Investigating Rural Teachers' Professional Development, Instructional Knowledge, and Classroom Practice

Rural schools face significant challenges in providing effective professional development (PD) opportunities for teachers, including geographic isolation, limited availability of PD resources, and the lack of available staff to support PD efforts (e.g., coaches, consultants, substitute teachers for teacher released time). Physical distance has been identified as a major deterrent for rural schools to provide PD to teachers (Hansen, 2009; Rude Weitzenkamp, Howe, Steckelberg, Marlow Oliver, 2007), studies of teacher PD are not well represented in the rural education research literature. Although the focus in this area is growing, a 2011 review of rural educational research found that the percentage of studies dealing with teacher preparation was around 20% (Cicchinelli, 2011). Since this review, several investigations have explored the influence of systematically introducing pre-service teachers to the rural context and place-based pedagogy (e.g., Azano, Vernon-Feagans, Kainz, Hedrick, Ginsberg, Desimone, Smith, Desimone Porter, Garet, Desimone, Vanderburg Denton Mangin Neuman Desimone et al., 2013; Gamse, Jacob, Horst, Boulay, Desimone Desimone et al. …