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

PAUL KIMMELMAN: As a practicing superintendent, I want to thank my fellow commissioner, Javier, for telling me where to go back and look for our supplies now when I get back to school, so I will redistribute them next year.

I would like to recognize the Professional Development committee members, if you would just signal everybody: Anne Jolly; Bill Firestone, who is one of our consultants that was here today; Lisa Towne; Donna Osborne; Ken Griffin; Congressman Rush Holt; Kathy Havens, Diane Briars; and Susan Loucks-Horsley, who had to leave, I believe, earlier, and Bruce Alberts, and Linda Rosen, who came in to make sure that I behaved myself while we were trying to do our work.

[See Slide 1] Our committee made a decision to just bring forth one big, bold recommendation, and that recommendation was to guarantee or expect that all teachers will engage in high quality, continuous, content-based professional development experiences as part of their role and responsibilities during their normal work day and year. We consider what we've done today to be a work in progress, and we're hopeful that people such as yourself who are in the audience will use the Glenn Commission system to e-mail feedback to us so that we can continue to modify and refine our work.

Dr. Firestone, who was one of our presenters this morning, had suggested that we try to categorize our action strategies in several categories; those being facilitating conditions, incentives, and making available knowledge and resources. And so this is a preliminary run at trying to accomplish that goal. And I do believe that prior to the next meeting there will be changes made to it.

The action strategies to implement our goal include obviously dealing with the one issue that we talked about consistently, and that is salaries, restructuring the school day and year in the context that professional development needs to be done at a time when teachers are not in contact with students and providing them sufficient time to do it as part of their work responsibilities.

Teacher collaboration around improving teaching practices, collaboration with the community, including business and industry, K-12 and beyond continuum, connecting to literacy, defining appropriate roles for the federal, state and local entities, along with higher education and business and industry.

[See Slide 2] Under incentives, linking to the existing standards and aligning the system, using the Susan Loucks-Horsley definition of accountability, which was looking at the professional development system and correcting it as you work your way through it. We recognized Craig's statement yesterday about not being a moving target and the macro accountability component, that if we get X, we will produce or deliver Y, and a recognition that there needs to be some alignment with student achievement and a professional development program, but recognizing the caveats that were discussed this morning, as well, and using a multi-faceted performance-based accountability system.

Finally, the third category, making available knowledge and resources, developing national resources to support high quality teaching and organizing it in what we assume would be some form of a database to facilitate large-scale dissemination and use. The role of the principal and what principals can do to enhance the professional development implementation plan, and finally developing cadres of leaders to support professional development in a variety of ways.

This is the first cut in our attempt to define professional development. I will say that we used the continuous improvement definition that was delivered by Susan when she introduced the concept to us earlier today.

If there's any other -- if there're other additional items, I would invite any other members of the committee to add them and to take questions, if you have any.

MEMBER: Paul, was there any consideration in terms of determining who would be the professional developers? Certification? Experience? Where would you see them come from? And who would determine who they would be?

MR. KIMMELMAN: Well, what we did, Jeff, that was mentioned. But we did not go deeply into the action strategies. So the quality of the cadre of professional developers is something that will be discussed at a later date.

MEMBER'S DESIGNEE: Could you clarify for me the statement that professional development will be done at a time when teachers are not in contact with the students? Does this mean -- what does it mean?

MR. KIMMELMAN: Well, since you're with the AFT, certainly it's from 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM every night, Alice.

MEMBER: On Saturday night?

MR. KIMMELMAN: You got it. No. I think that what we're looking at is that it's built into a component of the day, that we're not looking at the one shot, 4:00 - 6:00 PM idea, but that teachers are going to have periods of time, blocks of time in their working schedule to allow them to engage in this.

MEMBER'S DESIGNEE: Was this sort of Diane's idea --

MR. KIMMELMAN: Yes.

MEMBER'S DESIGNEE: -- of yesterday? And not the idea that there shouldn't be these release blocks built into -- ?

MR.KIMMELMAN: Exactly. But I think that it's also open for a lot of people to throw additional ideas. But certainly that one reflects Diane's passion for addressing that concern.

And I would share that I think everybody on the committee had that same passion, and it wasn't just Diane's.

MEMBER: Can I make one observation on this? When I read it again, looking at it again, as far as the recommendations, it says that teachers will engage, yada yada, during their normal workday and year. And I just want to make it very clear that "year" is not the current model for the year that we are looking at, an extended sort of year for teachers that would add another month. So we probably need to make a note of that.

MR. KIMMELMAN: And I think you can see that there is a thread that weaves through induction, recruitment and professional development as you listen to the reports.

MEMBER'S DESIGNEE: In your discussions about direction, in terms of the professional development, I'm struggling for the right words here, perhaps a little bit hyper-sensitive as a non-educator. Did you all talk about sort of the issue that Maria and Rita Colwell raised yesterday, it's sort of the -- how do you deal with professional development that may not -- where we may need to be going is not the sort of traditional classroom approach. And it may be implicit in a lot of it, but I'm just curious about, if you could talk about it.

KIMMELMAN: We really didn't get into that, Kelley. And hopefully, people will send us their ideas so that we can incorporate them into our future writings. And I'm sure Linda will talk about that before the day's over.

This page last modified April 26, 2000 (pss)