The primary goal of professional development is to help educators increase their instructional effectiveness. Inservice education is defined by Joyce, Howey, and Yarger (1976) as the formal and informal provisions for the improvement of educators as people, educated persons, and professionals, as well as in terms of the competence to carry out their assigned roles. (p.6) Inservice education is intended to improve teacher capacity in three areas: knowledge, skills, and attitudes. According to Gall and Renchler (1985), inservice education is defined as "efforts to improve teachers' capacity to function as effective professionals by having them acquire new knowledge, attitudes, or skills" (p. 6). There is a need, carefully and systematically, to evaluate and apply principles of effective staff development to the technology inservice training programs used to prepare teachers (Glenn & Carrier, 1989). Therefore, the research relevant to this study focuses on effective staff development practices. The terms inservice, staff development, and professional development are seen and used interchangeably throughout the literature. However, these terms have evolved and are not necessarily synonymous. Bellanca (1995), differentiated the terms as follows: Inservice is the scheduling of awareness programs, usually of short duration, to inform teachers about new ideas in the field of education, or, in the worst case scenario, to fill mandated institute days with any available topic or speaker. (p. 6) Staff development is the effort to correct teaching deficiencies by providing opportunities to learn new methods of classroom management and instruction. (p. 6) Professional development is a planned, comprehensive, and systematic program designed by the system to improve all school personnel's ability to design, implement, and assess productive change in each individual and in the school organization. (p. 6) Bellanca stated that the major differences arise from (a) who makes the continuing education decisions, (b) how these changes align with the district's agenda for constructive change, (c) responsibility and accountability issues, and (d) the notion of learning for change. (p. 9) Staff development received a great deal of attention in the 1980s. It was the focus of numerous conferences, workshops, books, articles, and research papers. State legislators and school administrators considered staff development key to the success of school improvement efforts. While there are several models of staff development (Sparks & Loucks-Horsley, 1989), the training model is the one educators associate the most with staff development. Most teachers are accustomed to attending workshop-type sessions presented by an expert who is responsible for determining the content and flow of activities. There are usually a clear set of objectives and learner outcomes. Learner outcomes usually focus on knowledge, attitude, and skill development. In addition, the improvement of teachers' thinking should be an important goal of staff development. According to Showers, Joyce, and Bennett (1987), The purpose of providing training in any practice is not simply to generate the external visible teaching "moves" that bring that practice to bear in the instructional setting but to generate the conditions that enable the practice to be selected and used appropriately and integratively. (p. 85) The research framework for the training model comes from many sources. The most intensive research has been conducted by Joyce and Showers (1983), who have determined that depending upon the desired outcomes, training might include the following components: (a) exploration of theory, (b) demonstration or modeling of a skill, (c) practice of the skill under simulated conditions, and (d) feedback about performance and coaching in the workplace. In-classroom assistance in the form of peer observation and coaching is critical to the transfer of more complex teaching skills. When all training components are present, Joyce and Showers (1983) determined that an effect size of 2.71 exists for knowledge-level objectives, 1.25 for skill level objectives, and 1.68 for transfer of training to the classroom. Wade's (1984-1985) meta-analysis of inservice teacher education found that training affected participants' learning by an effect size of .90 and their behavior by .60. Gage (1984) traced the evolution of research on teaching from observational and descriptive studies to correlational studies to nine experiments that were designed to alter instructional practices. He determined that the main conclusion from this body of research was that Inservice education is fairly effective--not with all teachers and not with all teaching practices but effective enough to change teachers and improve student achievement, or attitudes, or behavior. (p. 92)
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