| Summary: | This study explores three teachers' process of transforming declarative domain and pedagogical knowledge of text production into procedural knowledge during a yearlong professional development project.This declarative knowledge includes knowledge of text structures, sentence structures and paragraph structures. The research study was inserted within the staff development project and focused only on teachers' responses to questions during three reflection sessions, each following coaching sessions that were evenly spaced throughout the 1999-2000 year. The results show that two subjects expanded their declarative knowledge of linguistic form over the yearlong project. Only one of these two subjects actually transformed some of this recently acquired knowledge into procedural knowledge. One subject, who had some declarative and procedural knowledge about the use of certain forms to support students' writing at the beginning of the year, extended her knowledge of text structure to opinion texts. Results indicate various perspectives on the meaning of self-efficacy, and its significant influence in the process of procedural knowledge construction. One of the important implications is the necessity of defining self-efficacy from several perspectives, if one wants to adequately address this issue in teacher learning. Other contributing factors to the process of conceptual change include: (a) teachers' establishment of personal learning goals, (b) teachers' ability to utilize metacognitive skills to monitor progress towards these objectives, and (c) teachers' stance in terms of students' learning, using a teacher-oriented or student-oriented perspective.This study reflects and extends findings from other studies and has specific recommendations for practice, professional development and research. A schema to explain the process of conceptual change, from declarative to procedural knowledge, is suggested.This model is based on the construct of a Problem Space, in which various aspects of declarative domain and pedagogical knowledge are manipulated and changed through the use of declarative and procedural cognitive and metacognitive knowledge.
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