Dissertation Writing Help - Professional Development Decision Making

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This comparative case study on professional development (PD) decision making sought to understand how, when, where, and why decisions were made to create and administer educational training for secondary biology teachers. Additionally, the study examined various organizational factors that affected these decisions. Four Wisconsin public secondary schools and their districts were included in this study: Two of these schools were large and metropolitan in demographic makeup. The two remaining schools were small and rural. Data collected was obtained through personal interviews with key PD decision makers at each school and from Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) educational databases.

Research suggests that while the availability of PD is nearly universal in this country, widespread disconnects exist between these programs and student learning (Cohen & Hill, 2001; Desimone, Porter, Garet, Kwang, & Birman, 2002; Elmore, Peterson, & McCarthy, 1996). When examined by the content knowledge of individual teachers, the effects of these disconnects are most clearly observed in the mathematics and sciences (Goldhaber & Brewer, 1996; Kennedy, 1998; Monk & King, 1994).

Prospect theory based decision making suggests that people tend to make irrationally conservative decisions in order to preserve what they perceive to be a tolerable status quo. These same people, however, can also become irrational risk takers when seeking to avoid personal losses related to power, prestige, or career. This theory predicts that biology PD decision makers working in an unthreatened school would resist changing or abandoning an existing PD program regardless of whether such a program were connected to student outcomes or not.

Several common themes emerged from this study. For instance, defining what constitutes effective PD for a biology teacher depended upon each decision maker's educational background and their current job description. Additionally, PD ownership in this study's four subject schools appeared to reside primarily with the principal or assistant principal. Lastly, while no decision maker in the study characterized their own PD program as being particularly connected to student academic performance; neither did any of them propose to abandon or significantly alter what they were currently doing in order to advance student learning.