Summary: Eylon and BagnoSummary of “Research-design model for professional development of
teachers: Designing lessons with physics education research,” Bat-Sheva
Eylon and Esther Bagno, pp. 176–189.This article describes a model for the professional develop-
ment of practicing high school teachers of physics. The model
has components that draw explicitly on results from physics
education and science education research to help teachers
deepen their understanding of how to teach more effectively
and how to assess student learning. A case study is used to
illustrate how aspects of the program help to achieve fi ve pri-
mary goals: (a) raising the awareness of teachers about defi -
cits in their own understanding of the content and the teaching
of physics, (b) enhancing teacher knowledge of both physics
and the teaching of physics, (c) informing teachers about how
the results of physics education research (PER) can guide the
design of lessons, (d) forming a community of practice among
participating teachers, and (e) deepening the familiarity of
teachers with the central results of PER.
Research on the learning and teaching of physics and on
teacher professional development both indicate that bringing
about profound changes in teachers’ views and practices requires
a long-term, multi-faceted, and comprehensive program. The
professional development model discussed in this paper took
place in Israel and spanned 1.5 years (about 330 hours). It con-
sists of 10 consecutive steps, which are grouped into three distinct
stages. The stages involve the teachers in (1) defi ning teaching
and/or learning goals based on analysis of students’ prior knowl-
edge, (2) designing lessons that they implement and test in their
classrooms, and (3) conducting a small-scale research study and
preparing a paper that summarizes the process of curriculum
design and assessment of student learning. At the end of each
stage, the teachers organize and participate in a mini-conference
that helps them synthesize and generalize their work.
The stages in the program are carefully structured so that
together they help achieve the fi ve primary goals. The fi rst stage
attempts to help teachers recognize the need to introduce innova-
tion into their teaching of a particular topic. The teachers defi ne
the goals for a particular lesson, review the literature on the teach-
ing and learning of that topic, try to identify the problems that
they (as learners) and their students encounter and then revise
their instructional goals accordingly. During the second stage,
they become familiar with new instructional strategies and then
plan and design lessons through a process of successive refi ne-
ments of the goals and the means for achieving them. The process
involves expert consultation, critique by peers, and observations
of the instructional strategies used by their colleagues. Finally,
in the third stage, the teachers conduct a detailed examination of
their students’ learning and report on the results to other partici-
pants and colleagues. They also prepare a paper for submission
to a professional journal.
The article describes the design and results of a study that
assessed the contribution of this program to the professional
development of the participating teachers. Qualitative and
quantitative data were collected through documentation of the
meetings of the participants (observations, transcriptions of audi-
otapes, and written materials produced by the teachers), student
work brought by teachers to the workshops, informal conversa-
tions with the teachers, journals kept by the course leaders, and
questionnaires administered to the participants immediately after
the program and six years later. The focus of this article is a casestudy involving six of the teachers who participated in the pro-
gram. These teachers were offered a choice of topics on which to
work, ranging from Newton’s laws to waves and electromagnetic
induction. This particular group worked on a unit entitled “From
electrostatics to currents.”
The evaluation of the program traces the teachers’ activi-
ties through the three main stages of the program. Specifi c
questions and comments made by the teachers, as well as the
materials prepared by the teachers, are used to illustrate their
progress and how the structure of the program facilitated the
achievement of the program goals. For example, during the
fi rst stage, as the teachers considered what content to teach
and how to assess student thinking, their conversations illus-
trate the initial gaps in their understanding and how they came
to recognize for themselves what they did and did not under-
stand about the underlying physics. The article also traces the
progress the teachers made resulting from discussions with
one another and with workshop leaders, as well as through
review of the literature and through discussions with scien-
tists and science educators. Teachers had to grapple with basic
questions related to designing test questions for probing stu-
dent thinking, and even struggled with the basic question of
what is meant by “understanding.”
The assessments of the second stage, designing lessons,
and of the third stage, performing and publishing the results
of a research study, illustrate the development of pedagogical
content knowledge of the teachers. Comments by the teach-
ers, as they progressed through these stages, demonstrate this
growth as they refl ected on how to teach the content, learned
about instructional strategies with which they had not been
familiar, and gained appreciation for the diffi culties inherent
in the process of designing curriculum. At the end, the teach-
ers assessed student learning in their classrooms and refl ected
on how their materials might be changed in the future to
address the problems they had identifi ed on their post-tests.
The results were written up and accepted for publication in
Tehuda, the journal of Israeli physics teachers.
Teachers’ responses to questionnaires given immediately
afterward and six years later suggest that the program had
lasting benefi cial impacts on the participants’ attitudes toward
teaching and for their classroom practice. In particular, most
of the teachers singled out the development of the lesson/
lessons as an activity that was most meaningful, useful, or
important to them.
The paper concludes with refl ections on this model for pro-
fessional development of precollege teachers and the long-
term, intensive nature of the teachers’ activities. The authors
stress that the lesson development activity described in the
article serves as a context for the professional development
of teachers and not an activity that is to be carried out rou-
tinely by teachers. It is expected that through this activity they
will become better consumers and customizers of curricular
materials and PER relevant to their work. A central insight
that emerges is the power of the kind of cognitive confl ict
that arises when teachers examine student work critically and
refl ect on the gap between what they have taught and what
their students have learned.APS-AJP-11-1001-Book.indb 30APS-AJP-11-1001-Book.indb 30 27/12/11 2:56 PM27/12/11 2:56 PM