ABSTRACT
This chapter is about School Based Curriculum Development (SBCD) as a means of enhancing teachers’ professional development, where professional development is viewed as a continuous process of conceptual change. According to our hypothetical model, conceptual change is a process that occurs in two interdependent contexts; a socialtheoretical locus which is a reflective group where teachers can voice their different ideas of teaching and through a dialectical process of reflection, reconstruct their pedagogical knowledge, and a practical context, or the teachers’ actual practice, where he or she can experiment their new ideas and reflect on (or in) their experience (Gorodetsky, Hoz and Keiny, 1993). There is no necessary sequence between the two loci, they are mutually dependent and the interplay between them is instrumental in the development of a new conception, namely in teachers’ professional development. The study draws its ideas from a ‘comprehensive community school’ project, where teachers involved in SBCD, construct curricula units which use the local industrial plants as well as community institutions, as learning resources. The teachers’ conceptual change was traced through their changed concept of ‘school=community relationship’, and their new understanding of learning as an interaction with reality.
