Write Up A Storm!® provides support through professional development, demonstration lessons, and coaching for all levels of personnel: district level administrators, principals, leaders, teachers and support staff. Cognitive and reflective coaching are implemented in an effort to increase teacher competence. According to research, “Professional development workshops must be supported by modeling and coaching in order to attain a higher degree of effectiveness.“ Darling-Hammond and McLaughlin; Elmore and Burney; Guskey; Joyce and Showers, 2000. Implementation of practices advocated in staff development workshops is most effective when professional development includes both staff training activities and staff support activities. Guskey notes that few teachers can go from workshop to practice without experimentation, classroom-based modeling, and other follow-up support. Additionally, teachers must be helped to endure and persist past the anxiety of initial failures. Cogan, “Current Issues in the Education of Teachers,” in Teacher Education: Seventy-Fourth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, ed. Ryan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). Guskey, Evaluating Proffessional Development (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, 2000), 16. There is concrete research linking staff development and student achievement. Note that “a growing body of research shows that improving teacher knowledge and teaching skills is essential to raising student performance.”
D. Sparks and S. Hirsh, A National Plan for Improving Professional Development, 2000, 1, ERIC. ED 442779.
