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profiles
Click to get to articles Jess rhoades bonilla High school teacher New York City
INSIDE
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Click to get to articles POLICY & PRACTICE S2 Professional Development at Crossroads S4 No Proof-Positive for Training Approaches S6 District Strives for ‘Learning System’ S8 Michigan District Adds Accountability Piece To Focus Training
Geetika d. kaw Middle school teacher Lexington, Mass.
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business & finance S12 Providers Eye New Opportunities S14 Cost of Teacher Training Lost in District Budgets S15 Questions Arise on Credentials
corey r. sell Elementary teacher Arlington, Va.
ann walker kennedy Elementary/middle school teacher Baltimore
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curriculum S17 Content Seen Lacking Specificity S20 Texas District Targets ELL Teaching
laurie hahn ganser High School teacher Austin, Texas
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Emile Wamsteker, Erik Jacobs, Stephen Voss, Stephen Voss, Erich Schlegel
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Teacher PD Sourcebook
21st-Century Teaching Teacher PD Source Directory The Fall 2010 issue of Teacher PD Sourcebook examines the concept of “21st-century teaching.” The world has changed a great deal in the past two decades, particularly as a result of developments in information technology. This issue takes a look at how conscientious teachers and schools are integrating these changes into their classrooms, and how teachers’ own work is affected.
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Review Sourcebook’s exclusive directory of K-12 professionaldevelopment products and services. Search by keyword, or browse resources on English/Reading, ProjectBased Learning, Classroom Management, Differentiated Instruction, Professional Learning Communities, School-Wide Improvement, and more.
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PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
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policy & practice
To influence policy, the field must be able to articulate both what it is and how it can help teachers improve student achievement.
Erik Jacobs for Education Week
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Professional Development At a Crossroads
By Stephen Sawchuk
P
erhaps no other aspect of the teacher-quality system in the United States suffers from an identity crisis as severe as that of professional development. Few in the education field discount the eminently logical idea that teachers should be supported in the continuous improvement of their craft. But as a term for describing ongoing training investments in the teaching force, “professional development” has become both ubiquitous and all but meaningless. Though frequently invoked by lawmakers and consultants, most recently in states’ applications for the federal Race to the Top competition, professional development plans generally incorporate little context about who will provide the training and for what purpose. That this situation endures, despite a focus during the past decade on data analysis and research to improve instruction, is both a testament to the complexity of the professional-development enterprise, and its greatest problem: Mediocre, scattershot training, apart from doing little to help students, is a burden for teachers. “At some point, you are in this meeting and feel you’ve been there two million times before, and it starts to grate,” said Jess Rhoades Bonilla, an 11th grade English teacher in New York City. “It can be a teacher-morale issue as well as not a good use of time.”
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New developments in education policy portend a crossroads of sorts for the field of professional development. For one, the idea of “teacher effectiveness” is now front and center on the state and national policy agenda. In theory, the idea dovetails with the goal of professional development: to ensure that teachers have opportunities to improve their craft and are given tools with which to do so, and that school systems have a way of determining whether students learn more as a result. Yet advocates acknowledge that professional development risks marginalization in the teacher-effectiveness conversation unless it is able to articulate clearly its place in producing better teachers. “The hard truth is that, until recently, the field of professional development has been underdeveloped and immature,” said M. Hayes Mizell, a distinguished senior fellow at Learning Forward, a nonprofit group and membership organization that works to improve the quality of ongoing training. “It has tolerated a lot of sloppy thinking, practice, and results. It has not been willing to ‘call out’ ineffective practice and ineffective policy. ... It has not devoted attention to outcomes.” In this special report, Education Week takes a detailed look at some of the critical issues faced by those charged with upgrading the quality of post-preparation teacher training. Among other topics, this package of stories attempts to offer new insights into some of the fundamental questions about such training’s research base, its cost and its implementation in districts, and the changing marketplace for professional-development providers. The report also aims to launch conversations about changes in the field, including advancement in the
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The professional learning community of, from left, Hillary Berbeco, David Lawrence, Geetika D. Kaw, and Anne DeMallie discusses ways to help 8th grade science students at Jonas Clarke Middle School in Lexington, Mass.
Special Report 2010
Professional development
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Teacher-quality policy has evolved dramatically since 1996, when Education Week last examined professional development in a special report. At that time, teacher quality was still largely defined by teachers’ characteristics, such as the selectivity of teacher education program attended, credentials held, educational attainment, and state licensing status. But as analyses of longitudinal data linking teachers to student test scores have become common, researchers have discovered that such individual characteristics are by themselves only weakly predictive of student academic success. In the past two years, policymaking has moved toward linking student outcomes to teacher performance. But as teacher tenure, hiring, seniority, and dismissal policies increasingly come under that microscope, comparatively little attention has been paid to ways to boost the effectiveness of the majority of educators who will remain in classrooms across the country. From a policy standpoint, that could be partly because of the vast number of initiatives that purportedly invest in enhancing teachers’ knowledge and skills. “We’ve recognized professional development as important, but we don’t have very clear standards for what we’re looking for and we don’t have much accountability for what teachers engage in,” said Jennifer King Rice, a professor of education policy at the University of Maryland College Park. “It opens the floodgates for just about anything to be called professional development.” Practices that fall under the broad heading conceivably include everything from teacher induction and contractually set in-service days to content coaching, recertification credits, and participation in professional associations and networks.
