Abstract: This qualitative study explores the empowering practices in teacher professional development programs held by an NGO development project for community school teachers. The literature review is divided into two main sections. The first section provided insights of the conceptual frameworks of professional development and empowerment along with international best practices. The second section focuses on the concept of community based learning, and the historical background on community schools in Egypt. Data was collected using semi-structured interviews, document analysis, and observations. The participant were 35 composed of facilitators/teachers, project manager, students, and mentors. The findings showed that while teachers where empowered in some dimensions, they are other aspects in which they were not fully empowered in yet. The paper concludes with practical implications, future recommendations, and limitations.

Because what we do in staff development can best be understood in terms of Contexts, Strategies, and Structures, the remainder of the book features distinguished educators who write from their own unique experiential and theoretical stances. Jacqueline Ancess describes how teachers in New York City secondary schools increase their own learning while improving student outcomes • Milbrey W. McLaughlin and Joel Zarrow demonstrate how teachers learn to use data to improve their practice and meet educational standards • Lynne Miller presents a case study of a long-lived school, university partnership • Beverly Falk recounts stories of teachers working together to develop performance assessments, to understand their student’s learning, to re-think their curriculum, and much more • Laura Stokes analyzes a school that successfully uses inquiry groups. There are further contributions (including some from novice teachers) by Anna Richert Ershler, Ann Lieberman, Diane Wood, Sarah Warshauer Freedman, and Joseph P. McDonald. These powerful exemplars from practice provide a much-needed overview of what matters and what really works in professional development today.

This open access book presents a comparative study on how large-scale professional development programs for teachers are designed and implemented. Around the world, governments and educators are recognizing the need to educate students in a broad range of higher order cognitive skills and socio-emotional competencies, and providing effective opportunities for teachers to develop the expertise needed to teach these skills is a crucial aspect of effective implementation of curricula which include those goals. This study examines how large-scale efforts to empower teachers for deeper instruction have been designed, how they have been implemented, and their outcomes. To do so, it investigates six programs from England, Colombia, Mexico, India, and the United States. Though all six are intended to broaden and deepen students’ curricular aspirations, each takes this expansion of curricular goals in a different direction. The ambitious education reforms studied here explicitly focus on building teachers’ capacity to teach on a broader set of goals. Through a discerning analysis of program documents, evaluations, and interviews with senior leaders and participants in the programs, the book identifies the various theories of action used in these programs, examines how they were implemented, and discusses what they achieved. As such, it offers an indispensable resource for education leaders interested in designing and implementing professional development programs for teachers that are aligned with ambitious instructional goals.

Teachers, like other professionals, need to stay informed about new knowledge and technologies. Yet many express dissatisfaction with the professional development opportunities made available to them in schools and insist that the most effective development programs they have experienced have been self-initiated. Enhancing Professional Development for Teachers explores how the provision of professional development through online media has had a significant influence on the professional lives of an increasing number of teachers. Growing numbers of educators contend that online teacher professional development (OTPD) has the potential to enhance and even transform teachers' effectiveness in their classrooms and over the course of their careers. They also acknowledge that it raises many challenging questions regarding costs, equity, access to technology, quality of materials, and other issues. Enhancing Professional Development for Teachers suggests that teachers be active participants in planning and implementation of any new technologies that enhance professional development. The book recommends that federal and state policy makers take on the responsibility of promoting equal access to technology while the federal government and foundations play an important role by supporting the development, evaluation, and revision of OTPD.

How can every teacher, school, and district improve the quality of their schools? The answer is to empower teachers to take charge of their own learning, says author and teacher Joseph H. Semadeni. In this book, you'll learn how the Fusion professional development model can help you do just that. This accessible, customizable, and affordable model gives you proven ways to successfully establish teaching and learning practices that are grounded in solid educational research. In some schools, you may wish to begin the program with just a few teachers and let it gain recognition, support, and buy-in from the biggest skeptics. In other schools, the whole staff may be inspired to create their own lists of best practices, funding levels, and new school-day schedules. In both scenarios, schools have successfully implemented Fusion where it was needed the most. What's most appealing to teachers is that this approach gives them the chance to determine what strategies they want to learn, how much professional development they want to access, and when it best fits their schedules. As teachers learn, use, observe, and are observed practicing the strategies in their classrooms, they determine which practices best fit their students and foster achievement. With experience, teachers become eligible for related pay increases and Fusion helps teachers to foster the qualities, attitudes, and behaviors necessary to establish and nurture a collaborative culture within the school community.

