Joyce and Showers

In a post last year - Behaviour Management and Avalanches - I wrote about the failure of professional development activities to lead to actual changes in behaviour from teachers.  At the time I thought that I had stumbled upon something new.  It turns out, as usual, that I was just ignorant of the existing work in this area.

Joyce and Showers established, back in the 80s, that fewer than 10% of participants in staff development actually implemented new strategies in their classrooms.  But they found that with  peer-observation and peer-coaching this percentage increased to 90%!

This research is very reassuring to me, given that I am currently working with staff to set up professional learning communities in school, supported by peer-observation and peer-coaching.

Comments

Post a comment

Popular posts from this blog

ActiVote Walkthrough Part 1

Image
At my visit to Musselburgh Grammar this morning, I spoke to some of the maths department about using Activote. They were enthusiastic about the potential of the technology, but said something like "it looks easy as you stand there and explain it, but we'll forget everything you've said by the time we next come to use it". So.... to provide a bit of backup, here's a step by step guide to using Activote with your class. The following assumes that the voting pads have been registered with your PC. If not, chase up IT! Setting up the User Database You'll want your pupil names to be stored in the system, so that their names appear at the top of the screen when you run a vote. Here's how.... In East Lothian, we have a problem - we don't have write-access to the place on the C drive where the user database is stored! To get around this, we need to copy the default user database to somewhere that is writeable, then tell ACTIVStudio that we've done so: I
Read more

Someone is looking for the Catburgers!

I was most surprised today to discover that the top search phrase leading people to this blog over the last few weeks has been "the catburgers." This is the name of the indie band I was in back in the late '80s (I sang and played guitar). I can't imagine who might be looking for my old band, unless it is some kids in North Berwick who heard about the band through my son. Whoever it might be, I'll take advantage of this opportunity to post up some mp3s from the good old days, both recorded in 1987.  I just realised that's 20 years ago!  Time for a reunion tour of the states... anyway here are "Children's TV" and "First Day of Spring" for your entertainment: [audio:childrens-tv.mp3] [audio:first-day-of-spring.mp3] After all, you have to keep your visitors happy don't you?
Read more