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OBSTACLES ABOUND In addition, scholars point to problems with how the training is selected and provided. “Every time the superintendent goes to a conference, the teachers get worried, because they know he’s going to come back with something he wants to try,” said Thomas R. Guskey, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Kentucky, in Lexington. “We should start where students’ weaknesses and shortcomings are and then seek strategies or techniques to help [teachers] understand those shortcomings.” A popular model for doing that is the “professional learning community,” or plc , in which school-level
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research
No ProofPositive for Training Approaches
By Stephen Sawchuk
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necdotes about districts’ success stories with particular professionaldevelopment brands, services, and approaches are common in today’s marketplace. But is there proof that any of them actually work? For the most part, the answer is no, according to scholars who have studied the link between postlicensure teacher training and student academic achievement. Reasons for that dearth of evidence include a general lack of rigor in education research, as well as specific obstacles that make studying professional development’s impact on student achievement a challenge. Few studies of professional development employ scientifically rigorous methodologies. The research literature on the training, scholars say, is largely qualitative or descriptive, and therefore not capable of answering nuanced
cause-and-effect questions. At the same time, there are many problems with those programs and studies that do purport to tackle the student-achievement question. “First, the intervention itself should be workable, and some are not supported by theory or scientific action. Second, the program needs to be fully implemented if you want to see any effects, and in many cases, fidelity is a real challenge,” said Kwang S. Yoon, an analyst at the Washington-based American Institutes of Research who studies in-service training. “And the third piece is the intervention research itself. It may be weak in design.” For a 2007 review commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education, Mr. Yoon and colleagues pulled more than 1,300 potentially relevant research studies of professional development conducted between 1986 and 2006. Only 132 specifically focused on K-12 in-service training in reading, mathematics, or science. And of those, only nine studies met evidence standards set by the What Works Clearinghouse, the arm of the federal Institute of Education Sciences that reviews experimental research on program impact.
Time on Task
Three of the nine studies, which examined summer institutes or workshops between five and 14 hours in length, showed no effect on student achievement. The studies that looked at teachers trained between 30 and 100 hours were correlated with positive studentachievement gains.
teams of teachers meet periodically during school hours to examine student work from common assignments, brainstorm ways to instruct students who haven’t yet mastered standards, and evaluate the results of reteaching. Such efforts appeal to teachers like Ms. Bonilla. “One ineffective way of doing PD is very top-down, giving little control to teachers and treating all departments and all teachers the same way,” she said. As with all teacher training, the team-based approach can be done well or poorly. Supporters of the model stress that merely putting teachers in a conference room once a week doesn’t, by itself, yield better professional development. “There’s probably not a district out there that doesn’t think it’s doing plcs,” said Judy Haptonstall, the superintendent of the 5,000-student Roaring Fork district, in Colorado, which for eight years has set aside time each
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month for teachers to work together. “But the heart of it has to be about planning for good instruction and evaluating teaching.” Indeed, the relationship of professional development to teacher evaluation is among the murkier areas for educators to make sense of. Evaluation, the centerpiece of the Obama administration’s teacher-quality plans, ideally provides teachers with specific feedback about how to improve their craft. Some educators, like officials at the Learning Forward group, formerly the National Staff Development Council, worry that the focus on individual teacher evaluation will dominate discussions about professional development, causing it to be seen as a remediation tool rather than a process for collective, schoolwide improvement. But Timothy Daly, the president of the New Teacher Project, a New York City-based training organization, argues that better alignment
The review found that, across the nine studies, only the teachers who received a substantial amount of development boosted students’ scores. Three of the nine studies, those that examined summer institutes or workshops between five and 14 hours in length, showed no effect on student achievement. The studies that looked at teachers trained between 30 and 100 hours were correlated with positive studentachievement gains.
between individual and schoolwide training is crucial for making professional development relevant. “You cannot possibly have good professional development without a [formal] evaluation that tells you the skills that need to be developed and without a subsequent evaluation that lets you know whether they’ve been improved,” he said. “It helps set the curriculum for professional development.”
Key Shifts As such debates wind on, a variety of for-profit and nonprofit providers, both local and national, continue to populate a lucrative marketplace for professional development, and they are beginning to respond to the call to move training closer to schools. Federal data suggest that a steady increase in teacher hiring during the past decade may have
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Advocates have seized on those findings as evidence that the amount of time currently spent on professional development is insufficient. But given the small sample sizes of most of those studies, Mr. Yoon said, they don’t provide conclusive answers to the question of how much time spent in training matters. Rather, he said, the effects of professional development are likely functions of both the time and the quality of the specific training. “You can have many, many hours without much engagement,” he noted. “Any serious teacher change or teacher learning requires intensive treatment of some topic of significance.” An added problem is that professional development is mediated through teachers’ own practices. A successful in-service-training program, therefore, must inculcate in teachers behaviors that improve outcomes for students. “Even if professional development is effective and a teacher learned something, what makes them really improve their practice in the classroom when they are so busy and so tired?” Mr. Yoon said. “I don’t think there is a huge external incentive for the teachers to practice their new learning. ... I think that’s a huge [research] gap that we do not think to pay much attention to.” Some of the largest-scale studies have found that even when teachers have indeed changed practices in response to a professional-development intervention, those changes haven’t led to greater student learning. A 2008 federally financed study used a randomized experiment to look at the impact of two early-reading intervention programs. It found that the intervention caused significant increases in teachers’ knowledge and changes in their teaching practices, but did not significantly enhance students’
been caused by the phenomenon of the instructional-coaching model for professional development. And federal data also document an increase in the number of teachers who report participating in a mentoring program. What all the spending on personnel, programming, and teacher release time actually buys remains hard to determine, because districts typically amalgamate federal, state, and local dollars for those purposes—and do little to track their impact on teacher and student learning. Despite all the challenges in the field, there are signs of rejuvenation, too. Providers of all sorts are creating new programming to respond to new needs, such as helping general teachers work with special populations of students. On the cutting edge is a way of thinking about professional development that focuses not just on content but also on the minute-byminute ways teachers make peda-
gogical decisions in classrooms. And finally, there are teachers in every building and every school who are dedicated to constant improvement. They include teachers like Corey R. Sell, an 11-year veteran of the field who for years has grabbed bits and pieces of everything from academic journals to in-service workshops that he felt would make him a better teacher. Now all that remains is figuring out how to get all teachers to share that degree of professional commitment. That is not an easy task, says the 5th grade teacher in Arlington, Va., when some teachers prefer to close their classroom doors and new ones come into a culture that’s not always committed to ongoing learning. “If I could find a way to get my own school to be innovative, to disrupt itself,” Mr. Sell said, “I’d do it in a moment.” n Freelance writer Bess Keller contributed to this story.
