Center for the Study of Systemic Reform
   in Milwaukee Public Schools

 


Professional Development RESEARCH 

Gloria Ladson-Billings
Associate Professor, Department of Curriculum and Instruction,
University of Wisconsin-Madison  

Abstract

Any sincere attempts to achieve systemic reform, higher academic standards, and school improvement require a commitment to improved teacher learning through teacher professional development. This research area is aimed at looking carefully at the ways professional development supports systemic reform and standards-based academic achievement. It hopes to provide the district with a clearer picture of the ways its policies and resources can be better used to ensure that teacher learning has a more direct impact on student learning and achievement. 

I. Introduction 

Professional development typically is an afterthought in large urban school districts (Hawley & Valli, 1999; Little, 1994). However, it is clear from research in schools that work that professional development is the primary responsibility of administration. Most businesses and industries allocate 10 to 15 % of their operating budgets to improving the knowledge and capacity of their workforce. Schools spend much less of their resources on professional development; yet, improving the instructional capacity of the teachers is one of the most critical aspects of school improvement (Lampert & Ball, 1999). 

There are a number of reasons why large urban school districts must invest in professional development. One reason is that changes in standards, curriculum, and assessments require school districts to take the lead in educating teachers about the vision and direction of the district. Specific changes instituted by school districts cannot be presented to teachers in pre-service education. Thus, continuous learning must be a part of a district’s mandate (Corcoran, 1995; Elmore, 1992; Elmore & Burney, 1999; Hawley & Valli, 1999).

Another reason is that urban districts have a relatively high number of inexperienced teachers (with less than five years of teaching experience) and a high level of teacher turnover each year. These constant changes mean that districts must step in and provide solid support for teachers. Urban school districts serve large numbers of students of color and poor students, who traditionally have not performed well on measures of academic achievement. Many new teachers resist teaching in such schools because of the presumption that there will be little to support their own professional growth (Ladson-Billings, 1999).

 A third reason for providing effective professional development is that good professional development can help teachers create a sense of professional community (Lord, 1994; Sykes, 1996). Teachers practice their profession in isolation. Their peers rarely, if ever, observe them at work. The structure of the school day leaves little time for discussions or reflection on pedagogical practice. Yet, each year teachers are expected to absorb into their classroom practice new innovations in curricula, standards, and assessments (Little, 1999).

If Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) is serious about having its students benefit from systemic reform initiatives (e.g. high academic standards, enriched aligned curriculum, data-driven teaching, and assessment), it must be committed to “stable, high-quality sources of professional development” (National Commission on Teaching & America’s Future, 1996, p. 82). Such high-quality professional development:  

·        Has the goal of improving student learning at the heart of every school endeavor;

·        Fosters a deepening of subject matter knowledge (Shulman, 1986), a greater understanding of learning, and a greater appreciation of students’ needs;

·        Helps teachers and other staff meet the needs of students who learn in different ways and who come from diverse cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic backgrounds;

·        Provides adequate time for inquiry, reflection, and mentoring, and is an important part of the normal working day;

·        Is rigorous, sustained, and adequate to the long-term change of practice;

·        Is directed toward teachers’ intellectual development and leadership;

·        Is teacher designed and directed, incorporates the best principles of adult learning, and involves shared decisions designed to improve schools;

·        Balances individual priorities with school and district needs;

·        Is site-based and supportive of a clearly articulated vision for students. 

Importance of This Research  

Research attention to the professional development of teachers is an integral part of the work of the Center for the Study of Systemic Reform. It knits together our concerns about data-driven inquiry, curriculum alignment, assessment, and school improvement. An assumption of this particular project is that systemic school reform must include stable, high-quality professional development. We understand that MPS is in the early stages of systemic reform and we want to insure that professional development moves along with all other district efforts toward reform. Indeed, we believe that professional development is one of the keys to insuring that school-wide reform does occur. 

