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What Professional Development
Should Districts Provide?
How Have States Implemented AYP?
How Do Districts Support Schools to Meet AYP?
How Do Schools Meet AYP?


A WestEd guide reports that "system-wide instructional improvement depends not only on a coherent infrastructure and the skills of individuals, but on the capacity of the district to nurture continuous learning." How do you bring good alignment and coherence to your professional development program? How do you build capacity?
 
Districts have multiple responsibilities in building capacity that includes, but is not limited to, principals, prospective leaders, and teachers. Because teacher preparation institutions are only beginning to align their programs with K-12 content standards and to shift from a focus on teaching technique to evidence of student learning, the majority of teachers in the US have to learn how to teach in a standards-based system through inservice activities.
 
Districts need to understand what quality professional development looks like and how to differentiate between what capacity building schools should do versus what the district should do. They need to align professional development with their student achievement targets and with what student achievement data identify as needs. They need to understand what teachers need to know and do to improve student achievement and what principals need to know and do to lead the process of meeting district student achievement targets.




What is quality professional development?
A study by Hawley and Valli suggests that there is increasing agreement about changes that are needed in teacher professional development for standards-based reforms driven by the following factors:
 
  • Research on school improvement that links change to professional development
  • Growing agreement that students should be expected to achieve higher standards of performance, which include a capacity for complex and collaborative problem solving
  • Research on learning and teaching that reaches substantially different conclusions about how people learn from those that have shaped contemporary strategies for instruction and assessment
  • Research that confirms the widespread belief that conventional strategies for professional development are ineffective and wasteful and that provides support for the adoption of different ways to facilitate professional learning.
Current recommendations for effective teacher professional development have converged on a few key principles. The first principle is an unwavering emphasis on student learning. That is, the purpose of teacher professional development is to change teachers’ practices in ways that improve student learning. Accordingly, states are being urged to fund and support staff development for teachers only if it provides teachers the knowledge and skills to teach to higher standards and contributes to improvements in student learning (Sparks and Hirsh, 2000).
 
A chapter from a McREL report, Standards in Classroom Practice: Research Synthesis, summarizes the findings from major studies that examined the impact of professional development on teaching practices and student learning. They found that the research converged on the following conclusions. Professional development is more likely to have positive impacts on teacher and student learning if it has the following research based features:
 
  • Focuses on a content area with direct links to the curriculum
  • Challenges teachers intellectually through reflection and critical problem solving
  • Aligns with goals and standards for student learning
  • Is of sufficient duration for practice and revision
  • Occurs collaboratively within a teacher learning community
  • Involves all the teachers within a school or department
  • Provides active learning opportunities that have direct applications to the classroom
  • Is based on teachers’ input regarding their learning needs
National education organizations add that professional development should have the following characteristics:
 
  • Driven by results in student performance
  • Ongoing and embedded in the daily lives of teachers
  • Helps teachers meet the needs of students who are at different developmental levels and who have diverse backgrounds"
Across research studies, consensus has also developed about the importance of collaboration to achieve change in teacher practices and ultimately students’ achievement. Darling-Hammond asserts that "teachers learn best by studying, doing, and reflecting; by collaborating with other teachers; by looking closely at students and their work; and by sharing what they see." Eisenhower studies found that "collective participation of teachers from the same grade or department provides more active learning opportunities for the participants compared to traditional approaches."
 
Joan Richardson, editor of the NSDC Results newsletter, believes that "this practice of having teachers work together to study student work is one of the most promising professional development strategies in recent years. Examining student work helps teachers intimately understand how state and local standards apply to their teaching practice and to student work. Teachers are able to think more deeply about their teaching and what students are learning. As they see what students produce in response to their assignments, they can see the successes as well as the situations where there are gaps. In exploring those gaps, they can improve their practice in order to reach all students".
 
Both researchers and national organizations including NFIE and NSDC have proposed principles for designing professional development that aligns with these conclusions. The National Staff Development Council (NSDC) has released a revised set of standards for high quality staff development on their Web site.
 

What professional development do teachers need?
School districts need to focus professional development on improving student learning in contrast to improving teaching practice. Focusing on student learning rather than teaching practices is a relatively new concept. The purpose of teacher professional development is to change teachers’ practices in ways that improve learning. Examining student work leads teachers to recognize the consequences of their teaching and the possible gap between what they believe they taught and what students learned. Teachers arrive at a deeper understanding of how they need to teach as they arrive at a deeper understanding of what students know or have learned.
 
The Center on English Learning and Achievement has developed a framework for professional development that states "Effective professional development is practice-based and problem-based and involves teachers in activity that has authentic educational change as its goal. Their focus is on engaging teachers as reflective practitioners examining learning and performance --- their students’ and their own. http://cela.albany.edu/research/partnerc4.htm
 
What do teachers need to know and do?
 
