You have a teacher in your school—every school has a teacher like this—who put a letter of endorsement in front of the principal last spring and got a signature; who went off to a summer institute last July, and who came back to school ecstatically bubbling about her incredible, mind-expanding experience learning about history or science or math or writing. She floated on air for weeks into the fall, badgered the principal for a chance to share her learning with other teachers, and talked endlessly in the lunchroom and hallways about history or science or math or writing and all the new and wonderful things she was trying out in the classroom.
But then she started to lose altitude. What she was doing in the classroom didn't quite match what the school curriculum called for, and other teachers began to resent her unwanted enthusiasm, feeling left out of the specialness of her summer experience and puzzled by exactly what she knew that they didn't. The teacher eventually settled back into business as usual.
This scenario has been repeated year after year for decades, thanks to well-intentioned supporters of high-quality professional development for teachers. Public and private funders like the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship program have learned very well how to provide outstanding learning opportunities for teachers. Focus on subject matter. Put teachers who have a consuming interest in their subject and a passion to teach together with professors, scientists, artists, or curators who have a consuming interest in their subject and a passion to teach. Set up an intense experience in which adult professionals can share an exhilarating immersion, and presto—the teachers return to school the following fall with deepened understanding and great enthusiasm to share the knowledge and experience they have acquired with their students and colleagues.
A Two-Year Study of Professional Development
As we all know, that understanding and enthusiasm rarely expand beyond the individual teacher. Several years ago, the National Foundation for the Improvement of Education (NFIE) of the National Education Association (NEA), which represents 2.2 million education employees, set out to analyze what constitutes high-quality professional development. Over two years we examined high-functioning schools and studied their professional development opportunities, interviewed nearly 1,000 teachers and teacher leaders, solicited essays from teachers, conducted focus groups of members of the public, and consulted with leading education researchers and reformers.
- Finding the time to build professional development into the life of the school through flexible scheduling and extended blocks of time when students are on vacation;
- Helping teachers assume responsibility for their own professional development based on students' needs, professional standards, parent input, and peer review;
- Finding common ground with the community through vision statements, business and community partnerships, technological support, federally funded institutes, and use of community resources; and
- Finding the revenues to support high-quality professional development by pooling state and district resources and finding ways to measure the effectiveness of such expenditures.
Professional Development as a Way of Being
- High-quality professional development is not a program or an activity, but an ethos—a way of being where learning is suffused throughout the teachers' working lives.
- Professional development needs to focus neither on the individual teacher alone nor on districtwide needs, but on the teacher in the context of the school as a whole, and to focus on the school as the unit of work (see box, p. 72).
Most professional development, like the intensive experience our enthusiastic teacher had, places the emphasis of learning on the teacher's individual interests, academic discipline, certification renewal, career path, and choice. More professional development plans are beginning to take the school context into consideration, but most still do not. Conversely, most professional development plans provided by districts, intermediate units, or states offer general professional development that equally discounts school needs and individual needs, by providing one-size-fits-all workshops and training.
Although some districtwide professional development—and much individual choice of what to learn—has value, the greatest gains in teacher learning we saw in our research were in places where whole schools studied their student results and agreed on what they needed to learn collectively and to do differently to improve those results.
What Is High-Quality Professional Development?
According to the National Foundation for the Improvement of Education, high-quality professional development:
has the goal of improving student learning;
helps teachers meet the future needs of students who learn in different ways and who come from diverse backgrounds;
provides adequate time for inquiry, reflection, and mentoring and is an important part of the normal working day of all educators;
is rigorous, sustained, and adequate to the long-term change of practice;
is directed toward teachers' intellectual development and leadership;
fosters a deepening of subject-matter knowledge, understanding of learning, and appreciation of students' needs;
is designed and directed by teachers, incorporates the best principles of adult learning, and involves shared decisions;
balances individual priorities with school and district needs;
makes best use of new technologies; and
is site-based and supports a clear vision for students.
School-Based Needs Assessment in Boulder
- Nederland Middle/Senior High School. Edward Ellis, the former principal of Nederland Middle/Senior High School, says, "The extended contract was the salvation of the school." Twelve certified teachers, paraprofessionals, education support personnel, and the principal formed a planning committee. They were charged by the entire staff with designing a faculty-student mentoring program, a mediation process for student discipline, and a study program to prepare faculty to use new curriculum standards and assessments.During their extended contract time, they studied Howard Gardner's writings on multiple intelligences and William Glasser's The Quality School, reviewed and discussed qualifications of applicants for staff openings, and worked with nearby Nederland Elementary on improving transitions from elementary to middle school through common academic expectations. The summer plans enabled continuing work during the school year to run smoothly.High school teacher Jim Martin observes, "During the school year, inservices deal with immediate concerns. With the extended time, we could do visioning in a long-term perspective. We could dream a little." The school's office manager adds, "We got a level of discussion you can't get in 60 minutes on a Thursday afternoon." Another teacher recalls that students were better prepared for graduation. Test scores reached a nine-year high, and Nederland Middle/Senior High School became a beacon for applicants from elsewhere in the district and reduced the number of students seeking to transfer out.
