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Chapter 1: Introduction. Professional Development Refers

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CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION Professional development refers to the development of a person in his or her professional role. According to Glattenhorn (1987), by gaining increased experience in one’s teaching role they systematically gain increased experience in their professional growth through examination of their teaching ability. Professional workshops and other formally related meetings are a part of the professional development experience (Ganzer, 2000). Professional development for new and veteran teachers rests on the premise that teacher content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge, or PCK (Shulman, 1986), directly and positively affects both the teachers practice and student learning. The National Council of Teachers of …show more content…

Majority of the research have been case studies, involving a maximum of 10 teachers, a repeated trend was 2-3 teachers. Generally, the researchers concluded teachers with a moderately weak conceptual understanding of mathematics have a tendency to use a step-by-step approach to instruction and only allow students to practice the math computationally. As anyone might expect, these teachers could only offer limited assistance to students for building up comprehension in what they were learning (Ball, 1991; Leinhardt and Smith, 1985). When the teachers tried to give an clarification or explanation, they were not equipped to do so (Borko, Eisenhart, Brown, Underhill, Jones, Agard, 1992). In some studies, their deficient in conceptual knowledge caused them to teach incorrect math procedures (Leinhardt and Smith, 1985; Putnam, Heaton, Prawat, and Remillard, 1992.). A portion of these studies contrasted the low level of teaching practices with the teaching practices of teachers who had greater understanding of math. These studies indicate that a strong grasp of mathematics made it possible for teachers to understand and use constructively students’ mathematical solutions, explanations, and questions (Ball, 1991; Fernandez, 1997.) Several researchers found, however, that some teachers with strong conceptual knowledge did not necessarily use that knowledge to understand their students’ mathematical explanations, preferring instead

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