Aps-ajp-11-1001-Book indb

Summary of  “Research-design model for professional development of 
teachers: Designing lessons with physics education research,” Bat-Sheva 
Eylon and Esther Bagno, pp. 176–189.
This article describes a model for the professional develop-
ment of practicing high school teachers of physics. The model 
has components that draw explicitly on results from physics 
education and science education research to help teachers 
deepen their understanding of how to teach more effectively 
and how to assess student learning. A case study is used to 
illustrate how aspects of the program help to achieve fi ve pri-
mary goals: (a) raising the awareness of teachers about defi -
cits in their own understanding of the content and the teaching 
of physics, (b) enhancing teacher knowledge of both physics 
and the teaching of physics, (c) informing teachers about how 
the results of physics education research (PER) can guide the 
design of lessons, (d) forming a community of practice among 
participating teachers, and (e) deepening the familiarity of 
teachers with the central results of PER.
Research on the learning and teaching of physics and on 
teacher professional development both indicate that bringing 
about profound changes in teachers’ views and practices requires 
a long-term, multi-faceted, and comprehensive program. The 
professional development model discussed in this paper took 
place in Israel and spanned 1.5 years (about 330 hours). It con-
sists of 10 consecutive steps, which are grouped into three distinct 
stages. The stages involve the teachers in (1) defi ning teaching 
and/or learning goals based on analysis of students’ prior knowl-
edge, (2) designing lessons that they implement and test in their 
classrooms, and (3) conducting a small-scale research study and 
preparing a paper that summarizes the process of curriculum 
design and assessment of student learning. At the end of each 
stage, the teachers organize and participate in a mini-conference 
that helps them synthesize and generalize their work.
The stages in the program are carefully structured so that 
together they help achieve the fi ve primary goals. The fi rst stage 
attempts to help teachers recognize the need to introduce innova-
tion into their teaching of a particular topic. The teachers defi ne 
the goals for a particular lesson, review the literature on the teach-
ing and learning of that topic, try to identify the problems that 
they (as learners) and their students encounter and then revise 
their instructional goals accordingly. During the second stage, 
they become familiar with new instructional strategies and then 
plan and design lessons through a process of successive refi ne-
ments of the goals and the means for achieving them. The process 
involves expert consultation, critique by peers, and observations 
of the instructional strategies used by their colleagues. Finally, 
in the third stage, the teachers conduct a detailed examination of 
their students’ learning and report on the results to other partici-
pants and colleagues. They also prepare a paper for submission 
to a professional journal.
The article describes the design and results of a study that 
assessed the contribution of this program to the professional 
development of the participating teachers. Qualitative and 
quantitative data were collected through documentation of the 
meetings of the participants (observations, transcriptions of audi-
otapes, and written materials produced by the teachers), student 
work brought by teachers to the workshops, informal conversa-
tions with the teachers, journals kept by the course leaders, and 
questionnaires administered to the participants immediately after 
the program and six years later. The focus of this article is a case 
study involving six of the teachers who participated in the pro-
gram. These teachers were offered a choice of topics on which to 
work, ranging from Newton’s laws to waves and electromagnetic 
induction. This particular group worked on a unit entitled “From 
electrostatics to currents.”
The evaluation of the program traces the teachers’ activi-
ties through the three main stages of the program. Specifi c 
questions and comments made by the teachers, as well as the 
materials prepared by the teachers, are used to illustrate their 
progress and how the structure of the program facilitated the 
achievement of the program goals. For example, during the 
fi rst stage, as the teachers considered what content to teach 
and how to assess student thinking, their conversations illus-
trate the initial gaps in their understanding and how they came 
to recognize for themselves what they did and did not under-
stand about the underlying physics. The article also traces the 
progress the teachers made resulting from discussions with 
one another and with workshop leaders, as well as through 
review of the literature and through discussions with scien-
tists and science educators. Teachers had to grapple with basic 
questions related to designing test questions for probing stu-
dent thinking, and even struggled with the basic question of 
what is meant by “understanding.”
The assessments of the second stage, designing lessons, 
and of the third stage, performing and publishing the results 
of a research study, illustrate the development of pedagogical 
content knowledge of the teachers. Comments by the teach-
ers, as they progressed through these stages, demonstrate this 
growth as they refl ected on how to teach the content, learned 
about instructional strategies with which they had not been 
familiar, and gained appreciation for the diffi culties inherent 
in the process of designing curriculum. At the end, the teach-
ers assessed student learning in their classrooms and refl ected 
on how their materials might be changed in the future to 
address the problems they had identifi ed on their post-tests. 
The results were written up and accepted for publication in 
Tehuda, the journal of Israeli physics teachers. 
Teachers’ responses to questionnaires given immediately 
afterward and six years later suggest that the program had 
lasting benefi cial impacts on the participants’ attitudes toward 
teaching and for their classroom practice. In particular, most 
of the teachers singled out the development of the lesson/
lessons as an activity that was most meaningful, useful, or 
important to them. 
The paper concludes with refl ections on this model for pro-
fessional development of precollege teachers and the long-
term, intensive nature of the teachers’ activities. The authors 
stress that the lesson development activity described in the 
article serves as a context for the professional development 
of teachers and not an activity that is to be carried out rou-
tinely by teachers. It is expected that through this activity they 
will become better consumers and customizers of curricular 
materials and PER relevant to their work. A central insight 
that emerges is the power of the kind of cognitive confl ict 
that arises when teachers examine student work critically and 
refl ect on the gap between what they have taught and what 
their students have learned.
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