Teachers in standards-based school systems must be able to address content standards outcomes, prepare students for standards-based assessments, design lessons that cover complex content and result in thorough student understanding, and ensure that all students achieve. Teachers need to collaboratively examine student work, analyze achievement data and use the information to inform their instruction. They need to know where each of their students is on the content standards indicators to move each student to proficiency. Teachers must be able to understand the characteristics of proficiency, how to recognize it in their students’ work, how to diagnose where students have a less than proficient understanding, and what to do to address their needs. In essence, teachers must focus on the cognitive and knowledge domains of their lessons in order to gain a thorough understanding of what they expect from their students and how they will know it when they see it.
 
To determine where their students are in relation to the content standard indicators, teachers need to know the following:
 
  • the intent (knowledge and cognitive domains) of the content standard indicators
  • how to align instruction and classroom assessment with content standard indicators
  • what proficiency looks like and how to reach consensus as a grade level team on what defines proficiency
  • how to create opportunities for students to demonstrate proficiency
  • how to interpret student performance
  • how to monitor progress
  • how to analyze monitoring data
  • how to examine student work
  • how to identify implications for instruction based on the data
  • how to use data to plan interventions
Current reforms in mathematics and science instruction reflect an increased emphasis on students’ thinking. Thompson and Zeuli describe "thinking to learn" as the heart of reforms in mathematics and science. "By ‘think,’ we mean that students must actively try to solve problems, resolve dissonances between the way they initially understand a phenomenon and new evidence that challenges that understanding, put collections of facts or observations together into patterns, make and test conjectures, and build lines of reasoning about why claims are or are not true."
 
Thompson and Zeuli believe that professional development aimed at changing teachers’ knowledge, beliefs and practices should have the following requirements:
 
  • "The creation of cognitive dissonance between teachers’ current beliefs and practices and their experiences with student learning
  • Sufficient time to work through the dissonance through discussion and critical thinking
  • The connection of these cognitive activities to teachers’ contexts of practice, for example through examining student work
  • The development of a repertoire of practices consistent with teachers’ new understanding about what reforms require
  • Help with transferring teachers’ new knowledge to the classroom through practice and peer support"

What professional development do principals need?
The National Association of Elementary School Principals (NAESP) has examined this issue in a new publication, "Leading Learning Communities: What Principals Should Know and Be Able to Do." http://www.naesp.org/llc.pdf The 96-page book is built around six guiding standards that NAESP defines as characterizing effective instructional leadership. These standards are not intended as an assessment tool, according to the NAESP, but as a resource to help principals reflect and grow in their work. To this end, school leaders should:
 
  • Lead schools in a way that places student and adult learning at the center. In addition, principals should serve as "lead learner" and teacher.
  • Set high expectations and standards for the academic and social development of all students and the performance of adults. Further, the principal should organize the school environment around achievement.
  • Demand content and instruction that ensure student achievement of agreed-upon academic standards.
  • Create a culture of continuous learning for adults tied to student achievement and other school goals.
  • Use multiple sources of data as diagnostic tools to assess, identify, and apply instructional improvement.
  • Actively engage the community to create shared responsibility for student and school success.
Rick DuFour hones in on what principals need to be able to do to meet staff development needs for teachers to collect and discuss the data that would focus them on what students were learning. In his article, "The Learning-Centered Principal," he describes his role in the following way:
 
"As principal, I played an important role in initiating, facilitating, and sustaining the process of shifting our collective focus from teaching to learning. To make collaborative teams the primary engine of our school improvement efforts, teachers needed time to collaborate. Teachers, accustomed to working in isolation, needed focus and parameters as they transitioned to working in teams. They needed a process to follow and guiding questions to pursue. They needed training, resources, and support to overcome difficulties they encountered while developing common outcomes, writing common assessments, and analyzing student achievement data."
 
 In short, principals need to know how to put the necessary expectations and structures in place to ensure teachers receive the support they need to collect evidence of learning and use it to inform instruction and improve student achievement.
 

How does the district align professional development efforts to the attainment of student achievement goals?
District professional development should be directly aligned with improving student learning and should set the stage for what needs to happen at schools. The focus area should be driven by student achievement targets and areas of need based on student achievement data. For example, if the district performance is poor in reading on the state assessments, the district will likely set a priority goal of improving reading performance as measured by the state assessments. They would then need to build capacity in setting and recognizing proficient reading performance, in diagnosing where students are in relation to the content standards, and in monitoring student progress by collecting evidence of learning.
 
