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Emerging digital technologies offer a transformative potential to redefine learning tasks and many examples of this potential are now available. The scaling of the innovative pedagogies emerging from the research into widespread and sustainable practice, however, remains problematic. This paper addresses the issue of scaling by using Design Based Research (DBR), also known as Educational Design Research, within teacher professional development to reposition teachers' thinking about the place of digital tools in their teaching. Using a project seeking to support the use of new digital technologies to develop children's spatial reasoning as a 'worked example', this paper highlights how the bringing together of the knowledge of educational research and knowledge of teaching practice in DBR can provide a catalyst for epistemic change. The paper will argue that DBR positions the knowledge and practice objects of both research and teaching as 'epistemic' or 'not yet known' objects and, therefore, the legitimate focus of experimentation and reflection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning to teach out-of-field is a challenge that many teachers worldwide face at some time in their career. Whether they are motivated to seek formal professional development as additional qualifications in this area, however, depends on many factors. Alignment between the specific professional development needs of out-of-field teachers and the planned learning experiences is essential to maximise sustained learning and applicability to teachers' classrooms. This paper reports on a government-funded program designed to support teachers teaching 'out-of-field' in science and mathematics. The initial design of the program drew on existing literature on effective teacher professional learning. Using the theoretical lens of 'boundary crossing' this paper reports on the perceived discontinuities that teachers 'brought with them' in order to understand where the potential for learning lay, and compared this to teachers' perceptions of their changed practice. Growth in teachers' confidence and relational understandings of content, pedagogy and curriculum was evident. Implications for future programs to support out-of-field teachers are provided. Teaching out of field (TOOF); Professional Learning (PL); Professional Development (PD) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

School systems around the world are adopting more intellectually ambitious academic content in the hopes of improving their educational productivity. In the United States, these efforts have required significant changes to teachers' instructional practices, and increased attention to teachers' formal and on-the-job professional learning opportunities. Focusing on the initial implementation of a reform-oriented approach to teaching mathematics in two local school systems in the United States, this paper examines whether – and under what circumstances – elementary teachers' professional learning opportunities predict changes in their instructional practices and beliefs related to mathematics. Our findings reveal that teachers' on-the-job interactions during the first year of reform predicted changes in their instructional practices; further, these changes were associated with the infrastructures that local school systems created to support teacher learning in mathematics. Teachers' participation in formal professional development, in contrast, predicted changes in their instructional beliefs, but not their practices. These findings have implications for future efforts to design formal and on-the-job professional learning opportunities that support ambitious educational reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports the outcomes of a ‘lesson study’ project conducted in a mathematics department with four serving teachers in a secondary school in England. Using Dudley’s lesson study framework and drawing on Hargreaves and Fullan’s notion of professional capital, the feasibility and value of collaborative lesson study as a vehicle for the development of teacher learning were explored. Planning and evaluation meetings as well as end-of-project interviews were analysed to investigate how teachers planned research lessons together and how these were evaluated. Despite time constraints, teachers who engaged in lesson study reported that the process improved understanding of their students; that collaboration helped them to develop less-teacher-centred approaches and created a stronger sense of teacher community. The project demonstrated that lesson study has potential as an alternative or complementary model of teachers’ learning, but it also throws up substantive organisational challenges if its use is to expand. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The focus of this paper is on detailing the decisions made when we created, implemented and studied a mathematics professional development (PD) program in low-performing, urban schools. Our program held many characteristics espoused by researchers as critical for effectiveness. We begin by reviewing the characteristics of quality PD programs that guided our work. For each, we detail our interpretation and how that interpretation played out in the design and implementation of the PD. We also evaluate our level of success with respect to using that characteristic to positively impact teachers' learning experiences and, where possible, the subsequent learning experiences of their students. We close with suggestions for the development of PD programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teachers working to transform classrooms towards equity and justice must resist the continual press of dominant culture, which seeks to reproduce longstanding arrangements of inequity and injustice. Little is known about the learning that supports teachers in this resistance. This article offers the Teacher Learning for Transformation (TLT) framework, which is built from two theoretical pillars: Wenger's articulation of four aspects of learning in Communities of Practice: meaning, practice, identity, and community; and Holland et al.'s notion of Figured Worlds. The resulting conceptualisation of TLT is a holistic view of multiple aspects of teachers' learning, which are embedded in and