 32; Burton and Griffin 328). However, while working in a regional museum or gallery can help to build friendship networks, it can also be professionally isolating. How do you benchmark what you do against other places if you are two or more hours drive from those places? How do you learn from other colleagues if all your colleagues are also isolated by the ‘tyranny of distance’ and struggling with the same lack of access to training? In 2017 in New South Wales alone, there were 8,629 active volunteers working in regional museums and galleries giving almost five million hours, which Museums and Galleries NSW calculated was worth over $150 million per annum in unpaid labour (MGNSW 1). Providing training and professional development to this group is an investment in Australia’s social and cultural capital.Unlike other community-run groups, the museums and heritage places which have emerged in regional Australia and New Zealand are not part of a national or state branch network. Volunteers who work for the Red Cross, Scouts or Landcare benefit from being part of a national organisation which provides funding, support workers, a website, governance structure, marketing, political advocacy and training (Winkworth, “Let a Thousand Flowers” 11). In Australia and New Zealand, this role is undertaken by the Australian Museums and Galleries Association AMaGA (formerly Museums Australia) and Museums Aotearoa respectively. However, both of these groups operate at the macro policy level, for example organising annual conferences, publishing a journal and developing Indigenous policy frameworks, rather than the local, practical level. In 1995, due to their advocacy work, Landcare Australia received $500 million over five years from the federal government to fund 5000 Landcare groups, which are run by 120,000 volunteers (Oppenheimer 177). They argued successfully that the sustainable development of land resources started at the local level. What do we need to do to convince government of the need for sustainable development of our local and regional museum and heritage resources?Training for Volunteers Working in Regional Museums: The Current SituationAnother barrier to training for regional museum workers is the assumption that the 70:20:10 model of professional development should apply. That is, 70% of one’s professional development is done ‘on the job’ by completing tasks and problem-solving; 20% is achieved by learning from mentors, coaches and role models and 10% is learnt from attending conferences and symposia and enrolling in formal courses of study. However, this model pre-supposes that there are people in your workplace whom you can learn from and who can show you how to complete a task, and that you are not destroying or damaging a precious, unique object if you happen to make a mistake.Some museum volunteers come with skills in research, marketing, administration, customer service or photography, but very few come with specific museum skills like writing exhibition text, registering an acquisition or conserving artefacts. These skills need to be taught. As Kylie Winkworth has written, museum management now requires a [...] skills set, which is not so readily found in small communities, and which in many ways is less rewarding for the available volunteers, who may have left school at 15. We do not expect volunteer librarians to catalogue books, which are in any case of low intrinsic value, but we still expect volunteers in their 70s and 80s to catalogue irreplaceable heritage collections and meet ever more onerous museum standards. That so many volunteers manage to do this is extraordinary. (“Let a Thousand Flowers” 13)Workers in regional museums are constantly required to step outside their comfort zones and learn new skills with minimal professional support. While these challenging experiences can be very rewarding, they are also potentially damaging for our irreplaceable material cultural heritage.Training for museum professionals has been on the agenda of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) since 1947 (Boylan 62). However, until 1996, their work focused on recommending curricula for new museum professionals and did not include life-long learning and on-going professional development. ICOM’s International Committee for the Training of Personnel (ICTOP) and the ICOM Executive has responded to this in their new curricula—ICOM Curricula Guidelines for Professional Museum Development, but this does not address the difficulties staff or volunteers working in regional areas face in accessing training.In some parts of Australia, there are regional support and professional development programs in place. For example, in Queensland, there is the Museum Development Officer (MDO) network. However, because of the geographic size of the state and the spread of the museums, these five regionally based staff often have 60-80 museums or keeping places in their region needing support and so their time and expertise is spread very thinly. It is also predominantly a fee-for-service arrangement. That is, the museums have to pay for the MDO to come and deliver training. Usually this is done by the MDO working with a local museum to apply for a Regional Arts Development Fund (RADF) grant. In Victoria there is a roving curator program where eligible regional museums can apply to have a professional curator come and work with them for a few days to help the volunteers curate exhibitions. The roving curator can also provide advice on “develop[ing] high quality exhibitions for diverse audiences” via email, telephone and networking events. Tasmania operates a similar scheme but their two roving curators are available for up to 25 days of work each year with eligible museums, provided the local council makes a financial contribution. The New South Wales government supports the museum advisor program through which a museum professional will come to your museum for up to 20 days/year to give advice and hands-on training—provided your local council pays $7000, an amount that is matched by the state government—for this service. In 2010, in response to recommendations in the Dunn Report (2007), the Collections Council of Australia (CCA) established a pilot project with the City of Kalgoorlie-Boulder in West