- Coal Creek Elementary School. Coal Creek planners used the extended contract to introduce the entire faculty to computers. The intensive two-week program allowed faculty members to work through management issues, become adept with the technology, consult with parents, and prepare themselves to be active users of it for teaching.Teachers focused on improving their ability to teach mathematics. As the principal explained, "We wanted the kids to be mathematics thinkers. Dialogue among the faculty was key. The teachers looked at both gaps and overcoverage in mathematics instruction. We really turned around our whole approach to mathematics."
- Nederland Elementary School. At the third school, the faculty decided to focus on student writing. They used the extended contract to revamp a writing assessment tool and to plan yearlong faculty development. In previous years, then-principal Holly Hultgren had been the only one planning and organizing the inservice days before school opened each fall. The extended contract allowed the participating teachers to investigate specific topics more thoroughly and share relevant information with all staff members. Teachers planned their own staff development for the entire year, using writing assessment and literacy portfolios to record student progress. The following year, the faculty extended this work to revise the report card format and parent conferencing processes to match the newly established writing procedures. Hultgren says, "These efforts could not have taken place without an uninterrupted, extended period for discussion, planning, and writing."
Members of all three faculties learned by connecting with grant-funded networks of teachers and scholars: The Collaboratives for Humanities and Arts Teaching, the Colorado Partnership for Educational Renewal (part of John Goodlad's National Network for Educational Renewal), and the American Council of Learned Society's Elementary and Secondary Schools Project. And school and university faculty have collaborated to form a Humanities Center at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
Through intense, extended examination and discussion, staff members at all three schools identified the major needs of the students, parents, and teachers, allowing the faculty to plan effective professional development and other activities that improve student learning.
We must no longer view professional development as a program separate from the teaching job, a package that can be delivered by one person or group to another. The NFIE report shows that when professional development is built into the daily, weekly, and yearlong job of teaching, it results in changed practice and student success. This kind of professional development is determined transactionally by teachers working on a long-term basis with both the school administration and other resources in the community.
Addressing the Recommendations
- Define the professional development focus of several new state mandates through the activity of NEA and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) affiliates;
- Inform a new NEA resolution that now permits collective bargaining and advocacy to include peer assistance and review in local contracts and agreements;
- Generate activities to implement its recommendations in new contracts at the local level, as well as in state legislation.
- In Olathe, Kansas; Phoenix, Arizona; and Edmonds, Washington, the teachers' locals are working with districts to reshape teacher evaluation so that it becomes an opportunity for growth rather than merely an after-the-fact judgment.
- In Rhode Island, a partnership among the state affiliates of the NEA and AFT, the Rhode Island State Department of Education, and the Northeast and Islands Regional Educational Laboratory at Brown University seeks to establish a statewide professional practice school for both veteran and novice teachers.
- In Michigan, the state NEA affiliate is working with science centers, the state board of education, and mathematics and science professional groups to create regional learning communities where teachers can prepare themselves to help students attain higher state standards.
- In several communities, teachers' unions are working with higher education and business groups to define new roles for teachers, support staff, and students to support the use of technology in instruction.
These pilots are among 10 NFIE grants that followed the report's publication. Even more widespread are local discussions stimulated by the NFIE report throughout NEA and its partner institutions, such as state departments of education, education associations, local school boards, and higher education and cultural organizations. These policy discussions hold the potential to generate large-scale change at every level.
Teachers Speak Up
Teachers from all over the United States have written to tell us that Teachers Take Charge corresponds to their beliefs and experiences, primarily because it distills the experiences and voices of thousands of teachers who have struggled for decades to learn how to improve their practice for student success.
Fundamentally, teachers told us they need to ground their learning in the classroom. Their representative associations are now moving to facilitate such learning through contracts and legislation that build professional learning into the job, that measure the effectiveness of teacher learning through observations of changed practice, and that equitably and fairly measure the effectiveness of changed practice on student achievement. As teachers told us during our two-year research project, their bottom line is student success (see fig. 1).
Figure 1. Teachers' Motivations for Growing as Professionals
When we asked teachers what their foremost concerns were in the first open-ended question on a survey—prior to informing them we were interested in exploring professional development—they told us that the issues of greatest importance were parent involvement (34 percent) and more funding (30 percent). The NEA, which represents staff in two-thirds of U.S. public schools, is taking up these concerns at the national, state, and local levels.
When we surveyed teachers on their needs and preferences for professional development, we asked many open-ended questions. We found that teachers most frequently used the phrase "keeping up" in their responses. They viewed "keeping up" as a continuous need throughout their careers—keeping up with changing knowledge, changing students, and a changing society.
Teachers Take Charge suggests ways that communities and states, higher education and professional organizations, businesses, and parents can work with teachers to build learning into schools in productive ways, so that teachers can go beyond merely keeping up, to powerfully taking on their role as society's most important change agents.
