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

DR. SUSAN LOUCKS-HORSLEY: [See Slide 1] Thank you, Senator Glenn. I'm very, very pleased and honored to be here, and to have this opportunity to talk about something I'm very passionate about, which is providing professional learning opportunities for teachers.

Senator Glenn started out by talking about the confluence of many things that makes this an auspicious time to be dealing with these issues. And one that I might add to his list is that at this time we have an awful lot of research about professional development, about teacher learning, about all of the different issues and aspects that feed into that particular topic, as well as a great deal of what I call practitioner wisdom. A lot of people who are doing professional development who are quite wise about what it takes to make it really successful. And so it's been my sort of aim in life to bring some of that material together and to be able to share it with those who face the challenge of designing professional development programs.

The Senator also talked about needing bold and visionary ideas, and if you accept the fact that most professional development in this country is in the form of single in-service training workshops, ones that typically stand alone, ones that don't connect particularly well to the teacher's practice, then it's almost as if anything would be bold and visionary. But I'm going to suggest some particularly, what I think of as fairly bold differences from that singular standalone workshop that so many teachers feel confined to choosing among.

Bill Firestone and I are sharing the time on professional development, and what I'm going to do is start with the notion of what the nature of professional development is, is critically important. It's not that we want, we know that we want more professional development for teachers, but we want the quality of that professional development to be particularly good, and the nature of effective professional development is something that we're learning a lot about. So that's my part. And Bill will talk about some policies and policy instruments that could support and structure that effective professional development.

In the briefing book is a particularly good paper by Tom Corcoran of CPRE on professional development. And I want to start with his definitions of the purpose of professional development. [See Slide2] Just to start with a conversation about what is more bold and visionary than what we have out there.

Tom says that the purpose of professional development is the continuous improvement of professional practice. And the way I want to organize these few minutes I have with you is to take each part of that definition and talk about what that means in the way of the nature of professional development. So I'll talk about what it means to be continuous, and what it means to focus on improvement, and what it means to have professional practice at the core of our professional development activities.

First of all, the term continuous. [See Slide 3] We know that effective professional development is continuous, ongoing, sustained over time. We know that it's not just a training workshop, it may begin with a training workshop, but it also has sustained experiences over time. One of the research projects I was connected with years ago had, as one of its bold and visionary recommendations, that people who design professional development spend half of their resources up to an initial opportunity for learning, so that if there's an initial training workshop or whatever, and then the other half of their resources afterwards. That's certainly not the way professional development is thought about at this point. So it's building over time, provides an adequate amount of time to learn and make meaningful and substantial changes. All of us know that if we really are going to change what we do, we have to spend some time learning about how to do something different. Some of the best training programs, best professional development programs are talking about 80-100 hours of professional development for teachers, a lot different from a two-hour after school workshop, even an all-day Saturday workshop, even a three, four, or five-day institute over the summer. Eighty or 100 hours is a long time to study and really learn something new.

And then the notion of what actually goes into that time is a cycle of learning and then practice and assessment, and then thinking about what to do differently, practicing, assessing and so forth. So we're talking about a feedback loop and a learning cycle, very unlike a single workshop.

The second phrase I want to focus on in Tom's definition of effective professional development is improvement. [See Slide 4] In this particular case, we're talking about increasing the quality of teaching and learning. Now, I'm not going to go into your definition of high quality teaching because I know you spent a couple of sessions on that, but only to point out that when professional development centers on high quality teaching, it cares deeply about having meaningful content for teachers to learn, the big ideas and the discipline. It cares that all students are the focus, not just an elite number of students who are going to perhaps go on to be scientists and mathematicians. It also cares about the nature of teaching, that it probes student understanding and cares about that students understand things and that it's not just transmission-oriented.

So the centering on the high quality teaching, and I might add that science and mathematics fields both have a highly respective set of standards, national standards. And so focusing on those standards and what they say about teaching and the learning expectations for students is a very good thing. It's something that has been shown to be effective.

The second thing about focusing on this high quality teaching, or improving teaching to be more high quality is that it's very rich in the subject matter content. The importance here, as we've already heard from several speakers, is that a lot of teachers come to their teaching without the deep understanding of content that they need. Some people are teaching out of field. Elementary teachers typically do not have science and mathematics in their background, an inclination or an understanding of those two fields. I went into teaching with a degree in science, a degree in geology, and if someone had asked me, what are the big ideas, the two or three big ideas in the field of geology, I would be hard pressed to have answered that question, but I could tell them, well, there's pictography, and there's geomorphology, and there's crystallography. I was very topically oriented. Most teachers come to their teaching a subject matter thinking about the topics that they learned in their college courses, but not about the big ideas, not about the process of inquiry and understanding science and math point of view, and similarly with mathematics.

