Curricular Control and the Privatization of Inservice Teacher Education

• In Event: 106 - Open Refereed Roundtable Session I
  In Refereed Roundtable: A. Table 03. Education and Teachers

Abstract

A wide variety of programs and lifelong learning opportunities can be regarded as forms of professional development. To a certain extent there exists general agreement about features of effective professional development. However, practices do not always reflect these aspects of professional learning. In this article, I take a critical look at professional development in order to understand the persistence of a “training” model of inservice teacher education, focusing on the bundling of inservice teacher education with curricular programs marketed to schools and school districts in the United States. The purpose of this article is to examine how, within the market oriented contexts of a competitive funding stream and shrinking fiscal support for education, the discourse of “what works” in education combined with a particular focus on scientifically based reading research in ways that perpetuate training models of professional development.

Author

• Christopher B. Crowley, University of Wisconsin-Madison