Kindergarten Teacher Responses to a Contextualized Professional Development Workshop on STEAM Teaching

Theoretical Framework

The current study was influenced by the Practice-Based Professional Development (PBPD) framework (Ball & Cohen, 1999) which serves as an approach that focuses on integrating teacher learning of content, theories of learning, and curriculum and pedagogy into PD practices. Teacher development should emphasize the advancement of understandings and skills surrounding the effective educational practice. Based on this model, Harris et al. (2012) posit that six elements are important when developing a PD model: ‘(a) collective participation of teachers within the same school with similar needs; (b) basing professional development around the characteristics, strengths, and needs of the students in teachers’ classrooms; (c) attention to content knowledge needs of teachers, including pedagogical content knowledge; (d) opportunities for active learning and practice of the new methods being learned, including opportunities to see examples of these methods being used and analyze the work; (e) use of the materials and other artifacts during professional development that is identical to those being used in the classroom; and (f) feedback on performance while learning and before using these methods in the classroom so that understandings and skills critical in implementation are developed’ (p. 105).