Section archive - Professional Development

The authors investigated the design and implementation of the Climate Academy, a professional development project intended to help teachers learn about climate change and support the development and implementation of climate change topics in participating teachers’ curricula. This article indicates that a focus on the science of climate change and modeling of theoretically driven pedagogical activities can help teachers improve their climate science knowledge as well as their understanding of how to teach climate science concepts by aligning content and practices with students’ local environment. Furthermore, the authors found that all teachers appreciated the opportunity to learn important content from climate experts and experience hands-on modeling during the summer institute.

This study describes the visions of nine teachers over the course of seven years. The results highlight how the teachers articulated clear visions for their students that focused on helping them become motivated, successful, lifelong learners, and these teachers designed their instruction and classroom environments to support their visions. The authors found, however, these teachers encountered far more obstacles to enacting their visions than they did affordances for working toward them.

The purpose of this study is to examine teacher-perceived capacity to meet their students’ additional support needs. This study also aims to identify perceived sources of help or hindrance in meeting students’ additional support needs, as these sources may be relevant when focusing on the improvement of teacher potential. The findings reveal that the participants perceive themselves to be fairly capable of meeting students’ additional support needs. The participants’ own competencies are perceived as being helpful in addressing all dimensions of students’ additional support needs. The teachers discern four sources of help or hindrance to which teachers attribute their success: teacher him/herself, student characteristics, school/working conditions and teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs.

This article addresses a growing need to attend to the way teacher professional development (TPD) is enacted in today’s schools. The authors argue that that the physical presence of students is the missing variable in the majority of TPD efforts. In this article, they present a framework for administrators, teacher leaders, and teachers to either evaluate or initiate TPD in relation to levels of physical student presence.