Date of Award
5-2019
Culminating Project Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Educational Administration and Leadership, K-12: Ed.D.
Department
Educational Administration and Higher Education
College
School of Education
First Advisor
Kay Worner
Second Advisor
James Johnson
Third Advisor
David Lund
Fourth Advisor
John Eller
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Keywords and Subject Headings
Professional Development, Instructional Practice
Abstract
“The central lesson now evident is that sustained improvement in students’ outcomes requires sustained effort to change teaching and learning practices in thousands and thousands of classrooms, and this requires focused and sustained effort by all parts of the education system and partners” (Levin & Fullan, 2008, p. 289). The process of changing teaching and learning practices occurs through professional development. The Every Student Succeeds Act relies on the research of Desimone (2002), Garet, Porter, Desimore, Birman, and Yoon (2001), Guskey (2003), Hirsh, Psencik, and Brown (2014), and Wei, Drling-Hammond, Andree, Richardson, and Orphamos (2009) to identify set of criteria describing effective professional development. The six ESSA criteria are job-embedded, data-driven, classroom-focused, sustained, intensive, and collaborative each impact teachers’ instructional practices in different ways. Professional development also occurs in either a traditional format or a reform format (Garet et al., 2001).
The purpose of the study was to determine what select Minnesota K-12 teachers report as their frequency of their participation in professional development aligned to ESSA criteria, the formats of professional development in which teachers participated, and how professional development positively impacted their instructional practice. The quantitative methodology utilized a survey instrument to determine participants’ experiences with professional development.
The study results indicated that select Minnesota teachers reported participating in professional development that aligns with three of the six ESSA criteria (collaborative, data-driven, and sustained) of effective professional development more frequently than was found in the Frontline Institute Research study (Combs & Silverman, 2017). The study sample of K-12 Minnesota teachers also reported that reform formats of professional development had a higher positive impact on instructional practice than did traditional formats.
Recommended Citation
Kind, Jill, "Teachers' Experiences with Professional Development and Its Impact on Instructional Practice" (2019). Culminating Projects in Education Administration and Leadership. 54.
https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/edad_etds/54
