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Gloria Ladson-Billings 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 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.
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