too site-based? Some scholars worry that the pendulum has already swung too far toward site-based development without proper attention to how the training is structured and led. “For a long time, most professional development was guided
or directed by a central office or a regional office, and those efforts lacked the contextual relevance that was really necessary,” said Thomas R. Guskey, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Kentucky. “Now, we’ve swung the other way and said we have to be completely site-based. ... Solutions can’t always come from inside, and oftentimes the findings from research can be particularly instructive, but teachers need guidance and direction on what can be done to bring it to bear in their classrooms.” Russell M. Gersten, a professor emeritus of education at the University of Oregon, seconds the idea that researchers need to do more to investigate features that seem to yield the most effective site-based training. He and colleagues crafted and tested their own approach for building 1st grade teachers’ capacity to teach reading comprehension and vocabulary, through facilitated study groups that met to discuss empirical reading research and create aligned lesson plans and instruction. A randomized study of the approach conducted by Mr. Gersten and his team found that teachers aligned their practices with the research, producing modest but statistically significant progress on measures of oral-vocabulary development. Released this year, the study compared teachers in 19 schools receiving federal Reading First funding in three states. Gains didn’t show up in other areas, but Mr. Gersten said his team is working on a larger-scale study with more statistical “power” to see if the results can be replicated. n A link to the studies is provided at edweek.org/links.
Jess Rhoades Bonilla
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reading achievement. Many professional-development advocates say one way to ensure that teachers both have enough time for professional development and work to improve their own practice is through site-based professional learning communities. Such communities are formed of teams of teachers who meet frequently to review student-achievement information and tailor instruction accordingly. High-quality studies specifically focused on the effect of the plc format of professional development remain sparse, despite the model’s common-sense appeal. The studies that do exist suggest that the success of such endeavors might hinge on having a formal, systematic approach and possibly experts to help guide teachers. A study published in 2009 in the Elementary School Journal found an achievement edge for schools whose learning teams relied on a set of formal protocols, a leadership structure that guided meetings, and a process for setting forth and solving problems. The study used a quasi-experimental methodology to compare students in nine Title I schools that used that specific framework with students in six other schools using a variety of other school improvement models.
High School of Telecommunications Arts and Technology New York City Age: 30 Years of teaching: 8 Jess Rhoades Bonilla recalls that professional development in her first year or two of teaching seemed useful. But that changed as another half dozen passed. “In the last two or three years, I can’t say I enjoyed the PD that was given,” said Ms. Bonilla, who teaches at the High School of Telecommunications Arts and Technology in New York City. “It started to seem repetitive.” She hadn’t lost her taste for learning. In those years, the 30-year-old Princeton University graduate earned a master’s degree in American studies and started work on an administrator’s license. She taught different grades and levels. It wasn’t, as teachers often complain, that the central office was dictating content or making her trek across town for a silly workshop. Most of the professional development was homegrown. Sometimes, she said, she learned a lot from her colleagues, importing techniques or materials to her own classroom almost right away. On other occasions, the sessions just weren’t what she needed—in the language of pedagogy, the instruction was “undifferentiated.” Plus, bringing teachers together from across the school was easy to overdo. “If I ruled the world, I’d make more time for English and history teachers to collaborate together,” Ms. Bonilla wrote in an e-mail. This past summer, she got her wish for intensive and subject-specialized professional development. One of a select group of teachers from across the city, she spent five, eighthour days in a creative-writing workshop led by a novelist-in-residence at the New York Public Library. “It was definitely the best professional development I’ve ever had,” she said. “So much of what I learned this summer I hope to recreate for my students.” Meanwhile, Ms. Bonilla has hopes for the “inquiry groups” that will fill the two, 35-minute periods that her school devotes to professional development each week. Her group of three teachers shares students; its members teach English, history, and art, respectively. The trio is going to zero in on some aspect of better helping the students who are struggling readers. Teachers were able to chose their own teams and topics. That, Ms. Bonilla said, was a good place to start. –bess keller
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If I ruled the world, I’d make more time for English and history teachers to collaborate together.”
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District Strives for ‘Learning System’ The goal for administrators and teachers is to convert typically scattershot teacher training into a coherent, cohesive endeavor.
By Stephen Sawchuk
O Lexington, Mass.
reo cookies, a veggie platter, and a lot of caffeinated beverages make up the afternoon reinforcements for the educators gathered in the basement of a converted school here in this leafy Boston suburb. Over the course of the meeting on this fall day, the 18-member professional-development committee for the Lexington school system will cover a wide swath of topics about the ongoing training—everything from practical concerns about teacher enrollment in a districtsponsored course to philosophical ones about how to improve teachers’ ability to modify instruction based on analyses of student work. Formed in spring 2009 by the district, in partnership with the local teachers’ union, the work group has a specific mission: to ensure that the pieces of the district’s continuing teacher training are congruent, of high quality, relevant to what teachers are doing in their classrooms, and widely accessible. In the words of Superintendent Paul B. Ash, the Lexington district is trying to become a “learning system”—one that fosters teacher learning beyond the individual school level. As it does so, the district is grappling with some of the challenges inherent in upgrading typically scattershot training into a seamless endeavor. Building teacher capacity to advance learning, after all, means moving from an individual exercise to a collective one. It relies on skilled teams in each school working effectively, as well as the provision of additional support when necessary for teachers, and for the teams, to overcome roadblocks. And that is exactly what this committee has set out to do. Since coming to Lexington in 2005, Mr. Ash has made the provision of professional development the hallmark of his leadership in this 6,300-student district. Training is now provided in a variety of formats. Educators in each school are expected to engage in the central component—a minimum of one planning period a week devoted to grade-level or content teams, known at some schools as professional learning communities, or plcs. Elementary teachers have some additional time on Thursdays, while other teachers and principals supplement the meetings by using contractual after-school Monday meeting time and additional prep periods for the collaborative work. The idea is for the teams to devise common benchmarks for student learning, discuss how students perform against those benchmarks, and intervene and reteach as needed. At Jonas Clarke Middle School, for instance, the three members of the 8th grade U.S. history content team used their collaboration time to craft a unit on the 2008 presidential election, after realizing that many students didn’t
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understand the distinction between a Republican and the political concept of “republicanism.” This year, the team is working on ways to upgrade the history curriculum to include more primary sources, historical accounts, and materials beyond the scope of the textbook. Ramille Romulus, a team member, said one of his group’s goals is to gradually raise expectations for students. As he puts it, “After a couple of years of getting things done, it’s time to move on to something higher.”
