Stacy Duffield, associate professor in the School of Education, and Angie Hodge, assistant professor of mathematics, will have their paper, titled "Special Treatment or Responsive Instruction? Teaching Teachers in Master’s-Level Coursework,” appear in the July 2009 issue of International Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.
The study examined a school district that received a grant to administer content-specific professional development to teachers of American history. A series of nine master’s level, degree-eligible courses were developed and administered by the history department. At the conclusion of the grant activities, the teachers were interviewed to determine their motivation for taking the courses and their overall impression of the effectiveness of the professors and course content. One unique theme that emerged from the data was the expectation of specialized treatment.
“There were some unexpected findings,” Duffield said. “Contrary to the recommendations of many experts about the way teacher professional development should be planned, the teachers in this study largely preferred learning experiences that involved content learning without direct classroom application.”
Duffield and Hodge also found the aspects teachers identified as being benefits allow insight into what it is that teachers want from professional development. “Relevance is often touted in adult education literature, and we did find relevance or the lack thereof to be important to the teachers in this study. What struck us most is that while the teachers did expect benefits from the courses such as advancement on the salary schedule or credits for license renewal, they did not necessarily expect the courses to be relevant to their teaching,” Duffield said.
Another interesting finding that Duffield and Hodge discovered was teaching teachers at the university requires a change in thinking for higher education faculty. “The professors in this study did not have prior experience as K-12 classroom teachers. Their classes at the university were made up of traditional graduate students; traditional graduate students expect a heavy reading and writing workload from a graduate level course,” Duffield said. “Understanding teachers as learners may help professors to develop graduate coursework that provides the maximum benefit for teacher learners.”