A Teacher Professional Development Tool for Creating and Sharing Research Lessons on Evidence-Based Teaching Strategies

Abstract

This demo paper presents a teacher professional development (PD) tool aimed at increasing educator adoption of evidence-based teaching and learning strategies such as retrieval practice, distributed practice, spaced learning, and reframing. The tool, evolving from Learning Design and online communities of teachers’ technologies, is an online platform centered on a teacher-led inquiry design template. The template, developed to scaffold teacher creation of research lessons (i.e., case studies) based on their use of the strategies, presents a 5-step teacher inquiry process: (1) lesson planning, (2) data planning, (3) activity and materials, (4) sense-making, and (5) communication. In addition to enabling teachers to create their own research lessons, document the lesson effects, and share their work with other teachers; the tool provides teachers with content and resources to deepen their understanding of the strategies and to support their usage. Furthermore, exemplar research lessons that teachers can duplicate and adapt to their contexts are offered to facilitate teacher learning and creation of case studies. The tool was co-designed with teachers as part of a European project that ran a series of workshops for teachers in four countries during the academic year 2021–2022 – and has been integrated into a 20-h teacher PD program.