Great Expectations| Professional Development

a teacher at work
Great Expectations

By SUZIE BOSS

At the end of a long day, his classroom empty, an Oregon teacher pushes aside the stack of English papers he's grading, takes off his glasses, and allows himself a moment to vent. "Every time I pick up the newspaper I read another story questioning the job we're doing as teachers," he says. "Why aren't our test scores higher? Why can't our kids do more? Why do Japanese or German kids do better?" The irony is, this man happens to be an exceptional teacher, praised by parents, students, and colleagues. But some days, it seems as if the whole country expects him to do a better job.

During the third National Education Summit last fall, conference co-chair Louis Gerstner Jr. argued the case for better teaching: "If we don't have great teachers, we won't have great students. It's simple."

President Clinton has spelled out the challenge this way: "Every child needs — and deserves — dedicated, outstanding teachers, who know their subject matter, are effectively trained, and know how to teach to higher standards and to make learning come alive for students."

The National Commission on Teaching and America's Future has set 2006 as the target date for an ambitious goal, "providing every student in America with what should be his or her educational birthright: access to competent, caring, qualified teachers in schools organized for success."

Teaching — long known as "the essential profession" because it lays the groundwork for all other careers — is becoming an essential component of education reform. During the past decade, reform efforts have focused on setting high standards for what students should learn and designing tools to measure their progress. Now, the focus is shifting to classroom teachers as the critical link between setting goals and helping students reach them. As James W. Stigler and James Hiebert explain in The Teaching Gap, published last year, "Teaching is the next frontier in the continuing struggle to improve schools. Standards set the course, and assessments provide the benchmarks, but it is teaching that must be improved to push us along the path to success."

The classroom pressures are intense. Teacher Quality, a 1999 report from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), acknowledges that teachers "are being asked to learn new methods of teaching, while at the same time they are facing the greater challenges of rapidly increasingly technological changes and greater diversity in the classroom." Less than half of American teachers feel equipped to meet these new challenges, according to NCES. Teacher Quality reports that relatively few teachers feel well prepared to integrate educational technology into classroom instruction, meet the needs of challenging students (such as those with limited English skills or disabilities), or use the student performance assessment techniques that many states and districts now require.

How can we hope to deliver on the promise of a competent, caring teacher for every classroom, without making teachers feel overwhelmed or defensive about the job they're doing? Better teacher preparation is one focus of current reform efforts. Just as critical is on-the-job training to help those already in the classroom meet the expanding challenges of their profession. Quality Counts 2000, a special report published by Education Week in January, makes a case for stepping up the rigor of both preservice and inservice training available to the nation's teachers. The "pipeline" for beginning teachers is more of a leaky faucet, according to Quality Counts, and "states are not doing nearly enough to help teachers reach their full potential as educators and to keep them from quitting the profession."

If teaching practices and student results are to improve, research suggests that teachers need time and opportunities to be active learners themselves. School environments that allow teachers to learn also inspire student learning. As Teacher Quality concludes, "Continued learning is a key to building educators' capacity for effective teaching, particularly in a profession where the demands are changing and expanding." Authors of The Teaching Gap add a hopeful message to the discussion about professional development: "Teaching lies within the control of teachers. It is something we can study and improve.... Schools must be places where teachers, as well as students, can learn."

Indeed, given the right environment, the daily activities of teachers can be transformed into opportunities for ongoing learning. Writing in the Journal of Staff Development last summer, authors Fred H. Wood and Frank McQuarrie Jr. report the benefits of job-embedded learning — "learning by doing, reflecting on the experience, and then generating and sharing new insights and learning with oneself and others."

By observing the colleagues she most admires, a young Idaho teacher has arrived at this conclusion: "A good teacher is an ardent learner."

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