This book makes a major contribution to knowledge and theory by drawing implications of teacher effectiveness research for the field of teacher training and professional development. The first part of the book provides a critical review of research on teacher training and professional development and illustrates the limitations of the main approaches to teacher development such as the competence-based and the holistic approach. A dynamic perspective to policy and practice in teacher training and professional development is advocated. The second part of the book provides a critical review of research on teacher effectiveness. The main phases of this field of research are analysed. It is pointed out that teacher factors are presented as being in opposition to one another. An integrated approach in defining quality of teaching is adopted. The importance of taking into account findings of studies investigating differential teacher effectiveness is argued. Another significant limitation of this field of research is that the whole process of searching for teacher effectiveness factor was not able to have a significant impact upon teacher training and professional development. For this reason it is advocated that teacher training and professional development should be focused on how to address grouping of specific teacher factors associated with student learning and on how to help teachers improve their teaching skills by moving from using skills associated with direct teaching only to more advanced skills concerned with new teaching approaches and differentiation of teaching. The book refers to studies conducted in different countries illustrating how the proposed approach can be used by policy and practice in teacher education. Specifically, the book provides evidence supporting the validity of the theoretical framework upon which this approach is based. Moreover, experimental and longitudinal studies supporting the use of this approach for improvement purposes are presented and suggestions for further research utilising and expanding the Dynamic Approach for teacher training and professional development are provided.

Teacher-Centered Professional Development is a hands-on guide to collaborative skill building for educators. It introduces the Teacher's Choice Framework, a model that empowers teachers by helping them choose and initiate professional growth activities according to their schedules, strengths, and needs. The book describes a wide variety of professional development strategies, including mentoring, journal writing, peer-to-peer coaching, and seminars. For each strategy, the author provides: * A brief history of the research base * A step-by-step guide to implementing the strategy * Sample handouts and assessment forms * Examples from the field of the strategy in practice With this book, teachers at all levels can quickly learn how to set up development teams, conduct action research, and engage in other activities to further their skills. In addition, the Teacher's Choice Framework helps educators prioritize their needs and choose the strategies that best suit those needs. Teacher-Centered Professional Development offers both a perfect introduction to staff development options and a commonsense method for choosing among them.

Hopkins, Bruce Joyce, Michael Huberman, Matthew Miles, and Virginia Richardson. But we have chosen to present our own experience and empirical data first and then, in Part 3, to show how this experience and data relates to models which have been proposed by others. We will address here methodological issues concerned with collecting and interpreting evidence of relationships amongst the many individual and situational factors associated with PD, and re-visit the arguments about ‘process-product’ research on PD. In the light of our experience, we will interrogate models of PD which have been proposed by others and attempt to move forward our total understanding of the process of the professional development of teachers for educational change. In conclusion, we will look at some current national practice in professional development, concentrating on the recent English experience of introducing ‘strategies’ into schools but referring also, by way of contrast, to the situation in the United States. WHAT’S THE PROBLEM? Why has the professional development of teachers already exercised so many good minds for so long? And how can we justify adding another book to this field? The answer to both questions must lie in the continuing demand from society in general (at least as interpreted by politicians and newspaper editors) for improvements in the quality of education.

Teacher professional development is usually directed and governed by three agents: politics, pedagogy and innovation. The book begins by considering existing literature and ideas on teacher professional development. Chapter two briefly outlines some of the issues in science education that are of relevance to primary school science while also examining the PIPS model of teacher professional development. Subsequent chapters focus on the methodology employed by the project including details of the evaluation, as the data collected was instrumental in determining influential facets of the project. The following chapters explore the notion of readiness, risk, reflection, recognition, resource and relevance. These were deemed to be key elements that contributed to the success of the project in terms of promoting professional development and in terms of seeing tangible change in classroom practice. There is a short chapter which outlines some of the other project findings and the book concludes with a chapter on the need and challenge for dynamic teacher professional development programmes that work in partnership with teachers rather than deliver things for teachers.

This book presents a story of school improvement activity in East Africa from 1985 to 2000, which focused on sustained teacher development. The core of the book consists of six evaluations of school-and district-wide school improvement projects (SIPs) supported by the Aga Khan Foundation in Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda. The case studies present an evolving body of knowledge about the successes and challenges of a comprehensive approach to school improvement grounded in a common set of strategic principles. The strategic principles embody the belief that the chances for quality improvement in teaching and learning are greater when change efforts *are school-based, *involve whole schools as the unit of change, *emphasize the ongoing professional development of teachers, *attend to school management and organizational conditions affecting the capacity of teachers to implement change, * prepare for the institutionalization of organizational structures and processes that enable continuous school development, and *evolve through partnerships among relevant education stakeholders. The book concludes with commentaries by international experts in school improvement and teacher development on the SIP project designs, implementation and outcomes, and on lessons that can be drawn from the projects and their evaluations for school improvement policy, practice and theory in developing and developed countries around the world.