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As teacher professional development research includes more experimental designs, new challenges arise. We examine the threat of participant attrition as an example of the types of problems researchers face. Counter-intuitively, higher levels of recruitment effort were related to higher dropout rates among teachers. We also found that teachers left because of changes in teaching assignments, institutional challenges, and personal challenges. Finally, the majority of teachers in urban schools dropped out, while the majority of teachers in rural or suburban schools remained. We conclude with recommendations for future teacher learning experiments. (Contains 3 tables.)

Online teacher professional development (PD) has become an alternative to face-to-face PD. The shift from face-to-face to online PD, however, brings new challenges for PD facilitators, whose roles are crucial in orchestrating teacher learning. This paper is motivated by the need to improve our understanding of what is entailed in the roles of facilitators, and how those roles might vary by context (i.e., face-to-face or asynchronous online). We draw on Anderson, Rourke, Garrison & Archer (2001) "teaching presence" framework to lay the groundwork for characterizing the role of online and face-to-face facilitators. Qualitative analysis revealed that although PD facilitators attended to similar issues irrespective of context, the actions they engaged in to attend to these issues varied by context. Further exploration and synthesis of the findings suggests that shifting from traditional face-to-face to online PD presents several design and instructional tensions that can impact how facilitators carry Out their roles to support teacher learning. We conclude by using the findings from this study to present potential design tensions or pedagogical challenges that might arise when facilitators shift from face-to-face to online PD contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The 2013 closure of a public hospital in Baton Rouge, LA transformed graduate medical education (GME) at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center (OLOL). Administrators were tasked with incorporating residents into patient safety and quality improvement initiatives to fulfill regulatory obligations. This report outlines our experiences as we built these patient safety and quality improvement initiatives in a rapidly expanding independent academic medical center., Methods: We joined the Alliance of Independent Academic Medical Centers (AIAMC) to meet and learn from national peers. To fulfill the scholarly activity requirement of the AIAMC's National Initiative IV, we formed a multidisciplinary team to develop a patient safety education project. Prioritized monthly team meetings allowed for project successes to be celebrated and circulated within the organization., Results: The public-private partnership that more than quadrupled the historic size of GME at OLOL has, in the past 2 years, led to the development of an interdisciplinary team. This team has expanded to accommodate residency program leadership from across the campus. Our National Initiative IV project won a national award and inspired several follow-up initiatives. In addition, this work led to the formation of a Patient Safety and Clinical Quality Improvement fellowship that matched its first fellow in 2015., Conclusion: Through the commitment and support of hospital and medical education leaders, as well as a focus on promoting cultural change through scholarly activity, we were able to greatly expand patient safety and quality improvement efforts in our institution.