This special session examines frameworks for the preparation of high school computer science (CS) teachers from the Israeli perspective. Specifically, several Israeli CS teacher preparation programs and their components are presented. The presentation includes both a general overview and a detailed description of the actual implementation of such programs. This bipolar presentation, we suggest, provides practical guidelines with respect to CS teacher preparation, both for policy makers and for faculty members who wish to establish a CS teacher preparation program at their universities.

This research aimed to assess three case studies of in-service science teachers regarding their practices of socio-scientific issue (SSI)-based teaching as they participated in a specially developed professional development (PD) program. Data were collected throughout the PD program from group discussions, observations, interviews, and the review of documents, and they were analyzed using within-case and cross-case analysis methods. The findings showed that the PD program had positive impacts on the teachers’ practices of SSI-based teaching. There were some modifications that combined their old teaching styles and SSI-based teaching; however, they attempted to link the science content within a social context in a way that motivated student ownership of learning. They modified their roles as information providers to be learning facilitators. Their students were also encouraged to employ scientific evidence-based reasoning to address the issues under discussion. The three science teachers also added questions to enhance student thinking about the application of scientific knowledge in society. At the individual level, teaching confidence and teaching enthusiasm had powerful influences on their practices of SSI-based teaching. At the school level, the amount of teaching time and the lack of experts on SSI-based teaching in the school were found to be barriers to SSI-based teaching. The results of this study contribute to the growing body of knowledge about preparing science teachers to link their science lessons to the real world, and they also provide a framework for future studies.

The professional development of teachers in India is still, by and large, based on formal and outdated professional learning traditions, often characterised by crash courses and one-off workshops. In education, blogs have proven to be an effective means of establishing and maintaining collaborative learning networks and helping members reflect on their professional practices. Information and communications technology (ICT) enabled practices of teacher professional development is still in its infancy in India. Moreover, there is limited research in India to secure foundational understanding of how and in what ways teachers of English in India use blogs for their professional development. This study explores the use of teacher reflective practice, teacher networking, and teacher collaboration, beyond formal ICT training, through blog-based professional development of English teachers in the Mumbai region of India. Using data collected from 32 teachers from three private schools in Mumbai, through ICT interactive workshop observations, questionnaires, interviews, and blog comments, this action case study explains whether and why blogging, as a learning community, has the potential to add significant value to existing professional development of English teachers in Mumbai.

This paper proposes a collaborative partnership between practicing and pre-service teachers as a model for implementing science teacher education and professional development. This model provides a structure within which partnerships will work collaboratively to plan, implement and reflect on a series of Science lessons in cycles of action-reflection adapted from Korthagen’s (2001) ALACT model. Issues within Science education, teacher professional development and teacher education are considered in the development of the model which attempts to deepen constructivist approaches to teachers’ professional learning. It attempts to address issues with teacher professional development in the science area and improve professional experience practice for pre-service teachers. The nexus between theory and practice is the focus of the model which hopes to inform both teacher education and professional development for science teachers in the primary sector.

