Background/Purpose: Professional development is meant to improve teachers' teaching practices. This study used constructivist learning theory to examine how professional development impacted teachers' implementation of two innovative curricula.
Method: Ten elementary physical education teachers whose teaching experience ranged in years from 11 to 30 participated in two-year workshops and at-school mentoring professional development in educational gymnastics and team building. Data were collected through field observations of 38 lessons, 12 formal interviews with the teachers, lesson plan collection, and lesson evaluations using the Assessing Quality Teaching Rubrics (AQTR). The formal interviews were transcribed for analysis.
Analysis/Results: Analysis of the qualitative data using constant comparison revealed that prior to the professional development, nine teachers, in their interviews, reported that they did not regularly teach educational gymnastics or team building. However, through engaging in a series of subject-focused workshops, active creation and modification of lesson plans, sharing lesson ideas with colleagues, and reflective dialogue with curriculum experts between and after the lessons, the teachers demonstrated quality teaching practices during the lessons. For example, they presented developmentally appropriate and sequentially progressive learning tasks, provided accurate, related, and sequential learning cues, presented social norms, used creative class organization routines, scaffolded students in creating gymnastics sequences and solving joint problems, and provided on-going guidance if needed.
Conclusions: The subject-focused and at-school mentoring professional development facilitated the teachers' implementation of the curricula with high quality teaching practices despite having limited experience with both curricula prior to the intensive and sustained professional development.
See more of: Research Consortium