Connecting All The Pieces

Connecting all the pieces

By Joan I. Heller, Kirsten R. Daehler and Mayumi Shinohara

October 2003

Vol. 24, No. 4

How can we tell what influence our staff development efforts have on the teachers who participate in them, or on their classrooms or students? Teachers, learning environments, and students continually change for many reasons, and attributing changes in student learning to a particular staff development experience is nearly impossible. We used an evaluation mosaic (Heller, 1995) to seek evidence of the impact of a professional development project in Science Cases for Teacher Learning. Guided by an evaluation framework, we conducted multiple interrelated studies. Any one of the studies is meaningful in itself, but the sum, like a mosaic, presents a broader picture and more convincing evidence than separate pieces. When we found converging evidence of impact, we could argue not only that our work resulted

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Authors

Joan I. Heller, Kirsten R. Daehler, and Mayumi Shinohara

Joan I. Heller is director of Heller Research Associates. You can contact her at 230 Grand Ave., Suite 201, Oakland, CA 94610-4559, (510) 873-0808, fax (510) 873-0803, e-mail: jheller@edservices.org.

Kirsten R. Daehler is co-director of the Science Cases for Teacher Learning Project. You can con – tact her at WestEd, 4200 Farm Hill Blvd., Redwood City, CA 94061-1099, (650) 381-6402, fax (650) 381-6421, e-mail: kdaehle@WestEd.org.

Mayumi Shinohara is co-director of the Science Cases for Teacher Learning Project. You can contact her at WestEd, 300 Lakeside Drive, 18th Floor, Oakland, CA 94612, (510) 302-4257, fax (510) 302-4354, e-mail: mayumi@WestEd.org.

References

Birman, B., Desimone, L., Porter, A., & Garet, M. (2000, May). Designing professional development that works. Educational Leadership, 57(8), 28-33.

Cohen, D.K. & Hill, H.C. (1998, January). State policy and classroom performance: Mathematics Reform in California (CPRE Policy Brief RB23, 1-16).

Daehler, K.R. & Shinohara, M. (2001). A complete circuit is a complete circle: Exploring the potential of case materials and methods to develop teachers’ content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge of science. Research in Science Education, 31(2), 267-88.

Hawley, W.D. & Valli, L. (1999). The essentials of effective professional development: A new consensus. In L. Darling-Hammond & G. Sykes (Eds.), Teaching as the learning profession: Handbook of policy and practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Heller, J.I. & Kaskowitz, S.R. (2002). Science cases for teacher learning: Evaluation of impact on teachers, classrooms, and students, Project Year 3, 2000-01. Oakland, CA: Heller Research Associates.

Shulman, L.S. (1986). Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching. Educational Researcher, 15(2), 4-14.

Weiss, I.R., Gellatly, G.B., Montgomery, D.L., Ridgway, C.J., Templeton, C.D., & Whittington, D. (1999). Executive summary of the local systemic change through teacher enhancement year four cross-site report. Chapel Hill, NC: Horizon Research, Inc.