ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the use of the dynamic model for improvement at the teacher level. The previous chapters were concerned with studies investigating the use of DASI for improvement purposes at the school level. In the first part of the book, the importance of designing school improvement efforts was discussed. It was supported that designing improvement efforts which focus on the classroom level factors may improve the teaching practices of individuals but may not necessarily improve the school learning environment. In this case, teachers who improve some aspects of their teaching practices by one method will need, at some stage, an additional type of support to improve other teaching skills. Consequently, the dynamic approach to school improvement consists of steps which schools can follow in order to develop an evidence-based and theorydriven approach to their school improvement efforts. However, it is acknowledged that effectiveness research shows the teacher effect to be more important than the school effect (e.g. Teddlie & Reynolds, 2000; Scheerens & Bosker, 1997). For this reason, improvement of teaching practices is an important target of various efforts undertaken either within or outside the school, in order to improve the quality of education. Given that efforts to improve teacher effectiveness may originate from outside the school, through the provision of relevant in-service training courses, the last two chapters of this part of the book describe projects on teachers’ professional development. These two chapters make use of the main assumptions of the DASI approach to develop a dynamic and integrated approach to teacher professional development. Specifically, the projects presented in these chapters can be seen as an attempt to integrate findings of research on teacher education with the dynamic model. The dynamic model is used as a theoretical framework to deal with policy and practice in teacher education because it emphasises the quality of teaching, and uses an integrated approach in defining effective teaching by focusing on factors found to be associated with student outcomes (see Chapter 2). In this chapter, we present the results of an experimental study investigating the impact of this approach on teacher professional development and also on student achievement gains in mathematics.
