In-school teacher training in high definition planning, teaching, and evaluation and the impact on higher order thinking skills at a selected school, 2005

This study was conducted to investigate the extent to which teachers could be trained by a school administrator to conduct teaching following High Definition teaching strategies in order to increase the teaching of higher order thinking skills. High Definition teaching was expected to facilitate students' acquisition of higher order thinking skills by teachers explaining, asking questions and using answers along the lines of Bloom's Taxonomy (application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation) while covering text book knowledge, inferential concepts, students' experiences, previous lesson concepts, related subject concepts and test concepts. This study assumed that if the methods were successful, it would indicate that instructional administrators could conduct in-the-teaching process teacher development to improve the teaching of higher order thinking skills, thereby enhancing student performance on standardized tests. In this study, the following variables were measured as the dependent variables: (1) higher order thinking skills (2) lesson planning skills and (3) knowledge about students. The independent variables were the experimental group in comparison to its baseline performance (pretest) and a control group with no treatment. The design chosen for this study was an experimental design that involved both an experimental and a control group in a pretest-posttest data analysis. The control group was defined as the group of 14 teachers who were randomly selected from the faculty and assigned for no treatment. The experimental group was defined as the group of 15 teachers who were randomly selected from the faculty and assigned for treatment. The teachers in the pretest-posttest settings: (1) wrote their views about students as learners (2) had their lesson plans analyzed, (3) had their teaching videotaped for the purpose of comparison with their own pretreatment video, (4) had their teaching videotaped for the purpose of comparison with the control group and (5) wrote their views about students as learners after treatment. An analysis of the videotape data indicates that training of teachers in High Definition planning, teaching and evaluation improved the number and types of higher order interactions occurring in the classroom with respect to some of the dimensions measured. An analysis of lesson plans indicated improvement by some teachers in their understanding of the strategies taught. An analysis of the questionnaire data with respect to each question indicates posttreatment changes in teaching values by the teachers