So high quality professional development has rich content, rich focus on content. But it's not only that. It is -- it focuses on what, again, some of your previous speakers and some of your material that you've been reading, what the field calls pedagogical content knowledge, a 35 cent phrase. However, it's very meaningful. That phrase I think is part of our technical language. It is what separates a very good teacher from a scientist and a mathematician. It's that knowledge that good teachers know that help them understand not only their content, but how their students come to understand that content, what topics they struggle with, what they find difficult, what they find easy, what are the examples representation, the analogies that help students learn that content. And that's what separates good teachers from people who are steeped in science and mathematics. So that's the focus on improvement, improvement towards high quality teaching.

[See Slide 5] Finally, the part of the definition that Tom Corcoran used, effective professional development focuses on professional practice. And what we mean by this is that it focuses on the actual materials, on the actual act of teaching. It teaches you on a day-to-day basis. It uses the teacher's own curriculum materials. For example, we're learning a lot about how the use of new reform-oriented curriculum materials to help teachers learn not only how to present material to kids, but also learn some of the concepts in the field, learn some of the discipline, learn some of the subject matter content that's so important.

You saw a video case, I believe, at your last meeting. Video cases, narrative cases like lawyers and doctors use to be trained in their profession are being used more and more in good professional development programs. So, it's the actual work of their teaching, the curriculum materials they will use, the work of their students that they can analyze and think more about, and videos or renditions of their teaching practice that they focus on and learn from. You also heard from James Stigler, who talked about lesson study as a way of focusing teachers on what it is that they are teaching, and how they're teaching, their students come to learn what they're teaching. Effective professional development also supports collaboration among teachers. We've heard more and more about that and the importance of that for instructional planning, for the adaptation of materials and lessons, for actually doing research on how kids learn, how to reach their students better. And for the continuous process of assessment, what are the kids learning, what do I need to do better. And to do that in community, building a learning community among teachers.

Effective professional development also provides opportunities for leadership. One of the characteristics of a true profession is one that really -- where people embrace all kids, every kid within the school is my responsibility to have an influence, to be supportive of those people who are in teaching roles besides myself, kids beyond my own kids.

And leadership is a critical piece of professional development, so making a program for professional development successful. So I want to spend just a couple of minutes talking about the characteristics of effective leadership. Some of you have seen a new paper on teaching leadership by Brian Lord and Barbara Miller, where they talk about the leadership of teachers. But what we're talking about is leaders who come from a wide variety of places, including the teaching corps, but also people in authority, roles of authority such as principals and district administrators, people from informal institutions like Dennis was talking about. These are some of the things that effective leadership. [See Slide 6]-- three minutes I have before I get cut off somewhere.

So I'm not going to talk too much about effective leadership, but these are some of the kinds of things, and we can talk about it as a small group. What I do want to just mention briefly is that some people look at these lists of what effective professional development is, and they say, how can anybody possibly do that? Tell me where you can see that happening? And I want to make clear that there are places that are, in fact, combining all of these different characteristics of effective professional development and some of their programs, and let me suggest that these places vary. They have different goals, they have very different student populations.

[See Slide 7] Some of you have heard these places. One of your commissioners runs the program in Pittsburgh, or is a central leader, Diane Briars, in the Pittsburgh situation. And let me just mention that the Pittsburgh project, or Pittsburgh mathematics program, the Merck Institute in New Jersey supports four districts and upwards of 1,000 teachers. District 2 in New York City is a highly reputed place and working especially with literacy, but now with mathematics. And El Centro, California, which is a highly rural, highly poor, very high Hispanic population in the southeast corner of California, one of 14 districts that are running a professional development program. All of the programs that are represented in these particular locations have evidence of student learning that correlate with the amount of professional development that the teachers have, the nature of the professional development that they have an opportunity to participate in. And they are not just on the measures that somebody thought up to use with their programs. They're on standardized tests of achievement that are highly acceptable across the board.

And so I would say that many of the characteristics that I talked about, continuous professional development, professional development that evolves over time, that takes a substantial amount -- or that gives teachers a substantial amount of opportunities to learn, focuses on rich content, provides opportunities for teachers to work on their own practice with each other in their school settings. All of those characterize these programs. And I look forward to talking more in a small group about what we can learn from some of these structures that are being used in these very, very different programs.

[See Slide 8] I'll end with a final thought that really addresses the fact that professional development cannot cure all. There's a lot of, in addition to professional development that's necessary to really transform the teaching and learning in our classrooms, but that it can create a culture and a capacity for some of the challenges that lie ahead. And I look forward to spending time in a small group thinking about bold and visionary ways of addressing these challenges.

Thank you.

This page last modified April 26, 2000 (pss)