Statement of the Problem  

MPS is currently involved in systemic reform that is designed to teach all students to high standards and to document student performance through state and local assessments. However, it is unclear to what degree MPS teachers are provided “stable, high quality professional development” opportunities. Thus, the role of this aspect of the Joyce Foundation/Bader Foundation-funded research is two-fold: 

1.      To determine the state of current professional development efforts and the district’s capacity to support necessary professional development.

2.      To assist in designing a professional development program that supports the district’s vision of teaching all students to high standards and producing excellent results. 

Research Design  

The size of the district and resources for this research require us to be strategic about what data we collect and how we collect it. We intend to do the following studies: 

1.      Interview district personnel involved with professional development. We need to understand the MPS vision concerning professional development. We want to understand how this vision coheres with the district’s vision of higher standards, improved curriculum, and quality assessment. We hope that the interviews we conduct will help to clarify the role the district has carved out for itself to support teacher learning. We also hope these interviews will help us determine how tightly coupled the district’s reform efforts are to professional development.

2.      Survey teachers in selected schools about professional development opportunities. We will not be able to interview every teacher in the district but we may be able to survey a representative sample. Simple survey questions will help us determine which professional development opportunities teachers have had, which ones they have found most useful, and which ones they believe they still need to support their attempts to teach all students to high standards.

3.      Examine professional development opportunities in schools that have demonstrated academic gains and/or higher-than-predicted test scores. MPS has indicated that there are a number of schools that are performing at or above standard. Since these schools may represent examples of “best practices,” we want to examine the ways that these schools support teacher learning. We will try to determine how teachers in these schools continue to grow and assimilate new learning that helps them teach all students to high standards. 

These three sites of investigation create an important triangle of data for our research: 

District Policies

  

                                    Teacher Responses                    School Practices                                  

Figure 1. The integral features of the data triangle addressed in this study of professional
                development.

 II. Progress to Date 

The team member responsible for this research, Gloria Ladson-Billings, has held one meeting with the MPS Director of Curriculum and Instruction, Jocklyn Smith, and the English/Language Arts Specialist, Sandra Dickerson. A subsequent meeting with the six curriculum specialists in mathematics, reading, science, and social studies and the Director of Special Services, Estell Sprewer, was held on May 26, 1999. During that meeting, we discussed some of the research findings from the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (1996). 

III. Findings 

Each curriculum specialist shared her insights on professional development and described what was occurring in her specific area. It was clear from their reports that there are many professional development activities currently occurring in the district. Some of those activities include: creating courses with the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; creating teacher writing groups to identify subject-area skills and standards; becoming more focused in a particular area and on specific grade levels (e.g. early reading); including administrators and para-professionals in professional development activities; creating a variety of venues for teacher orientation to new curriculum programs; training cadres of teachers to work with other teachers (this start-up model has already had an impact on 1,900 of the district’s 3,000 elementary teachers). 

The common concerns expressed by the curriculum specialists included the following: 

1.      Mobility of middle school teachers, which works against creating a stable professional development system;

2.      Need to build the academic knowledge base of teachers;

3.      Limited availability of curricula materials in some areas and specific topics;

4.      Creation of better and more seamless connections between regular and special education;

5.      Creation of more effective development programs for high school teachers;

6.      Involvement of principals in more effective dialogue with their staffs;

7.      Coherent application of fiscal resources to professional development (e.g., starting in 1997, about $9.00 per student was decentralized and sent to schools for this purpose);

8.      Micro-analyses of school level test data that will facilitate the design of professional development programs and activities;

9.      Making the transition from the whole-school in-service sessions requested by principals toward more collaboratively constructed professional development opportunities based on school and teacher needs;

10.  Development of the potential for greater use of distance learning and Professional Development Schools;

11.  Creating support for a district demonstration school where “best practices” are tried and modeled (e.g., similar to the old 21st Street School);

