A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

DR. WILIAM FIRESTONE: [See Slide 1] I would like to thank Senator Glenn for the opportunity to join you and help you deal with a very challenging and very important problem and issue here. And I hope you can actually read these slides. It doesn't look good.

[See Slide 2] Let me start out by stating from the point of view of professional development, policy, what's the policy problem here? Okay? The problem is, I want to take Dennis' findings, including statistics, and turn them around. At any given time most teachers are experienced teachers. These teachers set the tone for new teachers and for the school. In Jim Stigler's terms, these teachers set the culture of the school. The way you reach these teachers is through professional development. They've already been through induction. You've got to take them from where they live.

The challenge now is to help all teachers understand how to teach high quality math and science. We've always had a few good teachers. We've always had a good few teachers in math and science, but this is sort of the scale up issue. What we're talking about here, particularly with the challenging definition of high quality teaching that Jim Stigler shared with you is, how do you get a lot of teachers teaching in a way that is largely foreign to most teachers today or that they haven't experienced.

Now, what I want to do is try to zone in quickly on how do you get policies to help develop the kind of professional development context and activities that Susan talked about, support some of the induction ideas that Dennis and Michal had talked about. So who are your targets? Who are the policy targets that you want to work with?

[See Slide 3] Well, I suggest to you that there are two targets. First of all, there's teachers. Okay, you want teachers to come in with a receptive mind-set. The definition of high quality teaching that you're thinking about is foreign to teachers, to many teachers, let me say. They are not going to be readily convinced of this. They're not going to really understand it until they try it in the classroom with their own kids. But you want teachers coming in willing to listen, willing to try, not to say, oh, well, I already do that, which so many of them often do. That's one target, and that's to get them started.

The other target is school districts, okay? In fact, most professional development comes from school districts. We're doing some surveys of teachers now. Two-thirds of the teachers, when we asked them where they get their math and science professional development, it's district, the one-shot in-service days that Susan was talking about. A few of them are getting outside to Eisenhower programs outside their district, to SSI programs, to other kinds of projects, Merck if we're in the right districts in New Jersey. But most of them just get one shot in-service, and if they get out of these other things, it's with the agreement and permission of their school districts. So, where school districts don't actually do the professional development, they decide what professional development teachers get. So you need to think not just teachers, but school districts.

Now, from a policy perspective, how are you going to go about changing professional development? Well, the federal government and states don't provide professional development, maybe small states do, but it's fairly rare. [See Slide 4] Basically, you've got three policy tools that you can work with. You can influence the demand for professional development, you can influence the supply of professional development, and you can change teacher's work contexts. Okay? Now, you can treat these as separate. But, in fact, things work best when they coordinate with each other. This is where the principle of systemic reform comes out in another kind of way. You don't want to treat the supply and the demand problems as something different.

There's been a lot of discussion. I know it's a challenge of a commission like this to come up with some bold recommendations. But I would suggest to you it's going to be the challenge of the people who implement these policies to stay the course for a long time. What may be bold in the short-run, we need to come up with something in the areas of demand, supply and work context that will stay in place for long periods of time. So how are we going to -- what are some of the things that can be done under the heading of demand, supply and work context?

[See Slide 5] Let me suggest three things. First of all, let's think about salary increases. I gather this is something you've talked about already. Now, the key word here for a couple of these things is focus, which, again, goes on the idea of systemic reform. The single salary structure, which is the way most teachers are paid in this country, which has a dimension for years of experience and a dimension for college courses, already, in a sense, pays for professional development. But the indicators of professional development, years of experience and college courses taken, are often extremely crude. It's time, I think, for us to start thinking about better indicators, better measures of learning experiences for teachers. Teachers ought to be paid more directly either for being involved in experiences that have been shown to improve teachers' practice, or be assessed for the skills they develop. I would suggest not be assessed for the test scores of their students because they feel not in control of that. But with national board certification requirements, with some experiments that are going on in districts around the country, we're beginning to see ways where we can link salary increases to professional development.

Second, I want to mention the issue of student assessments. Almost all states now are assessing students and are publicizing the test results, and this is creating a political demand for improved teaching and improved learning. Most states are doing this already. The question is how to do it in such a way that creates a context for improved learning and, of course, for improved professional development. Again, it's all the rage now in some circles to talk about high stakes. I would suggest to you that high stakes, by which I mean things like closing schools if test scores are too low, giving teachers direct salary payments if test scores get very high, those kinds of things can be dangerous; they can backfire, leading to the kinds of cheating we've seen described in the newspapers, and that sort of thing.

Tests do two things. They create an interest in an area that can lead to an interest in learning. But if the pressure is too high, they can create a kind of teaching to the test that actually works against all of the kind of professional development and high quality teaching that you guys have been talking about.

A second issue I want to raise under student assessments and state assessments is limit the content areas taught. I've seen this in my travels in England, I'm seeing it now in my home state of New Jersey. When you start developing standards in every content area, and you start developing assessments in every content area, suddenly everything is important. That means nothing is important. Math and science begin competing with -- you name the content area and teachers -- particularly elementary teachers, tend to lock up under these circumstances. It's not clear how to cope. So that's another thing to think about. It's not directly related to professional development, but it certainly creates the context for professional development.

