Teachers: The Key to Successful Reform

April 1999
Teachers: The Key to Successful Reform
By Suzie Boss

School reform efforts that overlook or exclude teachers may be contributing to an "Alice in Wonderland" atmosphere in the nation's classrooms, according to a new publication, Actual Schools, Possible Practices: New Directions in Professional Development. Dr. Rebecca Novick of NWREL's Child and Family Program reports that disjointed reform efforts have led to a climate of "confusion and contradiction," causing some teachers to consider "closing the classroom door and waiting for it all to go away."
Seeking a way out of Wonderland, Novick looks specifically at the role of effective professional development in elementary school reform. She synthesizes academic research, recounts trends in education, shares understandings from developmental psychology, highlights promising practices, and relates the results of a NWREL survey of Northwest educators on the topic of professional development.
At the heart of school reform efforts, Novick suggests, are key questions about the nature of learning and the purposes of schooling: Do we see students as passive learners, waiting to be "filled" with information by teachers? Or as active seekers of knowledge who construct their own meanings from experiences, which teachers can facilitate? And what kind of adults do we want our children to become?
Novick deliberately avoids polarizing answers, which she believes sets up a "dangerous dichotomy." Research, she points out, shows that good teachers "have always balanced discovery learning with skill and strategy instruction."
Indeed, on a daily basis, many teachers face dueling challenges: emphasizing multiple intelligences and increasing standardized test scores; facilitating higher-order thinking and memorization of isolated facts; creating exciting, lively classrooms and maintaining order.
Well-designed professional-development activities can help teachers balance the inevitable tensions of such conflicting expectations. Effective professional development "requires time for observation, practice, reading, reflection, dialogue with colleagues, and support for these practices at the district, state, and federal levels," she writes. In a climate that supports true reform, Novick asserts, "everyone involved will be both a teacher and a learner."
Turning schools into learning communities will require changes at the very core of education, Novick acknowledges. It's a demanding task that can't be accomplished through the "one-shot" workshops that continue to define professional development for most teachers. Among the barriers Novick describes in detail are time and funding, bureaucratic structures, evaluation practices, and personal resistance to change.
According to the Northwest educators surveyed by NWREL, effective staff development should:

Include staff in planning and scheduling of activities
Be determined and carried out at the building level
Have a clear direction—a coherent, long-term vision

How would such an approach look in practice? Novick describes the ambitious, ongoing reform effort taken at Cherry Valley Elementary School, which serves a culturally and economically diverse student body in Polson, Montana. For a decade, this school has worked to create a school culture that supports children's learning. Families, community members, and all staff are considered key members of the learning community, and a team process is utilized as the basis for decisionmaking. Staff-development practices include time for collaboration, planning, reading, discussion, visiting other schools, and peer mentoring.
"If schools are to become exciting places for children to grow and learn," Novick concludes, "then teachers and principals, like children, need opportunities to become actively involved in their own learning process."
To order a copy of Actual Schools, Possible Practices: New Directions in Professional Development, please go to the Document Order Form for ordering information.

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