Education Commons^™

The Construct Is In The Eye Of The Beholder: School Districts’ Appropriations And Reconceptualizations Of Tpack, Judi Harris, Mark J. Hofer

Mark Hofer

Despite debates about the specific parameters of its eight subcomponents, TPACK is generally understood within university-based teacher education communities as the knowledge needed to incorporate technologies—especially digital tools and resources—effectively in teaching and learning. How do professional development providers working within primary and secondary schools and districts conceptualize and operationalize TPACK? Our study of educational technology-related professional development in seven North American schools and districts in seven states/provinces found that educational leaders’ discussion and operationalization of the TPACK construct differs from that of university-based researchers in intriguing and important ways. In these organizations, TPACK was both appropriated to reconnect curriculum …

Student And Teacher Attitudes Toward Giftedness In A Two Laboratory School Environment: A Case For Conducting A Needs Assessment, Jennifer Riedl Cross, Tracy Cross, Andrea D. Frazier

Jennifer Cross

Providing effective professional development in laboratory schools around topics that can be divisive, such as preparing a school environment for expansion of gifted education services, can be quite difficult. However, doing so based on data collected through a needs assessment can be invaluable to the planning process. As part of a needs assessment in preparation to enroll 100 new gifted students, students and teachers (N=171) from a unique setting in which a residential school for gifted high school students is housed within a laboratory school were surveyed using F. Gagné and L. Nadeau’s (1991) Opinions about the Gifted …

School Improvement: Data-Driven And Vision-Centered, Samuel J. Smith

Samuel James Smith