Suzie Boss, Writer, Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory

Effective professional development activities give teachers the chance to be learners. That may sound simple, but it neatly sums up what researchers have concluded about how to improve teacher quality. The best professional development is active, collaborative, built into the daily routines of school, and tied to student success. Web sites, where teachers are provided with continuing information and resources, can be central to this development.

Like most veteran teachers, Meile Harris has yawned through her share of required workshop sessions. "Experts come in and tell us how to teach, without ever modeling the strategies they're talking about. They lecture to us about why not to lecture to our kids," says the middle school math teacher.

When Harris has a chance to lead professional development activities, however, she engages her colleagues in lively learning projects just like those she creates in her own classroom. One of her favorites, called It's a Wild Ride, involves designing a roller coaster. "We make sure teachers experience it from the students' point of view," Harris says. Teachers get plenty of chances to "mess around" with materials, learning through their own trial and error. "They enjoy the chance to be learners, and that's why they get so fired up about taking this idea back to their own classrooms."

Video and Web Resources
Featured on the Intel® Innovation in Education Web site, It's a Wild Ride is an interdisciplinary project that Harris and two colleagues from Twin Falls, Idaho, created to engage middle school students in the design of roller coasters—along with the study of Newton's Laws of Motion, linear and nonlinear equations, and technical research and reporting.

The Intel Web site includes a detailed description of how the project came together, with the teaching team's suggestions for planning a project, organizing time, using the tools of technology, and assessing learning. The site also offers downloadable workshop materials for use by professional developers. A short video that shows the project in action is also available free of charge.

Looking back on the evolution of the project, Harris can see how it hit the high points of good professional development. She and her Twin Falls teammates started with an authentic question they wanted to answer: How could they design a project-based unit that would engage students in the study of math, science, and language arts? Working collaboratively, they drew on one another's strengths in content areas. They took time to experiment with teaching strategies, analyzed the pros and cons of activities, and anticipated what might go wrong when they introduced the activities to real-live middle-schoolers. And as soon they wrapped up the pilot unit, they immediately began revising plans for the next time.

"It keeps evolving," Harris says, "as we pull in more pieces, enhance it, analyze it. We keep learning, and keep trying to improve what we are doing."

Learning from Teaching
Stanford education professor Linda Darling-Hammond advocates for professional development programs that "envision the professional teacher as one who learns from teaching rather than as one who has finished learning how to teach." Doing What Matters Most: Investing in Quality Teaching, a report Darling-Hammond coauthored for the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, highlights professional development strategies that are:

• Experiential, engaging teachers in concrete tasks of teaching, assessment, and observation that illuminate the processes of learning and development
• Grounded in participants' questions, inquiry, and experimentation
• Collaborative, involving a sharing of knowledge among educators
• Connected to and derived from teachers' work with students
• Sustained and intensive

For teachers preparing to embark on a professional development activity that will incorporate these strategies, Harris shares one more tip: "Don't wait for everything to be perfect before you begin. There will always be drawbacks—scheduling, people, leadership. You have to be willing to be a risk taker. That's all part of the art of teaching."

For more information about It's a Wild Ride, visit www.intel.com/education/wildride.