Professional Development In Elementary Education

Introduction Professional Development is crucial to help elementary teachers to excel. Professional Development continues to be at the forefront of helping standards-based pedagogies in elementary math classrooms (Polly, Neale, & Pugalee, 2014).Professional Development comes in all forms and all subject matters for elementary teachers. Professional Development can be just one training or on going over a period of time. The research indicates on going Professional Development is powerful because teachers learn it, plan their implication, teach it, and reflect on it. Then, they come back to build on the training even more. The more teachers learn and are confident in their subject matters, the more the students learn. Effective teachers are

The results prove that showing the teachers how to teach reading with this method yields greater results. The students show substantial growth compared to how well the students performed with their teachers being trained. The study continued for one year. The teachers were trained to use the students’ assessments to drive their instruction. There are 4 qualities that determine how well teachers respond to professional development and then are able to implement what they were trained to do during the professional development. First, how well the teachers interact with the other teachers in their professional development. Second, teachers come with knowledge and understanding of the skill before arriving at the professional development. The professional development adds to their knowledge base of that skill. Next, the teachers’ personal qualities influence how well the teachers respond to the professional development. Finally, their classroom makeup plays a role in the success of it (Brownell, Lauterbach, Dingle, Boardman, Urbach, Leko, Benedict, and

54 teachers were given new science materials. Of the 54 teachers, 18 were given extensive scaffolding by an expert, 18 were given reduced extensive scaffolding by an expert, and 18 were not given any expert scaffolding. There were 19 teachers that made up a baseline group, and they were not given any professional development nor materials. All teachers completed questionnaires on teacher outcomes only. The teachers that had scaffolding professional development improved more than the teachers that had not had the professional development in the areas of motivation, instruction, and student achievement. The section of student achievement showed significant growth from the pretest to the posttest. On the pretest, the ICU score or the integrated conceptual understanding was .58 and the posttest was .72. All science items were read aloud to the students. 46 out of the 54 that made up the 3 tiers that all had materials, but different levels of expert scaffolding took the two tests. The test was on the conceptual understanding of floating and sinking. There were 12 multiple choice answers and 2 free response items (Kleickmann, Jonen, Vehmeyer & Moller,