Educational Reform and Professional Development

In the current era of educational reform, a plethora of issues has arisen about how best to achieve change in the classroom. Research on cognition, and particularly constructivist approaches to learning, call for substantive changes in the way learning is conceptualized (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989). Translating this knowledge into practice, whether in developing new pedagogical approaches for the classroom or new approaches to professional development, has proved challenging.