This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licensesponsored events are also more likely to focus on local issues, such as implementing a new system for assessing
students’ learning within the local schools. In general, too, local events tend to cost less to attend, in both time and
money.
By the same token, the larger the association, the more its professional development opportunities are likely to
focus on large-scale trends in education, such as the impact of the No Child Left Behind legislation we discussed in
Chapter 1 or the latest trends in using computer technology for teaching. Conferences or other professional
development events are more likely to span several days and to be located outside the immediate town or region
whether you live and work. You may therefore see fewer of your everyday colleagues and acquaintances, but you
may also have a greater incentive to make new acquaintances whose interests or concerns are similar to your own.
The event is more likely to feature educators who are well-known nationally or internationally, and to call attention
to educational trends or issues that are new or unfamiliar.
Whether large or small, the activities of professional associations can stimulate thinking and reflecting about
teaching. By meeting and talking with others at a meeting of an association, teachers learn new ideas for teaching,
become aware of emerging trends and issues about education, and confront assumptions that they may have made
about their own practices with students. Professional meetings, conferences, and workshops can provide these
benefits because they draw on the expertise and experience of a wide range of professionals—usually wider than is
possible within a single school building. But compared simply to talking with your immediate colleagues, they have
a distinct disadvantage: they take effort and a bit of money to attend, and sometimes they are available at
convenient times. Well-balanced professional development should therefore also include activities that are
available frequently, but that also draw on a wide range of expertise. Fortunately, an activity with these features is
often easily at hand: the reading of professional publications about educational research and practice.
Reading and understanding professional articles .......................................................................................
Although publications about educational issues and research can take many forms, they tend to serve three
major purposes in some sort of combination. A publication could either (1) provide a framework for understanding
teaching and learning, (2) offer advice about how to teach, or (3) advocate particular ideas or practices about
education. Benefiting from a professional publication depends partly on understanding which of these purposes a
particular article or book is emphasizing.
Three purposes of educational publications
Consider the first purpose, to provide a framework for understanding teaching and learning (Hittleman and
Simon, 2005). A "framework" in this context means a perspective or general viewpoint for understanding specific
events and actions. They are much like the theories described earlier in this book, though not always as formal or
broad. A published article might propose, for example, a way of understanding why certain students are
disrespectful in spite of teachers’ efforts to prevent such behavior (perhaps they are reinforced by peers for being
disrespectful). It might offer evidence supporting this perspective. In doing so, the author provides a sort of “theory
of disrespectful behavior”, though he or she may not call it a theory explicitly.
A second purpose is to offer advice about appropriate teaching practices. An article intended for this purpose,
for example, might suggest how to introduce reading instruction to first graders, or how to use fiction to teach high
school history, or how to organize a class to include a student with a disability. Often giving such advice overlaps
Educational Psychology 355 A Global Text