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Teacher Development
An international journal of teachers' professional development
Volume 12, 2008 - Issue 3
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Articles

Asking those who know: a collaborative approach to continuing professional development

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Pages 261-270 | Received 06 Jul 2006, Accepted 29 Feb 2008, Published online: 18 Jul 2008
 

Abstract

This paper asks who should be responsible for the design and delivery of improved continuing professional development (CPD). It also questions what roles teacher educators, subject specialists and experienced classroom practitioners should take in developing a research‐led programme for practising teachers. The paper further reviews current provisions for CPD in parts of the UK and the USA and examines efforts to make educational research more relevant to classroom practice. As its backdrop, the paper discusses an innovative CPD programme at Clarion University in the USA that shows how the expertise of three different groups – subject specialists, teacher educators, and classroom teachers – is productively intertwined so that the results of current educational research are transformed into improved classroom practice. It is written from the perspective of both a visiting lecturer from Belfast and the Clarion University project director with the aim of informing the wider debate on CPD.

Acknowledgements

The Partnership in Preparing Master Mathematics Teachers project is supported by a $425,648 grant from the US Department of Education Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education (FIPSE) and Clarion University. This paper has been made possible by the generous travel scholarship awarded to Dr Patricia Eaton by the Universities Council for the Education of Teachers and the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (UCET/AACTE) that enabled her to travel to Clarion to study the graduate programme described above.

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