Pre-service training in how to teach is much more common than pre-service training in how to collect and use evidence of learning. Few districts have focused on ongoing --- as opposed to annual --- evidence of learning. And yet the only way for districts to know what they need to do to improve student performance is to understand where their students are in relation to the content standards they need to learn. What can students do and what do they need to learn? For that matter, the best way to know where teachers need support in improving learning is to know where their students are. Consequently, most teachers will need capacity building in how to assess student learning. When you are examining student work, you are both assessing the student’s performance as well as examining the quality of the assignment given the student. As Phillip Schlechty, CEO of the Center for Leadership in School Reform says in an interview in the Journal of Staff Development, "Organizing staff development around improving the quality of work we give students rather than improving the teacher’s performance in the classroom changes the whole dynamic. When the focus is on improving the experience of students, staff development then takes on a very different character. It is on ongoing invention rather than a canned program, and it is collaborative because teachers and principals need to consider together how they can improve the quality of the work they give students and what the teachers and principals need to learn in order to do that."
 
What should the district do?
 
Districts can build capacity of school staff in the following ways.
 
  • Build in professional development time in the school year calendar
  • Align district professional development with student achievement targets
  • Provide expectations that schools align professional development with student achievement targets and monitor the expectation
  • Provide resources at the school level to allow teams of teachers to met regularly
    • Sub time
    • Staffing allocation
    • Scheduling expertise
    • Consultant money
  • Provide budget for district professional development
  • Provide budget for school professional development
In the same way that schools need to align the way they use staff time to attain student achievement goals, districts need to do the same. All regularly scheduled meeting time should focus on the student achievement target. A&S meetings, curriculum supervisors’ meetings, staff development meetings, internal department meetings and training opportunities throughout the system should all focus on this same target.
 
There are a number of areas where school districts could model what they want to occur at the school level. If a district wanted schools to be engaged in ongoing monitoring of student progress and examining student work, then they should be engaged in setting clear expectations, modeling what the process would look, monitoring that it actually happens, using student achievement data to measure its success, troubleshooting, and recognizing and celebrating when it happens.
 
Your district can also help schools to view professional development as a daily experience embedded in their routine tasks, not as a collection of training sessions. Many district professional development offerings resemble a cruise brochure where participants choose where they’d like to go. The offerings take them in many different directions providing a variety of single event opportunities.
 
Districts need to differentiate what professional development they should offer versus what schools should offer. Whereas the district may be in the best position to offer professional development events, schools are in the best position to provide the ongoing professional development. Each professional development workshop should be a part of a professional development continuum. If the district has hired a big name speaker to come into the district to set the stage and motivate principals to pursue a specific line of action, then the district needs to follow-through with additional professional development. Even a motivated principal will be subsumed by other district priorities if the district doesn’t continue to demonstrate this is a priority.
 

Resources for district professional development
Online Technical Assistance
 
The National Staff Development Council (NSDC) describes their revised professional development standards on their Web Site. The site includes information on how schools and districts have implemented the standards, a self-assessment for determining if your school or district staff development meets the standards and articles that provide extra guidance for using the standards.
 
Online Articles
 
"Teacher Learning for Standards-based Education," Standards in Classroom Practice: Research Synthesis, McRel 2001 (pages 107-140)
 
Improving Teaching and Learning with Data-Based Decisions. "Asking the right questions and acting on the answers." By Nancy Protheroe in summer 2001 issue of Educational Research Service Spectrum.
 
Hassel, E. (1999). Learning from the best: A toolkit for schools and districts based on model professional development award winners.
 
The NEA Foundation for the Improvement of Education has published an issue brief on "Using Data about Classroom Practice and Student Work to Improve Professional Development for Educators."
 
Teachers Take Charge of Their Learning is an online publication by the NEA Foundation for the Improvement of Education. Of particular interest is the chapter and references on "Finding Time To Build Professional Development into the Life of Schools."
 
"The Educator, examined: An Interview with Phillip Schlechty" in the Journal of Staff Development is an examination of ourselves, our work, and our institutions.
 
Instructional Coherence: The Changing Role of the Teacher by Sandra J. Finley, Ph.D. on the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory Web site examines how states use aligned instructional policies can impact teaching and learning.
 
"Leading Learning Communities: What Principals Should Know and Be Able to Do" was published by the National Association of Elementary School Administrators.
 
No Dream Denied: A Pledge to America’s Children, published by the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future reaffirms its commitment to recruiting, preparing, and retaining highly qualified teachers.
 
The National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future and The Consortium for Policy Research in Education published "Teaching for High Standards: What Policy Makers Need to Know and Be Able to Do" by Linda Darling-Hammond and Deborah Ball.
 
"Inside the Black Box: Raising Standards Through Classroom Assessment" by Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam in the Phi Delta Kappan argues there is firm evidence showing that formative assessment is an essential component of classroom work and that its development can raise standards of achievement.
 
"In the Right Context" by Rick DuFour in the Journal of Staff Development discusses how effective leaders structure team meetings and provide professional development for staff.
 
"Student work at the core of teacher learning" by Joan Richardson in the NSDC Results newsletter, writes about the success of one school and professional development center in making the examination of student work a significant part of the culture of the school.
 
The Center on English Learning and Achievement published online "A Framework for Professional Development."
 


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