During the 1990s, educators and employers have been reconceptualizing the relationship between education and work. As a result, school programs that more explicitly link school and work have been expanded and developed, and many are supported by federal funds through the School-to-Work Opportunities Act of 1994. In order to realize the curriculum and pedagogical reforms that underlie these programs, teachers need appropriate staff development.
In 1996, RAND staff designed and pilot-tested a six-week "mini-sabbatical," "Designing Classrooms that Work." The mini-sabbatical was developed as a prototype course to help teachers learn how to make the kinds of curricular and pedagogical changes implied by school-to-career reforms, whether they work in career academies, cooperative education, school-based enterprises, or other types of programs.
This report describes the design of the mini-sabbatical and presents findings from our assessment of the pilot study. A companion report presents the mini-sabbatical curriculum: Designing Classrooms that Work: Teacher Training Guide (Ramsey, Stasz, Ormseth, Eden, & Co, 1997). Both of these documents should be of interest to educators engaged in school-to-career programs and to curriculum developers and teacher-trainers in district and state education offices or at universities.
Development and testing of the mini-sabbatical at RAND was funded by the National Center for Research in Vocational Education, University of California at Berkeley, from a grant provided by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Adult and Vocational Education. The research was conducted with RAND's Institute on Education and Training.