Abstract:

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of a professional development program, designed to improve the teachers’ discourse in the classroom, by using Kirkpatrick’s four-level model. For this purpose, the participants’ reactions towards program, their levels of knowledge and understanding about program, the participants’ practices in their classroom and their students’ learning outcomes were investigated. The study group of this study consisted of two science teacher who participated in social classroom norm education and became vanguard teacher. The study was conducted between the years of 2009-2012 within the scope of a professional development program project supported by TUBİTAK and consisted of two phases. In the first phase (first year), the teachers participated in a three-week intervention performed by academics, which lasted approximately twelve hours. The intervention involved theoretical and practical info about the ways for creating social norms in a science classroom. In the second phase (second year) the teachers educated the participants as a vanguard teacher. The teachers’ reaction, knowledge and understanding was measured through using scales. The teachers’ classroom practices were videotaped before/after the program and when they were vanguard teacher and later transcribed. Descriptive statistics and deductive content analysis were utilized in order to analyze the data. The results indicated that the vanguard teacher found the program satisfying and their knowledge and understanding levels increased. Before the intervention, the teacher mostly preferred to utilize authoritative discourse. However, after the intervention, they started to utilize dialogic discourse. Moreover, it was seen an improvement in students’ learning outcomes, which involved individual responses, the justifications of the ideas, creating alternative solutions and students’ speaking time.

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