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The best part about being a teacher is that you get to remain a student forever. Teachers are lifelong learners. To be an effective educator, you must constantly pursue learning through workshops, conferences, on-site or online training modules, and seminars. Professional development can help teachers stay up-to-date with new trends and learn new techniques, strategies, and methods for dealing with various classroom challenges. But all professional development is not the same.

If you feel frustrated by not being able to find what you need, how about creating your own solutions? Every classroom challenge is as individual as the students in the class. Sometimes, instead of looking for solutions out there somewhere, it helps if a teacher learns to understand the challenge and experiments to find the answer that suits her class or students. Most teachers shy away from the word "research," thinking it is scholars' job to conduct research and come up with condensed data or analysis. But all of us are researchers, consciously or otherwise.

Teachers can do action research by formally defining a problem, drafting a hypothesis, collecting and organizing data, and coming to a conclusion about the effect of the hypothesized change. And the conclusion you derive will be more meaningful and effective because it deals with your challenges and your solutions, keeping in mind your circumstances and resources.

UNESCO is launching a Teacher Education Course on Climate Change Education for Sustainable Development (CCESD) in late 2011

In a nutshell, the course is designed to give teachers confidence in facilitating  CCESD inside and outside the classroom so that they can help young people understand the causes and consequences of climate change, bring about changes in attitudes and behaviors to reduce the severity of future climate change, and build resilience  in the face of climate change that are already present.

First, it helps teachers to understand the causes, dynamics and impacts of climate change through a holistic lens. Second, teachers are exposed to a range of pedagogical approaches that they can use in their own school environment. This includes engagement in whole school and school-in-community approaches. Third, teachers can develop their capacities to facilitate students’ community based learning.  Fourth, teachers can develop future oriented and transformative capacities in facilitating climate change mitigation, adaptation, and disaster risk reduction learning..    

An interdisciplinary team of researchers at the University of Kansas plan to bring a highly successful anti-bullying effort, the KiVa program, to American schools. Starting as early as the 2012-13 school year, a pilot program could kick off in selected classrooms in Lawrence, Kan. If shown to be successful there, soon afterward the model could expand nationally. KiVa, implemented in Finland in 2007, has impressed researchers with its proven reduction in bullying incidents.

The program takes a holistic approach to the bullying problem, including a rigorous classroom curriculum, videos, posters, a computer game and role-play exercises that are designed to make schools inhospitable to bullying.

“The KiVa program targets the peer environment, trying to create an ecology where bullying is no longer tolerated,” said Anne Williford, assistant professor of social welfare at KU. “Instead of targeting only a bully and victim for intervention, it targets the whole class, including kids who are uninvolved in bullying behavior.

Bound-to-be controversial in light of the recent suicide of 11-year-old Mitchell Wilson, a new approach to bullying uses a “no-blame, problem-solving response” rather than punishing aggressive kids and creating a victim mentality among those they target, say leading Canadian bullying researchers.

the idea behind the no-blame method is that it’s “more motivating for a child who has been aggressive.” It also helps the bully save face, and “take responsibility for making change, and to feel good about making change, and it decreases the likelihood of feeling unfairly treated and avenge an ‘injustice’ that was done to (them).”

But, in general, “the danger of a very hard-line approach is it elicits sympathy (for the aggressor) ... friends felt justified in their continuation of the bullying.” Bullying is a relationship problem and needs to be solved like any other, says York University’s Debra Pepler, considered one of Canada’s top bullying experts and a founder of PREVNet.

The State Board of Regents will consider letting alternative teacher training programs certify teachers, expanding the role that for decades has been exclusively performed by education schools

Another would change the requirements for teacher certification, like having more difficult content exams and classroom demonstrations.

While New York has had some alternative certification programs in place for years, like Teach for America and New York City Teaching Fellows, students are still required to take classes at education schools during the summer, nights and weekends to earn a teaching certificate.