School Reform and Professional Development

WORK SMARTER, and hurry up about it. Stripped down to the essentials, this seems to be the standards-based reform message being delivered to teachers around the country -- no matter how long they have been and no matter what they teach. However, many teachers find the message hollow. They believe that working smarter, in today's terms, means knowing how to improve students' standardized scores and nothing more. If all the activity attending change in education dissolves into a morass of upping scores, then students, teachers, and the whole education establishment will be victims of not very smart responses to the reforms. There is plenty of evidence around that, when teachers know their content and know how to teach it at high levels to all students, teaching to the test fades into the background of everyday instruction and learning. How much proof do teachers need? In studying the implementation of problem-solving instruction in California's schools, David Cohen and others found that teachers who took part with their peers in consistent, high-quality learning that was focused on content and on the pedagogy that relates to that content improved their students' achievement considerably on state tests. Teachers who focused on process-type development, such as cooperative learning, did not have similar results. In Pittsburgh, students of teachers who taught from high standards and under conditions in which the curriculum, assessment, and development opportunities all aligned with one another outperformed students in schools where this kind of alignment had not taken place. Black students in the high- implementation schools did better on tests than white students in low- implementation schools. In Chicago, students in even the most disadvantaged schools scored better on standardized tests of basic skills and produced higher- quality intellectual work if they had experienced high-quality instruction. Teachers who used interactive instruction (lots of different strategies) consistently saw their students make achievement gains that were above the Chicago average on state tests and on nationally normed tests. Students of teachers who clung to didactic instruction made below-average gains. Underlying such results are the kinds of opportunities that enable teachers to learn themselves. Stephanie Hirsh, deputy executive director of the National Staff Development Council (NSDC), estimates that only 10% of what teachers learn in traditional development activities is ever used in the classroom. Yet traditional forms of development persist. Teachers are usually subjected to the one-shot workshop, the district-developed catalogue of disconnected classes, or the unstructured professional development day. The mantra of the new Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), also known as No Child Left Behind, is scientifically based research. That phrase is scattered more than 200 times throughout the legislation, and, while it can be confusing and sometimes contradictory, its intent is to give substance to the initiatives funded by the federal government. The new legislation comes at a time when what constitutes high-quality development is well documented. For example, NSDC has just published its revised standards for K-12 development. They are based on research and on input from more than a dozen organizations. What distinguishes these standards from other pronouncements is that they assume that all the work will be focused on improving student learning. According to the standards, to ensure that students make progress, the learning environment in development for teachers must address the context (organization of the development), the process (the how), and the content (the what). …