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<p> Educators in a low socioeconomic urban school district have been concerned with the quality of professional development (PD) training provided by the district. This issue affects students, parents, and teachers. Guided by the educational philosophy of inquiry and community, which hold that empowering teachers with validated PD could improve teacher pedagogy and perhaps academic outcomes, this project study examined (a) what benefits a standardized professional development content validation program for the 21st century can provide and, (b) what standardized professional development content validation for the 21st century looks like. A sequential exploratory mixed-methods design was used on a purposive sample of 8 teachers, who participated in semistructured, open-ended interviews. A quantitative questionnaire collected perceptions of teachers at the school. Interview data were analyzed via an inductive analysis approach, and survey data were analyzed via descriptive statistics. The findings of this sequential mixed methods research revealed that the content of PD activities often lacked structured validation for teachers to master important skills in their content area, new skills were undiscovered, and their pedagogy was underdeveloped. The outcome was a 3-day workshop designed to provide PD content validation for educators in 1 district in Washington State. Positive social change implications include teachers who can engage students in an informed, confident, professional manner, and increased teacher satisfaction at the research site as well as in other rural schools. Implementing this workshop will provide useful knowledge for policymakers, educators, and other researchers who are looking for a clearer definition of PD content for the 21st century.</p>

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The purpose of this study was to develop and validate a legal workshop which could be used to provide information relative to professional rights and responsibilities to elementary and secondary school teachers. To accomplish this purpose, a review of literature was done of legal cases involving classroom teachers, federal and state statutes, Constitutional rights of teachers, administrative rulings, and workshop and instructional design. Workshop content was drawn from six legal knowledge areas: Federal Statutes and Constitutional amendments; freedoms in and outside of the classroom, pursuant to classroom teachers; major Supreme Court decisions; tort liability; rights and responsibilities of Florida teachers; and Florida teacher certification. The 8-10 hour workshop was presented to 66 volunteer inservice educators from two rural north Florida districts. Materials used included the pretest instrument consisting of a personal data questionnaire, 69-item legal knowledge segment, and a component to determine perceptions of legal education and its effect. The posttest instrument included the same 69-item legal knowledge segment and perceptions of legal education; an additional category was included to see how participants viewed the workshop treatment, and a write-in section elicited comments from the workshop participants. Statistically significant gains were made in each of the six selected categories of school law. The greatest gains were found in Category II, teachers' rights and responsibilities inside and outside of the classroom. Of the workshop participants, 97% agreed that the workshop increased their awareness of the rights and responsibilities of teachers, both within and outside of the classroom. Responses to the evaluative instruments supported the use of the workshop format and materials tested as effective means to provide legal knowledge to inservice teachers. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 43-03, Section: A, page: 0765. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1982.