Because Writing Matters by National Writing Project & Carl Nagin

Author:National Writing Project & Carl Nagin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2012-06-19T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

Professional Development

Today, many districts and principals are setting high standards and expectations for staff development. They demand models and activities that promote lasting change. They want professional development to offer research-based strategies whose effectiveness has been correlated with student performance.

Effective professional development requires time and resources if it is to take root. It can involve a broad range of interventions and formats, tied to specific curricular aims, unfolding over a one- to three-year cycle, with clearly defined short-term and long-term goals. Ample research from the last decade shows that staff development is both a crucial element in school reform and a catalyst for change in building a school culture that supports a high level of adult and student learning.1 In a study for Stanford’s Center for Research on the Context of Secondary Teaching, Milbrey McLaughlin and Joan Talbert conclude that “teachers’ groups, professional communities variously defined, offer the most effective unit of intervention and powerful opportunity for reform.” Such a network for educational change succeeds because it presents a “context for sustained learning and developing the profession.” Systemic reform, they argue, “cannot be accomplished through traditional staff development models—episodic, decontextualized injections of ‘knowledge’ and technique. The path to change in the classroom core lies within and through teachers’ professional communities; learning communities which generate knowledge, craft new norms of practice, and sustain participants in their efforts to reflect, examine, experiment, and change.”2

A frequently cited example of successful districtwide school reform strategy is Community District 2 in New York City. It has been called “one of the highest performing urban school systems in the country with, overall, fewer than 12 percent of its students . . . scoring in the lowest quartile of nationally standardized reading tests. A comparable figure for most urban districts is 40–50 percent.”3

When Anthony Alvarado began his eight-year tenure as superintendent in 1987, this ethnically and economically diverse district (roughly 50 percent of its students come from a family officially designated as below the poverty line) ranked tenth in reading and fourth in mathematics out of thirty-two subdistricts. By 1996, it ranked second in both subjects.4 Alvarado’s approach emphasized professional development as the principal engine for effecting systemwide instructional improvement. As described by Richard Elmore in a 1997 report for the National Commission on Teaching and Learning, Alvarado’s strategies for systemic change were built around seven organizing principles:

Given the opportunity, teachers can and will make significant changes in their practices and perspectives on teaching and learning. And nowhere have these changes been more profound than in urban classrooms in which teachers are challenged by the demands of and differences among today’s students.

Ann Lieberman and Milbrey McLaughlin, “Networks for Educational Change,” p. 677

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