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

Systemic Reform: Perspectives on Personalizing Education - September 1994

Conclusion

Five streams of reform present a challenge of considerable complexity, scope, and ambiguity. Yet the present pattern of professional development activity reflects an uneven fit with the aspirations and challenges of present reform initiatives in subject matter teaching, equity, assessment, school organization, and the professionalization of teaching. Much "staff development" or "inservice" communicates a relatively impoverished view of teachers, teaching, and teacher development. Compared to the complexity, subtlety, and uncertainties of the classroom, professional development is often a remarkably low-intensity enterprise. It requires little in the way of intellectual struggle or emotional engagement, and takes only superficial account of teachers histories or circumstances. Compared to the complexity and ambiguity of the most ambitious reforms, professional development is too often substantively weak and politically marginal.

Professional development must be constructed in ways that deepen the discussion, open up the debates, and enrich the array of possibilities for action. Ground for optimism resides in those "innovations on the margin" that embody principles consonant with the complexity of the reform task and with the capacities and commitments of a strong teacher workforce.

Endnotes

  1. Such descriptions may be in the making. For example, see Fine (in press), Evertson and Murphy (in press), and Murphy (1991).

  2. Throughut these exampkles are references to teachers' own research and to teachers as researchers. In some important respects, teachers' expanidng presence as a distanct community of educational researchers has taken on the character of a movement. Teachers' research -- as an intellectual and political enterprise -- has been the focus of recetn AERA symposia, the subject of a forthcoming NSSE volume (Hollingsworth and Sockett, in press), and a means for investigating the nature of professional community among teachers (Threatt, Buchanan, Morgan, Sugarman, Strieb, Swenson, Teel, and Tomlinson, in press).

  3. On the problems of the former, see Buchmann, 1990; and for an example of a challenge to researchers' privileged standing in the reform discourse, see Nespor and Barber, 1991.

  4. I have recalled this example from various speeches, but Schlechty (1990) elaborates the basic argument.

  5. The steady shift away from participation in university coursework and toward district-centered activity can be attributed only in part to changes in the age distribution of the teacher workforce. Over the past two decades formal staff development has become district business, conducted largely by specialists located in a district's central office (Moore and workshops than they are to receive release time or other individual subsidies to attend conferences hosted by subject area associations or institutes sponsored by universities (Little et al., 1987).

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[Emerging Issues (Continued)] [Table of Contents] [References]