Overcoming Resistance As simple as that concept of a school-based, inquiry-driven approach is in theory, it has not come to Lexington without some bumps in the road. For one, the culture of teacher autonomy at work in the United States is perhaps even stronger in a district that’s relatively wealthy and homogeneous than in one with myriad challenges. “Because we are so high-performing, it’s difficult to excite people to thinking that they can do even better,” said Carol A. Pilarski, the assistant superintendent for curriculum, instruction, and professional development. Administrators and even teachers here like to refer to the
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teaching corps as composed of “thoroughbreds”—confident, trained practitioners who excel in their content areas but also happen to be a bit stubborn. Mr. Ash began the transition to collaborative work by requiring, starting in the 2005-06 school year, that teams at each school engage in a yearlong “action research” project. Teachers initially resisted, partly out of anxiety about meetings in which elementary and middle schools would share results from those research projects. “We went through a big implementation dip, and I went through a tremendous backlash,” Mr. Ash said. “The union was upset; it felt teachers were overburdened, that there wasn’t enough training. ... But I knew that we weren’t going to change the culture until enough people had experienced the collaboration and saw that it was better.” Now, five years later, educators are involved in morefrequent cycles in which they look at student work and devise strategies for improving their teaching. Principals and teachers here say they are starting to notice changes in teacher behavior and student outcomes as a result of the teamwork. Whitney Hagins, the chairwoman of the science department at Lexington High School, says she can’t imagine teaching without her plc. “It’s really opened teachers’ eyes to things that weren’t working,” she said. Her colleague Marie Murphy, the foreign-languages chairwoman, says that a once-static curriculum is now “alive and it’s always being challenged,” making it richer. And Jeff Leonard jokes that he can hear the changes. The department chairman for performing arts, Mr. Leonard says the band’s rehearsal techniques have improved, and final performances now sound more cohesive. The work isn’t always easy. It is still difficult for teachers to talk about those instances when their instruction needs help, which is one of the reasons the most effective teams meet more than once a week in order to establish trust. “For the formal meetings to be successful, those relationships have to be in place,” said Geetika D. Kaw, the science department chairwoman at Clarke Middle School. Even then, according to Edward M. Davey, one of the teachers in the history content team at Clarke, a team can run into problems if it devises a test or plans a lesson without having a highly specific goal for what the teachers want to achieve through that activity. A conversation
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I knew that we weren’t going to change the culture until enough people had experienced the collaboration and saw that it was better.”
paul b. ash Superintendent Lexington Public Schools
from TOP: Edward M. Davey talks to his 8th grade social studies class about the burning of the British ship Gaspée, a harbinger of the American Revolution. He uses strategies he picked up in his professional learning community. Mr. Davey, right, works with his PLC colleagues, from left, Kathryn Harper, Ramille Romulus, and David Vincent, to devise the best ways to teach students about reading and understanding historical texts.
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s more professional development shifts from centrally mandated activities for all teachers to training that is more responsive to the contexts and students in each school, what’s the best way to keep it focused and of high quality? The Carman-Ainsworth district in Flint, Mich., recently faced that dilemma. By working with its teachers’ union, the 4,600-student district has emphasized school-based professional development since 2004. Its bargaining agreement codifies a schedule that includes “late start” Wednesdays, when school is delayed by an hour and a half. Teachers have more than 20 such days a year to engage in working in grade-level or discipline-specific teams during that time. Following a 2008 district-accreditation cycle, however, district leaders decided to see whether there were ways to improve the training. Teachers were given time to visit other schools and were interviewed in focus groups for their feedback. The information showed that teachers found value in the school teams, but also saw that the team work varied in quality from school to school. That led to a predicament that Steve Tunnicliff, the district’s assistant superintendent, calls the “tight-loose” problem of school-based training—how much oversight administrators need to provide to school sites without being too prescriptive about their activities. “It’s the total irony of [professional learning communities] in general—they seem so simple, but the implementation is extremely difficult,” Mr. Tunnicliff said. “When you’ve got these teachers, literally weekly, going off in their different areas, you need to develop some structure to make sure they’re following through with it.”
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[In the past], there was a level of frustration with what was being provided because we didn’t have much selection in terms of courses.”
stRUCTURE ADDED Last year, Carman-Ainsworth officials launched a system requiring teams to make presentations to other teams in their building. Three times a year, they must present the results of their inquiries in a “data cycle”: the problem they set out to solve, the data they looked at, the steps they took to respond, and the results in student learning. In addition to those protocols, central-office staff members now participate in some of the Wednesday meetings. “It kind of was a healthy accountability,” Mr. Tunnicliff said. “A structure for how you’re going to spend that [professional-development] time is pretty important. [The teams] can fall apart because they lose focus about what they’re trying to accomplish.” Fred A. Burger, the president of the local affiliate of the National Education Association, said the structure has helped teachers articulate goals across related subjects. The biology plc he belongs to, for instance, meets with the teams on chemistry and physical sciences in the school to make its presentations. “What we see,” he said, “is that there are common themes we agree on—that every student should be able to write a lab report or apply the scientific method.”
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among team members, he said, is not the same thing as the focused problem-solving that will serve to advance student learning.
