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with most of these stages of planning and implementation method of professional development activities.

In my school, I follow primarily classroom observation with the help of lead teachers to find out the needs of teachers to form a better strategy for professional development. I believe, since many of the teachers in my school are undertrained or unqualified, they are lacking some basic skills and ideas of instruction, especially the modern classroom practices. So I feel observation is the most appropriate method that can be followed to formulate the needs of teachers to be addressed in professional development. Moreover, since my search in this dissertation is to find solutions to reduce the achievement gap through professional development, I want to find evidence from the student learning outcomes to show there is a wide achievement gap among the studentsI thought you knew that – this diss is to address the issue, not to see if it exists?? . It is clear evidence that the teachers are lacking proper skills to handle a diverse classroom effectively. As Hawley and Valli (1990) state, ‘the content of professional development focuses on what students are to learn and how to address the different problems students may have in learning the material’ (p. 65). It emphasises two aspects of professional development such as the ‘pedagogical content knowledge’ (Shulman, 1986page needed) and the instructional strategies to be used to teach the content.

It is so important for teachers to be competent in the content knowledge of their discipline to teach effectively and improve student outcomes. It is evident from the literature that the successful teachers are the ones with deep content knowledge. Shulman (1986) argues that successful teaching requires teachers to understand their discipline in such a way that they are able to anticipate common misconceptions that student bring to the study of that subject and can provide alternative representation of the material for students who have difficulty in learning it. Agreeing with this view, Diana Rigden (2000) explains that ,

You are expecting me to work out what she says – this quote is too long – you need to give me the key points of her argument, not ask me to work it outResearch demonstrates that there is a strong reliable relationship between teachers’ content knowledge and quality of their instruction. Teachers with a deep conceptual understanding of their subject ask a great number of high level questions, encourage students to apply and transfer knowledge, help students see and understand relationships between and among ideas and concepts and make other choices in their instruction that engage students and challenge them to learn (p. 1).

At the same time as what/ the use of effective instructional skills is also equally important to achieve higher student learning outcomes and to cater to the needs of individual students in the class for closing the achievement gap. As Spark (2002) observes, the ‘most powerful form of professional development engages teachers in the continuous improvement of their teaching and expands the repertoire of instructional approaches they used to teach that content’, (p. 3). So an effective professional development plan should plan for introducing modern and effective approaches of instruction. One of the effective methods to improve teaching as pointed out by Spark