mediated by socio-historical and socio-cultural contexts. I offer an illustrative example of an articulation of the framework to support research on teacher learning towards transformation in a particular context. I comment on ways in which the framework might support further research and design of professional development which aims to support transformative learning towards greater justice in classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professional school cultures, which can be characterized by teachers who take an inquiry stance and in which exchanging knowledge and collaboratively developing classroom material is common practice, receive increasing attention. However, teachers in many schools still often work in isolation and generally do not critically examine their practices. This could lead to decreased feelings of self-efficacy and could negatively impact teacher learning. To counteract such an isolationist school culture, Lesson Study, known for its integration of collaborative and inquiry-based features, could play an essential role. Using a quasi-experimental design (N = 60) including two questionnaires, this study explores whether participating in Lesson Study influences teachers' perceptions of the school culture and conditions in their schools (such as leadership and collegial support), as well as their feelings of self-efficacy. The results reveal significant between-group differences in terms of efficacy in student engagement and significant within-group differences in the intervention group in terms of teacher autonomy and support from the school department leader as well as all teacher self-efficacy. This study could support school leaders who wish to implement, sustain or upscale Lesson Study practices in order to promote a professional school culture in their schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lesson Study is a professional development program, which engages teachers in a collaborative and long-term lesson planning process aimed at improving a single or a group of lessons. In the process, teachers may feel that they are offered three different types of support: social, emotional, and instructional. The purpose of this study was to investigate teachers' perceptions of those supports received during Lesson Study. Specifically, this study focuses on teachers' perceptions of the supports they experienced while working in a Lesson Study group, and the extent to which teachers' perceived supports differed when participating in Lesson Study in-person and then via video. Furthermore, perceptions of supports were investigated based on modalities, and whether or not the Lesson Study was single-school based or cross-school based teams. Findings from this study revealed that participants did feel socially, emotionally and instructionally supported during Lesson Study, and felt higher levels of support during in-person Lesson Study, in comparison to a video-based Lesson Study iteration. Additionally, the results suggest that levels of perceived support did not vary based on being single-school-based or cross-school-based Lesson Study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study discussed in this article examines the experiences of teachers participating in a district-wide Educational Design Research (EDR) initiative, with a particular focus on any perceived changes in teacher practices. McKenney and Reeves (2013) claimed that one of the two main goals of EDR is to benefit practice, but to date this claim has been underexplored in the literature. To test this claim, data for this quantitative study was collected from 344 teachers in an urban school district in California. The findings illustrate that EDR did enable the majority of teachers to enhance their teaching practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teacher collaboration, and teacher professional development within this context, has become an area of interest in recent years. In particular, teacher education has seen the rise of collaboration as an effective school-based professional development activity, where in-service teachers plan, observe and reflect on lessons together. The most common form of teacher collaboration is between teachers within one school or department; however, in England networks do exist that involve teachers from different schools (cross-school). Of the small number of collaborations that do extend beyond a single school, few involve teachers from different age phases (cross-phase), and only a very small number of these involve teachers planning lessons together, observing and jointly reflecting on teaching practice. This article analyses and discusses the experiences of two primary school teachers in a cross-school and cross-phase collaborative year-long innovative initiative to speculate about the implications of this type of professional development. Specifically, the article examines whether cross-phase and cross-school collaboration affords primary school mathematics teachers opportunities to develop and addresses what hinders their participation. Implications for future research on primary school teacher collaborative professional development are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This evaluation study examined a state-wide professional development program composed of two institutes, one for mathematics teachers and one for science teachers, each spanning two weeks. The program was designed to help teachers transform their practice to align with Common Core State Standards for Mathematics and Next Generation Science Standards. Data from this mixed-methods design consisted of observations, interviews, focus groups, institute documents and participant surveys. Participants experienced inquiry-based, content-specific, focused grade-band sessions, yet in some ways results indicated that the experiences fell short of having a potentially transformative effect on classroom teaching. The evaluation used a professional development framework to analyze how a seemingly well-designed program became disconnected from the participants' classroom teaching experience. Recommendations focus on ways for policy-makers, school leaders and professional development facilitators to use the professional development framework to bridge gaps identified by the evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]