Outside Supports Getting the right system of checks and balances to keep sitebased professional development from suffering from such mission drift is highly dependent on building-level leadership. In Lexington, the principals who have embraced that form of teacher training, like Steven H. Flynn of Clarke Middle School, go out of their way to make sure that time set aside for teacher teams is spent productively. Mr. Flynn’s schedule is organized so that he can spend 15 minutes apiece with the four teams meeting on a given day—or extra time with the groups that are struggling. And he keeps extensive records about what goals teams set out in every meeting and what they
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accomplished that day. In addition to the school content teams, other professional supports abound, including at least one dedicated literacy and math specialist in each school and access to instructional-technology experts. The most recent addition to the professional-development system was unveiled last spring: a series of free, voluntary after-school courses for teachers. The notion of such classes runs counter to the ideas of some professional-development advocates, who contend that most professional learning should be conducted on site. But educators here stress that the district’s courses differ from the expansive menu that teachers typically select from to earn continuing education credits. In November of last year, Lexington officials conducted a survey of the district’s teaching corps and designed the courses in response to teachers’ top 10 priorities, which included expanding their repertoires of instructional strategies,
analyzing student work, and integrating technology. Crucially, the courses involve a follow-up coaching element based in schools, another feature teachers favored. A few weeks into a course, enrolled teachers have an opportunity to receive feedback on how well they’re implementing new strategies and techniques. “Processing the information and coaching teachers on how to use it are vital, or else it sits in a bubble,” said Joanne Hennessy, the chairwoman of the professional-development body, which coordinates the course offerings. For his part, Superintendent Ash argues that it’s crucial to bring fresh ideas to the educators engaging in professional development. Early in his tenure, he recalled, “one of my union presidents said to me, ‘What happens if [the school teams] can’t figure out what to do next?’ That’s why you have to have a learning school system, because teachers will run out of ideas,” he said. “I really think that the plc is quite
GeEtika D. Kaw
Erik Jacobs for Education Week
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Jonas Clarke Middle School Lexington, Mass. Age: 30s Years of teaching: 10 Geetika D. Kaw’s tenure as a teacher in the same district for more than 10 years gives her a clarity of perspective on the waning and waxing of initiatives in Lexington, Mass. Before the arrival of the current superintendent, Paul B. Ash, in 2005, she’d outlasted a “revolving door” of school leaders—and a corresponding number of professional-development initiatives. “Some years we had a focus on technology, some years on differentiated instruction,” she said. “There was a level of frustration with what was being provided because we didn’t have much selection in terms of courses.” Now, though, having a superintendent who has a clear vision about focusing on raising academic standards for students and on classroom strategies for improving instruction has helped give a more cohesive theme to professional development, Ms. Kaw says. The professional learning community—or content team, as it’s known in her school—is the district’s core professional-development strategy. In her view, it has gone a long way to encourage the development of a common language and assessments for gauging the quality of instruction, while still allowing teachers to seek individual help if they need it. There’s still room for growth in the system, Ms. Kaw says. For instance, she’d like to attend the 6th and 7th grade science-content-team meetings, in addition to the 8th grade one she now goes to, but the current school schedule doesn’t allow for that. Still, Ms. Kaw has discovered ways in which she can build on the structure at the school. One of her goals as department chairwoman this year: take over other teachers’ classes on testing days, so that those teachers are free to observe how peers are leading their lessons. “The key,” she said, “is to let people know I’m available if they need help.” –STEPHEN SAWCHUK
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Ann Walker Kennedy Lois T. Murray Elementary/Middle School (previously taught at Harford Heights Elementary) Baltimore Age: 50 Years of teaching: 3
Stephen Voss for Education Week
“
They were nice people, but a little bit out of touch with what the school system wanted from teachers at that point.” self-limiting. It’s limited to the capacity of the three or four people in the room.”
constant tweaking It’s largely the work of the professional-development committee to make sure that all the professional-development layers come together. At a late-September meeting, committee members discussed suggestions for how to integrate the courses better with the other teacher supports. One member suggested supplementing the courses with webinars so that teachers could easily access a refresher. Another teacher suggested there might be a way to encourage all members of a school team to attend a course together and so continue the work at their weekly meetings. A third teacher had a practical concern about group-based rather than one-on-
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In her first three years of teaching, Ann Walker Kennedy saw both lows and highs of teacher professional development. But by the end of her third year in the Baltimore schools, the highs were beginning to predominate. Segueing into teaching from a career in advocacy and casework for people with disabilities, Ms. Kennedy started work as a special education teacher after five weeks of intensive training and a short stint in a summer school classroom. A last-minute change of assignment put her in charge of her own classroom of 2nd graders with disabilities at Harford Heights Elementary School, and she had never taught reading on her own. “I did feel like, ‘Oh my gosh, I don’t know what I’m doing,’ ” said Ms. Kennedy, who since this past summer has been teaching at a special education school run for the district by the Kennedy Krieger Institute. Back in her first year, a specialist in the reading curriculum stopped in to model a lesson for 15 minutes or so, but it wasn’t until the first districtwide professional-development day that Ms. Kennedy got her first big dose of the approach. That was helpful, she said, but somehow in the next two years, she was sent to virtually the same workshop two more times. In another case of redundancy, all special education teachers were required to retake a workshop on using a new online form, even though Ms. Kennedy had mastered the form the first time. Mentors, provided to teachers in their first and second years, were not as much help as they might have been. Retired special education teachers, they knew Ms. Kennedy’s field but not her school, her curriculum, or the new stress points. “They were nice people,” Ms. Kennedy recalled, “but a little bit out of touch with what the school system wanted from teachers at that point.” By her third year—also Chief Executive Officer Andrés A. Alonso’s third year leading the district—Ms. Kennedy had noticed marked improvements in professional development. For one, the district was making use of online professional-development schedules and learning modules. The latter meant that some required learning and testing for teachers—such as mastery of the use of a new report card—could be completed anytime, anywhere online. At least as good, the in-person workshops seemed different. “The people teaching the workshops I went to were crisper, the content was more relevant to my classroom, and I came back with resources, such as a CD, that helped me use the content,” Ms. Kennedy said. At the same time, Harford Heights Elementary, which had not been meeting federal and state standards, got money for collaborative planning some afternoons and Saturdays for gradelevel teams of teachers. “If it’s Thursday, I’d know what’s going on in Ms. Nelson’s room, and I could check with her at the end of the day to see how it went,” Ms. Kennedy said, explaining that the common planning magnified the teachers’ ability to learn from one another’s experience. “Being with my peers and getting information and being able to synthesize it with minds I know: If I could combine those things,” she –BESS KELLER mulled, “that would be the best PD.”
one coaching: Would it require elementary teachers to be away from their own classrooms too often? Debate of that nature may seem academic, but the leaders here stress that systems of support for teachers cannot afford to be static. They must undergo constant supervision and tweaking to meet teachers’ needs. Still more challenges are on the horizon, because the shift has required Lexington teachers to take greater ownership of student success. That’s starting to raise delicate questions about teacher performance. In the words of Gary Simon, who chairs the high school math department, the team work has given birth to the idea that if students are underperforming, “it’s not that my students didn’t do well, it’s that I didn’t do well.” But there is no question that the conversations will continue. Ongoing training is no longer considered an option in Lexington; it is a professional responsibility. “We’ve passed the point of no return,” Natalie K. Cohen, the district’s high school principal, said about that shift. “If you’re a teacher here and you are not on board with this approach, then maybe this isn’t the district for you.” n Coverage of policy efforts to improve the teaching profession is supported by a grant from the Joyce Foundation, at www.joycefdn.org/ Programs/Education.
