Teachers Perception of Virtual Professional Development in a Randomized Control Trial

Fuhui Tong, Beverly J. Irby, Rafael Lara-Alecio

Using qualitative survey response data from 75 third grade bilingual teachers in a randomized control trial (RCT), we examined teachers’ perceptions towards the project’s virtual professional development (VPD) component. We were interested in the teachers’ perceptions as it relates to the potential to take PD to a broader audience across geographic regions (scalability). Through the progression from the original RCT in one school district with face-face PD to a validation RCT in seven school districts across three geographic regions with VPD, it was found that teachers were overwhelmingly positive toward such type of training, and VPD is a gateway to increasing the scalability of strategies presented in the online setting.