Third, I want to talk about focused recertification requirements. And this is where the issue of time comes up. A lot of people are interested in the idea now, and most states have requirements that teachers are not permanently certified, they have to be recertified, and to do that they have to have continuing professional development of some sort.

The issue here, and this is why the word "focus" is important, is, what's the professional development that counts towards recertification? I would suggest that it ought to be aligned with the state standards, and it also, at the same time, needs to recognize the needs of different students and of different teachers, because different people are at different points at different parts of their career. When you have teachers in urban areas and suburban areas, and rural areas, the kind of background they may need may be different. So, it can't be lock step, but it needs to be focused in some kind of way. So that's the demand side.

[See Slide 6] Okay, I was going to talk here about the California Subject Matter Project area as an example, but Tom Corcoran's paper gave me the courage to try to be a little broader than that. Because I think that is a good model. But one of the things that's interesting about that, I realized when I was thinking about it is, again, it's not really run by the state. The state contracts with a whole lot of people for it. So I started to think about that experience, and some of the other things that I've been seeing, when states and the federal government get involved in professional development, what should they be doing when they're getting professional development to happen? And there are special projects like the subject matter projects, a number of states have intermediate service agencies that provide professional development, institutions of higher education can be mobilized to provide professional development. There are a lot of potential deliverers out there. The question is how you get things moving in the right direction.

One thing I would suggest is you ought to focus on state standards. Now, I'm assuming that the state standards in whatever state we're talking about here reflect the kind of high quality teaching and mathematics and science that you guys have been talking about in this panel. And if they don't, that's another thing you need to be working on. But one thing is focus on those standards so there's a good image of what high quality math and science is.

A second thing is avoid state mandated topical fragmentation. I can't tell you in my research how often I've gone in to talk with teachers and say, well, what professional development have you had in the last year? Well, we had a session on blood borne pathogens, we had a session on CPR, we had a session on this, we had a session on that, and it didn't lead to anything, and it probably wasn't related to the core content areas. So if they could stop doing that, that would be a step in the right direction.

A third issue is to allow for teacher input in two senses. One is collectively. The teachers associations, the subject matter associations should have some input into the direction of professional development policy in the state because they understand the needs of their clientele, they understand the needs of their subject matter areas. The other side of teacher input is individuals. Individual teacher needs are different. They need to find the array of things out there within the area of math and science that meet their needs at the moment.

I would also suggest allowing for higher education input since that is the source of expertise that can be used along with teacher expertise in providing high quality professional development. One of the nice things about subject matter projects is the way they balance the higher ed input and the teacher input, and often they sort of have a slot for the higher ed people, which is kind of interesting as a higher ed person. But it balanced and it worked for the needs of teachers, but higher ed people do have a different kind of expertise to offer.

Finally, we do need to think about quality control. We're in a kind of context now where almost anybody who can talk somebody in a school district into it can offer professional development. And I think when the states and the federal government are offering professional development, there ought to be some sense of focusing on things that are likely to work, getting feedback from the clientele, feedback in the form of student learning of the sort we saw with the Connecticut program to show if professional development is really working in some sense.

[See Slide 7] Finally, I have three minutes for my last slide. Let me talk about the work context. And much of what I'm saying here is going to reinforce what you've been talking about in your deliberations. The point I want to make here is that time with students doesn't equal teacher work time. And so the first strategy is one that you've talked about a lot, that Secretary Riley is talking about, is staff schools so that teachers have time to work together. There's a lot of different ways to do that. The 11-month school year is one way. Lengthening the school day is another way. There ought to be a variety of ways, and the time ought to be set up in such a way that teachers can work together to provide leadership for each other. There's a lot more to be said about that. I know you'll be talking about it. For now, I just want to reinforce that point.

I also want to -- I want to put out for your discussion strategy two, which I'm not sure that there's a research base for, but it's probably Bill Firestone's pet peeve, the idea that every supervisor or content leader should be a teacher. One of the sort of international comparison points I've seen is that the American education system has an awful lot more people working outside the classroom than most school systems, national systems around the world. Every time I go into a school district, I find teachers, including teachers with good ideas who could help their colleagues, work with their colleagues, but nobody can figure out a scheduling system to get them out of their classroom with their kids to work with other teachers.

Then, there's another set of people who are never assigned to a regular classroom that are called supervisors; they're called assistant superintendents, or whatever; and they're important people, and some of them are on this panel, so I'd better be careful. But they aren't back in the classroom anymore. When we're talking about teacher leadership, something in the slide Susan had to go through very quickly, one of the major barriers to teacher leadership is that teachers are stuck in the classroom. And I would just encourage you, among the things you're thinking about, to think about kind of getting the flexibility so that not all teachers are teaching all the time, and most of the people who work in subject matter areas with teachers have some classroom, ongoing classroom experience of their own.

And with that I'll stop, thank you very much.

This page last modified April 28, 2000 (pss)