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Providers Eye New Opportunities Still, the industry will have to compete for market share with districts as school systems shift ever more professional development in-house.
By Bess Keller
P
eople on the lookout for business opportunities have not often seen the glint of gold in helping teachers improve their craft. But the glint is brightening. A potent combination of new federal money, a consensus around the importance of teacher effectiveness, and digital innovations has supercharged professional-development providers. Veterans are being joined as never before by new or expanded businesses. In the late 1990s, venture capitalists and fund managers examined the education industry, with some even glancing in the direction of teacher professional development. But enthusiasm among advance-guard investors waned as businesses that managed K-12 schools struggled and as computerized lessons failed to narrow achievement gaps. The disappointments underscored that most of precollegiate education remains labor-intensive and change-averse—conditions that don’t promise much growth potential. Still, engineers and entrepreneurs continued to pull digital wonders from their hats, and to a degree, the school market responded with demand. Then came the No Child Left Behind Act, meting out consequences to schools and districts that failed to raise student achievement. With some 5,000 schools identified as wanting, the Obama administration has allocated nearly $17 billion for fixes. The nclb law also requires that districts in trouble with its accountability
provisions use 10 percent of their federal anti-poverty Title I money for professional development. On top of that, two federal programs that spotlight teachers, the Teacher Incentive Fund and the Race to the Top program, raised the ante on teacher effectiveness by billions more.
Profits Possible? As a result, the lure is there, but are the profits? Responding to the recession, some school districts have been keeping more of their professional development in-house, an approach that helps save jobs by creating positions for coaches and professional developers. Plus, many districts are used to getting their professional development locally or regionally, often from former employees, universities, and smaller outfits whose people they know. Rough estimates made three years ago by officials at the industry giant Pearson showed that about half of professional development then was provided internally or by regional education service agencies, a quarter by nonprofits such as universities, 15 percent by individuals from outside the district, and just 10 percent by for-profit organizations. “So much of the PD market is local,” observed Stephanie Hirsh, the executive director of Learning Forward (formerly the National Staff Development Council), the membership organization for educators concerned with professional development. “It’s about hiring the [retired] principal or teacher who had expertise in the area.”
A SAMPLE OF PROFESSIONAL-DEVELOPMENT SUPPLIERS Name
Examples of services offered
Headquarters
ASCD (formerly Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development)
conferences, publications, “tools kits” such as Educating the Whole Child
Alexandria, Va.
Learning Forward (formerly National Staff Development Council)
publications, conferences, 5-week e-learning programs
Dallas
National Council of Teachers of Mathematics
e-seminars and workshops, conferences, Reflection Guides
Reston, Va.
National Education Association
publications, Web learning
Washington
Lucy Caulkins
elementary-level reading and writing instruction for teachers
New York City
Richard DuFour
professional learning community strategies
Bloominton, Ind. (Solution Tree)
Ruby K. Payne
education and poverty materials and workshops
Highlands, Texas
Grant Wiggins
curriculum-reform workshops and materials
Hopewell, N.J.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
training for California K-6 English teachers using company reading materials in partnership with Pivot Learning Partners
Boston
Knowledge Delivery Systems
online professional development
New York City
Laureate Education
Canter Courses, including Assertive Discipline
Baltimore
Leadership and Learning Center
publications, courses, customized professional development
Denver
Pearson
Pearson Learning Teams, Assessment Training Institute, online teacher collaboration and courses
Saddle River, N.J.
School Improvement Network
Video Journal of Education, PD 360, TeachStream
Midvale, Utah
Teachscape
online professional-development support and dialogue, classroom walk-throughs with mobile devices
San Francisco
Solution Tree
publications, customized professional-development consulting, conferences, Marzano Institute partnership
Bloomington, Ind.
PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATIONS
NATIONALLY ACTIVE CONSULTANTS
FOR-PROFIT COMPANIES
PRIVATE, NONPROFIT, RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT COMPANIES AED (Academy for Educational Development)
after-school science-program training
Washington
Edvantia
in-person and online professional development, development of teacher leaders
Charleston, W.Va.; Nashville, Tenn.
McREL (Mid-Continent Research for Education and Learning)
Scaffolding Early Literacy program
Denver
WestEd
Quality Teaching for English Learners program
San Francisco
PBS Teacherline
Arlington, Va.
PUBLIC, NONPROFIT COMPANIES Public Broadcasting Service S12
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Corey R. Sell
Jim McVety, a Bucks County, Pa.-based consultant to K-12 businesses, points out that state or district rules often make teachers put in “seat time” to get credits toward recertification or pay increases, and that such rules get in the way of online learning—one route to valuable economies of scale. Schools are also leery about working with for-profit firms, several business executives said. “Unnecessarily phobic,” offered Scott C. Noon, the vice president for marketing of Teachscape, which focuses on hightech professional development. That’s unfortunate, he continued, because nonprofits “typically don’t have the kinds of capitalization that for-profits do to invest in new technology.“ Whether the sector will offer significant new opportunity or just a tidy living for existing players is hard to say, according to Mr. McVety. At present, he concluded, “I’d retain a healthy degree of skepticism.”
