Investigating the effectiveness of a professional development programme designed for teachers

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of a professional development program designed for teachers regarding social classroom norms and also to find out its contributions on teachers? classroom practices and students? results. A case study approach was adopted. Two vanguard teachers and three science teachers? classroom dialogues became the focus of analysis. The study was conducted between the years of 2009-2011 and consisted of two phases. In the first phase, vanguard teachers were educated by academics. In the second phase, vanguard teachers educated the participants. Both vanguard teachers and participant teachers initially participated in a three-week intervention, which lasted approximately twelve hours. The intervention involved theoretical and practical info about the ways for creating social norms in a science classroom. The teachers? classroom practices were videotaped and later transcribed. Both methods of deductive (Patton, 2002:453-455) and discourse analysis (Blumer, 1969) were utilized in order to analyze the data. The results indicated that before the intervention, the teachers seemed to possess teacher-centered beliefs about their own and students? roles in the classroom. Further, they preferred to utilize authoritative discourse. However, after the intervention, the teachers seemed to begin to possess student-centered beliefs and they preferred to utilize dialogic discourse. Moreover, it was seen an improvement in students? result, which involved individual responses, the justifications of the ideas, creating alternative solutions and students? speaking time