A successful professional development program in history: What matters?

TLDR: In this paper, a successful Professional Development Program for improving students' understanding of historical time, consisting of a training and the implementation of Timewise, a teaching approach in which timelines were used consistently, was carried out with 16 elementary school teachers in grades 2 (ages 7-8) and 5 (ages 10-11).

About: This article is published in Teaching and Teacher Education.The article was published on 2018-10-01 and is currently open access. It has received 21 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Curriculum & Professional development.

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Table 1 Overview of participating schools, teachers and students.

Fig. 2. Timeline of the PDP with the instruments that were used to answer the research questions.

Table 6 Individual teachers' instructional behavior in observations and logs (n¼ 16). - Objectives: mean of the scores on the 5 objectives for the extent to which teachers focused on the objectives (1¼ not or only once; 2¼ repeatedly). - Students' engagement: mean of the scores to what extent teachers actively engaged students in reaching the objectives (1¼ no engagement; 2¼ active engagement).

Table 7 Mean student learning gains resulting from the difference between pre- and post-test and the time teachers spent on Timewise and regular history lessons (n¼ 16).

Fig. 1. Conceptual framework for studying the effects of professional development on teachers and students (Desimone, 2009, p.185).

Table 3 Teachers' beliefs about the teaching of the understanding of historical time before and o