Textbook Giants Some education industry leaders are betting on opportunity. The big three of U.S. textbook publish-
ing—Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill, and Pearson—have all “aggressively pursued” the professional-development market, according to a 2006 report from Simba Information, which tracks publishing and media businesses. That pursuit has entailed both new partnerships and acquisitions. In a bold move this fall, for instance, Pearson bought the America’s Choice comprehensive-school-improvement program. It will operate alongside Pearson’s K12 Solutions business, the company’s existing effort to capture the market of schools that must make drastic changes under the nclb law. In 2005, Pearson bought the model the company now uses for its Learning Teams operation. Two of the three California researchers who developed the program, in which teachers are grouped for collaboration around meeting student learning needs, came to the company as well. The model is Pearson’s take on the wildly popular “professional learning community” approach to providing professional development and raising student achievement. Learning Teams aims itself at schools that are “in need of improvement”
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Stephen Voss for Education Week
Jamestown Elementary School Arlington County, Va. Age: 33 Years of teaching: 10 Like any elementary teacher worth his salt, Corey R. Sell is outgoing by nature—thoughtful, articulate, and inquisitive. You wouldn’t expect someone with those attributes to have difficulty engaging in dialogues about the craft of teaching. But Mr. Sell, a 5th grade teacher, says his most rewarding professional-development experiences have tended to be those he’s gone in search of on his own. “Sadly, I really think it’s an individualistic process for me,” said Mr. Sell, who is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in education at George Mason University, in Virginia. “I don’t think it should be that way. But ... it’s usually me finding someone else to talk to or seeking out support.” That pattern developed early in his career. At a former school, Mr. Sell eschewed the glossy, activity-filled publications for teachers, and instead, borrowed copies of journals from his principal that discussed empirical education research and its potential implications for classrooms. Sometimes, he’s found talented colleagues who have been willing to talk about such developments, but there hasn’t always been a structure in place in his schools to guide conversations about practice. As for formal in-service training, Mr. Sell, like many other teachers, can recount both good and bad professional development. Over the course of his career, he’s identified two common trouble areas in such training. One is practical—that such programs, while adding tools to his instructional repertoire, don’t focus as much attention on how to deploy them in a classroom. The other problem is philosophical, in that most such training requires teachers to buy in to a certain model, program, or philosophy, while discouraging modification. “I think it’s a cultural thing about teaching,” Mr. Sell said about that anti-intellectual subtext. “I don’t think we really want teachers to think that much or that critically.” He is considering a permanent move to higher education. “I really think it’s the system that’s pushing me out,” said Mr. Sell. “It’s not the workload; it’s not the money; it’s that the system [for teacher learning] really isn’t bottom-up.”
“
rather than those obligated under the federal law to make wholesale changes. Beth Wray, the president of Pearson Learning Teams, said that programs for improving teaching and turning around schools were a “perfect complement to Pearson’s capacity in assessment and curriculum.” Pearson trains district employees in the detailed model and gradually reduces its presence. That flow can work as a business model, Ms. Wray explained, because currently “we’re only scratching the surface of schools failing to make ayp,” or adequate yearly progress, the bar states set for schools under the nclb law. Pearson’s global education sales in 2009 amounted to $8.8 billion, according to Susan Aspey, a company spokeswoman. Like publishers that had years ago expanded into digital communications, companies that sell Web-based innovations for schools—online learning, for exam-
–STEPHEN SAWCHUK
Sadly, I really think it’s an individualistic process for me. ... It’s usually me finding someone else to talk to or seeking out support.”
ple, or software for staff management—can see a relatively short step into professional development. Truenorthlogic, a Sandy, Utah-based provider of digital systems for tracking teacher licensing and professional development, formed a partnership this year with New York Citybased Knowledge Delivery Systems, which creates online training programs. As a result, Truenorthlogic now offers its clients “anytime, anywhere” video lectures from gurus like Charlotte Danielson, the creator of a nationally known framework for evaluating teaching.
Venture Capital For entrepreneurs jazzed by new learning technologies, the NewSchools Venture Fund has
been the place to go. Founded in 1998 by L. John Doerr, a leading Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and others, the nonprofit fund helps new education companies. So far, most money has gone to charter school networks, but that is starting to change, said Julie Mikuta, the San Francisco-based fund’s partner for human capital. Still, in early rounds of investing, only one teacher-professional-development company—Teachscape—received substantial money from the philanthropy. Teachscape, also based in San
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Francisco, is pioneering the use of “immersion” video from a panoramic camera to capture what’s going on in classrooms. It is also pairing the video with Web-based tools that “frame” the action for measurement of the quality of teachers’ practice. The paired product, which allows teacher assessment in addition to teacher coaching, is expected out in January. The work is to be underwritten by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which will use the new technology in a study of teacher effectiveness. The company’s annual revenue is about $30 million, according to Mr. Noon of Teachscape. He said the company believes it will hit profitability this year.
Two-Day Workshops Not every professional-development company has tried to power its success with technological innovation, although that remains the most-talkedabout path to growing impact and profits. Some businesses have specialized in the seminars and conferences where educators have traditionally heard about new ideas. Similar to their more technologically driven counterparts, those companies have branched out into school- or district-tailored programs, some of them abroad. They have had to adapt to other market conditions, too, such as the demand for “sustained” professional development. Sometimes, a twinge of conscience might be involved. For example, Douglas B. Reeves, who founded the Leadership and Learning Center in Denver 15 years ago, no longer accepts offers to give one-shot “inspirational” speeches. “There’s no evidence,” the author of more than 20 books on teaching and school leadership observed drily, “that inspiration improves student achievement.” Mr. Reeves, whose company brings in $14 million annually, said he gives such speeches when they are part of the center’s ongoing work in a district. Solution Tree, another “traditional” contender with a track record going back 25 years, started under another name with the goal of providing onestop professional development: publishing, live events such as conferences, and workshops and institutes around the country. In the past 10 years, though, the Bloomington, Ind.-based company has revamped its business model to focus on its authors and experts. The reasoning was that the right authors, both well known and emerging, would help the
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business “have the best shot at helping schools and growing our business,” said Paul Kuhne, Solution Tree’s chief marketing officer. The company’s stable of professional developers includes Robert J. Marzano and Richard DuFour. With that strategy in place, the company is now working to get more of its professional development online. Company officials declined to provide revenue figures. In addition, like the Leadership and Learning Center and many other professional-development organizations, Solution Tree has dropped almost all its one-day seminars in favor of those that last two days. The nclb law defines acceptable professional development as activities that are “not one-day or short-term workshops or conferences.” Mr. Kuhne wouldn’t say that the near-demise of one-day workshops was related to the federal law, but in an e-mail, he acknowledged that Solution Tree pays attention to funding mandates. “We … work with schools and districts to identify funding streams as needed,” Mr. Kuhne wrote, “so that they can benefit from our products and services.” n
Cost of Teacher Training Lost in District Budgets What constitutes By Stephen Sawchuk professional ost. That would seem to be the most fundamental aspect of crafting a professional-development program. But as a number of researchers have discovdevelopment is so ered, school districts rarely have a good fix on how much they actually spend on such training—or on vague that school what that spending buys in the way of teacher or student learning. Because districts tend to characterize professystems have a sional development as programming, they typically underestimate other investments in teachers’ difficult time knowledge and skills—such as how much they spend on salaries during hours teachers attend in-service workshops, according to experts who study figuring out just district budgeting on professional development. What’s more, few professional-development activities are linked to outcome measures of whether a teacher has increased his or her capacity to how much they instruct students, they say. “There’s a sense that teacher effectiveness matters, and we’ve got to help spend to help teachers improve in effectiveness, but we don’t necessarily know how,” said Marguerite Roza, a scholar at the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington, in Bothell. “But districts are operating as improve though they do know how.” Finer-grained analyses of the costs of training and what it leverages are critiinstruction. cal for districts to use such funding productively, she and other scholars assert.
