This article offers a preliminary report of the first 2 years of a 3-year partnership between a university faculty member and a public middle-school teacher. The partnership was guided by four questions: How does academic service learning transform curricular delivery and the critical identity of teacher as a professional? What is the impact of…

This study assessed the effectiveness of a site-based teacher education program for undergraduate seniors at the University of Houston. The program's final field-based year is divided into a professional development semester and student teaching. During the professional development semester, students are placed in Professional Development Sites…

"Taking the Lead" is an initiative of The Center for Career Development in Early Care and Education at Wheelock College, working in partnership with other national organizations and government policymakers. The initiative is intended to build the capacity of the early care and education field to improve program quality by: (1) improving…

This booklet is designed to help Professional Development School (PDS) planners and implementers who seek guidance in designing and carrying out impact documentation. It can also help students, researchers, and policymakers interested in investigating PDS effectiveness. The booklet offers a conceptual framework for conducting impact documentation,…

This paper reports on an on-going action research study of the elementary school science education courses at the University of Victoria. The Department of Social and Natural Sciences requires that professors evaluate their teaching effectiveness annually using a variety of methods including student evaluations, peer observations, course outline…

Data from the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) were used to explore how learning environments within bilingual classes where students perform very well on the Spanish version of the TAAS are shaped by forces surrounding the TAAS and how this shaping process affects teachers. Four elementary schools were selected based on the high…

This paper describes the Professional Development Center at Fitchburg State College, one of the nine colleges of Massachusetts' system of public higher education. The Center's mission emphasizes outreach to public schools in the area. Its tenets include: principles and goals of the whole system must be described and understood before meaningful…

This paper discusses the unique challenges posed by executives in MBA (Masters of Business Administration) programs and how these challenges can be met insofar as the core information technology (IT) course is concerned, drawing on the experience of the teachers' across four programs, live and on video, over two years, involving more than 250…

During the fall of 1996, the Technical Innovations in Educational Research (TIER) laboratory at Illinois State University (ISU) initiated a followup study of a Professional Development School (PDS) begun the prior year within a local elementary school district. Researchers conducted telephone interviews with the former ISU student teachers who…

This report evaluates a project to provide a year-long English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) institute for 100 ESL literacy providers and instructors in Pennsylvania in order to enhance the skills of the participants in the institute. The ESL Institute provides an intensive 3-day summer workshop followed up by two 2-day workshops and a spring 2-day…

This document reports on state indicators for the quality of science and mathematics education in public schools and the trends in science and mathematics education as of 1999-2000, a system developed by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CSSO) in cooperation with the state departments of education, federal agencies, and professional…

This report presents guidelines for secondary school principals for including students with disabilities in large scale educational assessments. In the summer of 2001, a focus group of 13 administrators were brought together to share these promising practices for ensuring that students with disabilities participate in state and district-wide…

These case studies show how to improve the pre-service teaching experience by mentoring cooperating teachers. The case studies come from a Professional Development School (PDS) involving a large university and small secondary school. A system of "super cooperating teachers" was implemented in the PDS to accommodate all of the student teachers at…

In this paper, the researchers draw on their experience with a professional development project to propose a model for studying the formation and development of teacher community. The project described brought together 22 English and social studies teachers, as well as a Special Educator and an ESL teacher, from an urban high school for a period…

Chapter 1, "Step 1: The Change Process," focuses on the change process and describes why and how schools engage in program restructuring and resource allocation. Chapter 2, "Step 2: Defining a New Educational Strategy," discusses decisions that must be made about the regular education program and how the various schools adopted, adapted or created…