The purpose of professional development is to enhance educator practices so that students may achieve at high levels. Too often, professional development tends to be too broad, general, or unrelated to problems of practice that teachers face in their own classrooms. This action research project builds upon the scholarly research that recognizes…

Many stakeholders have long argued that teachers should use data from their own teaching as a way to improve their performance. The first chapter of this dissertation is a summary of the literature that advises mathematics teachers about what data they should gather and how they should use those data to improve instruction. The literature is…

A survey of research on teacher effectiveness (that is, whether what is taught is indeed that which produces improvement in student performance) reveals that very little is known about what makes a good teacher, a position that is becoming increasingly untenable as competency-based education is introduced. The main gap is in research into changes…