Step 2. Find and adapt instruments.

You go to the OERL instrument collection. First, you look for questionnaires. At http://oerl.sri.com/instruments/te/teachwork/instrTE_teachwork.html , you discover a series of evaluation questionnaires filled out by teacher workshop participants in NSF-funded teacher education projects. As you browse through the instruments, you find segments of instruments that would be useful to you, though they will need to be adaptated. For example, at http://oerl.sri.com/instruments/te/teachwork/instr74.html you discover a questionnaire about an earth science workshop from which you can obtain a number of questions. Many of the questions are generic enough to be easily adapted, with some changes in the references to the name of the project, the content, and the grade level. You like the questionnaire's format of posing declarative statements and asking respondents to indicate their level of agreement. However, you decide that a 4-point scale for the items is better than the 5-point scale (which allows a respondent to select "no opinion") because the 4-point scale compels respondents to declare an opinion. For the evaluation, you want to avoid noncommittal responses. You also like the open-ended questions posed at the end, though some of the questions will need editing and additional questions will be needed . For example, the list of instructional strategies in question 6 will need to be changed to fit your project.

You note that the questionnaire lacks questions that solicit the participants' self-assessment of professional competence. You find that this type of self-assessment information is gathered in a faculty development workshop evaluation questionnaire at http://oerl.sri.com/instruments/fd/teachwork/instr101.html . The questionnaire asks respondents to provide background information about their academic training, what they teach, how long they have taught, the amount of professional development in which they have participated, and the professional organizations to which they belong. The questionnaire also asks teachers to rate their teaching practices on a scale from 1 to 7, with 7 signifying a high rating (questions 1-18). You like this sort of self-assessment format but believe that some of the rating scales are unnecessary for your evaluation, such as "important-unimportant" and "unknowable-knowable;" therefore, you will not include them in your instrument.

You also browse OERL for observation protocols. You find two that have interesting, adaptable components. At http://oerl.sri.com/instruments/up/obsvclassrm/instr118.html you find a protocol for an ongoing observation that has an appealing table and coding format. For your evaluation, you need to refocus the coding system for the workshop and the classroom phenomena you are interested in observing. The original protocol was used to observe whether gender makes a difference in the behavior of teachers and students in the classroom. You would rather focus on whether the learners' engagement with the content varies depending on whether the instruction they receive is constructivist or didactic.

For post-observation summarizing, you like the format presented at http://oerl.sri.com/instruments/te/obsvclassrm/instr77.html, where the observer rates the class by reacting to a series of summary statements such as "Teacher used cooperative learning methods while teaching the lesson." You also like how the constructs are broken down into a fine-grained set of behaviors to permit the respondents to better understand the foci of the items. For example, the summary statement about cooperative learning is broken down into a series of five statements such as "Teacher divided class into heterogeneous groups" and "Students established individual roles and responsibilities within the group."

To interview teachers, you find at http://oerl.sri.com/instruments/te/teachintrv/instr65.html a protocol that was designed to get teachers to identify their instructional approach and assess how well it worked in their courses. You like how the protocol is split between general questions and student-centered questions, and you like the prompts, such as "How often," Describe," and "Give an example," because they compel the respondent to be specific. You also like the fact that question 12 (which asks teachers to report how much flexibility they have in teaching the content of their course) will provide evidence for gauging whether the teachers felt constrained in any aspect of implementing the instructional method.