The increasing integration of digital tools into teaching presents opportunities to enhance interactivity, flexibility, and student-centeredness for science education. However, for these opportunities to be fully realized, teachers need to develop the necessary competencies and positive beliefs to effectively incorporate digital media into their pedagogical practices. Therefore, offering high-quality professional development (PD) is essential. Such programs provide teachers with hands-on training, strengthen their self-efficacy, and support student-centered teaching strategies, including the reflective use of digital media. Our ministry-funded project LFB-Labs-digital has developed empirically based PD programs in student labs across different subjects. For this context, a design-based research (DBR) approach was conducted within an interdisciplinary quality management (QM) to aim at analyzing specific success factors and barriers of these PD programs. Hereby, we collect data from regular web-based discussions and short follow-up interviews with PD facilitators about their PD programs as well as incorporated observations. The evaluation framework was aligned with established criteria for effective PD, allowing for a systematic analysis of key success factors and necessary modifications. Our findings highlight several key factors for the success of PD programs in student labs. Identified success factors including technical support, curricular alignment, flexible formats, hands-on orientation, peer support and structured reflection opportunities that help teachers critically evaluate and adapt digital strategies to their teaching practice. These factors must be balanced against persistent barriers such as technical and organizational barriers as well as teachers’ heterogeneous digital competencies. Facilitators emphasize the need for PD programs that address diverse teacher needs while maintaining coherence in content delivery. By integrating multiple perspectives—facilitators, and systematic observations—this study contributes to a deeper understanding of how student labs can function as effective PD environments and provides concrete insights for scaling up and optimizing digital competency acquisition across subjects.

In the last twenty years in US science education, professional development has emphasized the need to change science instruction from a direct instruction model to a more participatory and constructivist learning model. The result of these reform efforts has seen an increase in science education professional development that is focused on providing teaching strategies that promote inquiry learning to learn science content. Given these reform efforts and teacher responses to professional development, research seems to indicate that whether teachers actually change their practice may depend on the teachers' basic epistemological beliefs about the nature of science. The person who builds the bridge between teacher beliefs and teacher practice is the designer and facilitator of science teacher professional development. Even though these designers and facilitators of professional development are critical to science teacher change, few have studied how these professionals approach their work and what influence their beliefs have on their professional development activities. Eight developers and designers of science education professional development participated in this study through interviews and the completion of an online questionnaire. To examine the relationship between professional development providers' science beliefs and their design, development, and implementation of professional development experiences for science teachers, this study used the Views on Science Education Questionnaire (VOSE), and interview transcripts as well as analysis of the documents from teacher professional development experiences. Through a basic interpretive qualitative analysis, the predominant themes that emerged from this study suggest that the nature of science is often equated with the practice of science, personal beliefs about the nature of science have a minimal impact on the design of professional development experiences, current reform efforts in science education have a strong influence on the design of professional development, and those providing science education professional development have diverse views about epistemology and the nature of science. The results and conclusions from this study lead to a discussion of implications and recommendations for the planning and design of professional development for science teachers, including the need to making equity and social justice issues an integral part of inquiry and scientific practice.

The paper examined professional development of senior secondary school biology teachers on inquiry-based teaching. To become and remain a competent biology teacher requires a continuous process that starts from pre-service experiences in undergraduate years to the end of a professional career. Science knowledge is constantly changing and expanding its relevance to societal issues therefore, these teachers needs constant opportunities to build their understanding and abilities in the same direction. Consequently, the National Science Education Standards (NSES) presented a vision of learning and teaching science in which students will have the opportunity to become scientifically literate. (NSES)(NRC,1996: 56). In the vision, science teachers are professionally responsible for their own professional development and for the maintenance of their teaching profession, hence this paper. Professional development is a specialized training, formal education or advanced professional learning to offer help to administrators, teachers and other educators improve their professional knowledge, skill and effectiveness in the teaching of biology in the classroom (hidden curriculum, 2014). The paper considered some majors issues that leads to teacher professional development which includes: professional development for biology teachers on inquiry-based teaching,  teachers current teaching of biology, concept of inquiry-based teaching, student learning of biology, consensus  or standards for professional development programme, impact of professional development programme, researches on professional development programme, challenges of professional development programme,  the paper was concluded by stating that  coaching and support for teachers at points of implementation should be encouraged,  professional development programs should be for a longer period of time more than what is obtainable presently, proper monitoring and evaluation of training received and its implementation among others.