What helps Teachers Grow | Professional Development

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What Helps Teachers Grow

In education, there's no shortage of opportunities for professional development. Indeed, it's a virtual industry, complete with summer institutes, online classes, mountains of how-to books, scholarly journals, Web sites, satellite broadcasts, and experts promising to deliver smart answers to vexing questions.

But a growing consensus holds that such plentiful choices have failed to produce consistent improvements in teacher quality. "Although nearly all public school teachers participate in some sort of professional development activity each year, very few educators receive the types of opportunities that have been demonstrated to be effective," assert researchers from the Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy at the University of Washington.

Good professional development allows teachers to become actively involved in their own learning and active participants in school reform. "Opportunities to engage in reflective study of teaching practices through reading, dialogue, experimentation, collaborative problem solving, observation, and peer mentoring are considered critical to effective professional development," reports Dr. Rebecca Novick of the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory in her 1999 publication, Actual Schools, Possible Practices: New Directions in Professional Development.

Drawing on research about best practices, the U.S. Department of Education has identified 10 principles of effective professional development and uses them as the basis for recognizing model programs around the country. (See Elements of Effective Programs.) As the department's 1998 report, Promising Practices: New Ways to Improve Teacher Quality, explains, "There is now much agreement about what professional development should be. It should be focused on what teachers in individual schools need to know and be able to do for their students. Teachers should work together to design and implement professional development based on shared concerns and strengths. Ultimately, professional development should build 'professional communities' committed to higher student learning."

Island of Hope in a Sea of Dreams, released in October, reports on schools that have won the U.S. Department of Education Model Professional Development Award since its establishment in 1995. Lead author Joellen Killion of the National Staff Development Council writes, "Teachers in these schools did not walk on the moon, fight in great wars, write significant pieces of literature, discover a cure for life-threatening disease, or invent a way to end world hunger.... They work hard.... They support and coach one another in a community of learners. They demand the best of themselves and their colleagues. And, their efforts pay off in the only way that matters to them — increased student success."

This new paradigm — in which professional development is ongoing, collaborative, built into the daily routines of the schoolhouse, and tied to student success — couldn't be more different from the one-shot, pull-out workshops that most teachers have attended on designated staff training days. As Linda Darling-Hammond, Executive Director of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, explains, "These new programs envision the professional teacher as one who learns from teaching rather than as one who has finished learning how to teach." Doing What Matters Most: Investing in Quality Teaching, the National Commission report that Darling-Hammond coauthored in 1997, highlights professional development strategies that are:

Experiential, engaging teachers in concrete tasks of teaching, assessment, and observation that illuminate the processes of learning and development
Grounded in participants' questions, inquiry, and experimentation as well as professionwide research
Collaborative, involving a sharing of knowledge among educators
Connected to and derived from teachers' work with their students, as well as to examinations of subject matter and teaching methods
Sustained and intensive, supported by modeling, coaching, and problem solving around specific problems of practice
Connected to other aspects of school change

A Washington teacher describes what happened when he changed schools a few years ago: "I moved from a building where teachers either felt isolated or were bickering with their colleagues to one where the whole staff was engaged as a team, figuring out better ways to help our students learn. Being in such a positive environment has brought back my enthusiasm to teach. It's good for kids and good for staff."

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