12.  Evaluation of  the honors (and gifted education) curriculum to insure that it measures up to other such programs nationally;

13.  Development of teacher accountability for professional development (e.g., reading, studying, professional association membership, etc.);

14.  Improved coordination of the professional development effort throughout the district (currently, there are as many as 45 different professional development activities in the district);

15.  Improved accountability of the monies devoted to professional development (in some instances, the professional development monies have been used to purchase a “person” at a school who has no professional development responsibilities);

16.  Development of the potential of weekend instructional television courses and systemic distribution of information about these courses (such courses, while they do help build teachers’ academic knowledge bases, can and should also be used to focus on current issues such as standards, curriculum alignment, and assessment). 

IV. Next Steps: Policy Recommendations for Future research  

The Professional Development research area has two foci. The first is to look more carefully at those professional development efforts that seem to be working. By working, we are referring to those professional development efforts that support teachers’ learning and their abilities to teach all students to high standards. We want to look at the features of such programs and determine what components are instrumental to the programs’ successes. For example, we want teachers to be able to identify professional development opportunities and experiences that helped them with specific aspects of their teaching. If a teacher has attended a professional development session that helped explain how to do “running records” to determine students’ reading strengths, we want to know whether or not the teacher is using that knowledge and how such knowledge may support student achievement. 

The second focal point of this research is that of setting professional development priorities. Each of the curriculum specialists has been asked to create a list of those professional development opportunities they feel are necessary if the are to help teachers meet the challenges of teaching students to attain high standards. Our joint task will be to identify out professional development priorities from that list. We are aware that there is neither enough time nor money to implement every professional development endeavor that the curriculum specialists may desire. However, if we are able to determine those activities that will best support the most teacher learning, we believe we can do a better job of coordination with all other systemic reform efforts in the district.

References 

Corcoran, T. C. (1995). Helping teachers teach well: Transforming professional development. New Brunswick, NJ: Consortium for Policy Research in Education, Rutgers University. 

Elmore, R. F. (1992). Why restructuring alone won’t improve teaching. Educational Leadership, 49 (7), 44-48. 

Elmore, R. F., & Burney, D. (1999). Investing in teacher learning: Staff development and instructional improvement. In L. Darling-Hammond & G. Sykes (Eds.), Teaching as the learning profession: Handbook of policy and practice (pp.263-291). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 

Hawley, W. D., & Valli, L. (1999). The essentials of professional development: A new consensus. In L. Darling-Hammond & G. Sykes (Eds.), Teaching as the learning profession: Handbook of policy and practice (pp.127-150). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 

Ladson-Billings, G. (1999). Preparing teachers for diversity: Historical perspectives, current trends, and future directions. In L. Darling-Hammond & G. Sykes (Eds.), Teaching as the learning profession: Handbook of policy and practice (pp.86-123). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 

Lampert, M., & Ball, D. L. (1999). Aligning teacher education with contemporary K-12 reform visions. In L. Darling-Hammond & G. Sykes (Eds.), Teaching as the learning profession: Handbook of policy and practice (pp.33-53). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 

Little, J.W. (1994). Teachers’ professional development in a climate of educational reform. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 15, 129-151. 

Little, J. W. (1999). Organizing schools for teacher learning. In L. Darling-Hammond & G. Sykes (Eds.), Teaching as the learning profession: Handbook of policy and practice  (pp.233-262). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 

Lord, B. (1994). Teachers’ professional development: Critical colleagueship and the role of professional communities. In N. Cobb (Ed.), The future of education: Perspectives on national standards in education. New York: College Entrance Examination Board. 

National Commission on Teaching & America’s Future. (1996). What matters most: Teaching for America’s future. New York: Author. 

Shulman, L. (1986). Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching. Educational Researcher, 15 (2), 4-14. 

Sykes, G. (1996). Reform of and as professional development. Phi Delta Kappan, 77, 464-467.

 

 

 

 

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