Hidden in plain sight: museum educators’ role in teacher professional development

Abstract

This article reports on Year 2 of a three-year project to assess historic site-based teacher professional development programs. The intended focus was assessing pre-post Q-sorts and interviews of 29 teachers regarding how they see their work at historic sites affecting their professional development. However, data analysis revealed exceptionally large shifts in teacher experiences both from previous year's administrations and in-year pre-post administrations. These shifts were attributable to programmatic changes museum educators (MEs) made, instigated by the first rounds of evaluation, rather than changes in teachers' stances. Thus, this article reports on the changes that MEs made in the program between Y1 and Y2 and the critical role that MEs play in supporting teachers' professional development and the ways in which their understanding/misunderstanding of teachers' needs drive programming. Herein the authors examine the influence of the assessment process on MEs' evolving understanding of their roles as teacher educators.

University–Museum Partnerships for K-12 Engineering Learning: Understanding the Utility of a Community Co-Created Informal Education Program in a Time of Social Disruption

“…Some informal science learning environments receive a large amount of teachers' time, with 35% of informal learning organizations reporting 25 h or more of contact time with teachers, which is primarily spent conducting professional development (PD) [44]. Museum educators can provide teachers with inquiry-based PD opportunities and curriculum to be used in the classroom, which furthers teachers' self-efficacy in project-based instruction, a teaching strategy that is clearly in line with design-based engineering education standards [45,46]. The ability of science museums to provide in-service science and mathematics teachers with extended PD is vitally important for the inclusion of engineering education in K-12 schools in the U.S.…”

Competence of Professional Language Teachers in Providing Educational Services to Improve Students’ Retention Ability

“…In general, the competencies that must be possessed by teachers as learning agents at various levels of education include: (1) pedagogic competence, (2) personality competence, (3) professional competence, and (4) sosial competence (Baron, Sklarwitz, & Coddington, 2021). Based on this description, the indicators of language teacher's professional competence used in this research are: (1) the ability to master the materials, (2) the ability to arrange learning sets, (3) the ability to carry out teaching programs, (4) the ability to evaluate, and (5) the ability to carry out a follow-up program.…”