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“What we can safely say is that most urban districts are spending a lot more than they realize, between $6,000 to $8,000 a year per teacher, on the in-service days and on training,” said Allan R. Odden, a professor of educational leadership and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied the issue of professional-development spending. “But it’s a mile wide and an inch thick. And until recently, districts were spending it on anything rather than on how to teach reading and how to teach math.”
In 2007-08, Philadelphia spent a total of $162 million on all professional development.
39% Estimated Salary Increments for Coursework
$63.4 million NOTE: Figures predate change in leadership. SOURCE: Education Resource Strategies
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Complex Accounting No national data exist on how much districts spend to support teacher training, partly because there is no national definition of the term “profes-
36% PD Initiatives
$57.9 million
opment cost, equal to the proportion of salary paid to teachers on those days. Those costs can vary widely by district: Of the 100 largest school districts’ most recent calendars, the number of days teachers were expected to be at school for reasons other than instructing students ranged from no days in Albuquerque, N.M., to 17 in Little Rock, Ark., according to a database maintained by the Washington-based National Council on Teacher Quality.
Scheduling Time The issue of teacher time and its cost is only now starting to attract attention from districts, researchers, and practitioners. “We just don’t recognize time as a resource, just as we didn’t use to recognize teachers as a resource,” said Jennifer King Rice, a professor of education policy at the University of Maryland College Park who has studied professionaldevelopment spending. “We are locked into traditions of how we use time, and we allocate it across districts in ways that may be unproductive.” For instance, the traditional mode of scheduling scatters teachers’ daily preparation at different times from colleagues’ in the same subject or grade level, making it much harder for them to work together to improve practice. Timothy Knowles, a former deputy superintendent of teaching and learning for the Boston school district, recalled a visit to the district by a British schoolinspectorate team in 2002. “It came home to me when Her Majesty’s Inspectorate said to us, ‘You have more time [for teacher learning] built into the fabric of the day than any schools we’ve ever seen anywhere, and you’re not using it,’ ” he said. The situation, Mr. Knowles surmised, reflects the cultural norms
Questions Arise On Credentials of teaching in the United States. American education continues to prize teacher autonomy above the notion of teaching as a collaborative enterprise, in contrast to practices in higher-performing countries. In fact, according to a study commissioned in 2009 by Learning Forward, a Dallas-based membership organization formerly known as the National Staff Development Council, teachers in Asian and European countries generally spent fewer minutes instructing students and more time working on their lessons with other teachers, compared with teachers in the United States. Lesson planning in the United States averages between three and five hours a week, but in most European and Asian countries, teachers spend 15 to 20 hours a week on those activities and generally perform them in collaboration with their peers, the study found. And such work is considered part and parcel of a teacher’s professional expectations, noted Thomas R. Guskey, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Kentucky, in Lexington. “There is this perception [in the United States] that if a teacher isn’t in front of kids teaching, then it’s a waste of their time,” Mr. Guskey said. “In China, teachers are basically in school from 8 to 5 every day, they have a significantly longer day than our teachers do, but ... a portion of the day is spent lesson-planning with other teachers, writing extensive comments on student work, and those things are built into their schedule.”
Reallocations
25% Contracted PD Days
$40.6 million
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sional development. Analyses of specific urban districts’ budgeting practices, in the meantime, show that activities financed as part of professional development tended to be fragmented rather than supportive of learning goals, according to Karen Hawley Miles of Education Resource Strategies, which contracts with districts to analyze their expenses. “Districts spend a lot more than they actively manage or that they think strategically about organizing,” said Ms. Miles, the president of the Newton, Mass.-based nonprofit organization. “You get lots of departments trying to do little pieces of professional development, but most of them are too shallow and spread apart to make a big difference.” As just one example, her group documented that the Philadelphia district, in the 2007-08 school year, spent nearly $58 million on professional-development initiatives, primarily for teacher coaches and release time for lead teachers to work with peers in schools. But those investments were being overseen by as many as nine separate offices or entities. And the analysis revealed a number of weaknesses in how that time was spent. For instance, activities that coaches and lead teachers were permitted to engage in were broadly defined and not audited for quality, the ers report found. Since the report was issued, Superintendent Arlene Ackerman has made changes to the district’s training system. But district officials did not respond to several requests seeking comment. In addition, Ms. Miles’ group found that Philadelphia spent an additional $41 million when counting the time set aside in the district calendar for mandated professional learning. As the ers analyses show, in-service days are a significant professional-devel-
Have case studies been able to determine whether districts invest enough in their current teacher corps when all the costs of professional development are accurately accounted for? Some scholars say yes. “For most big districts, it’s not that they need more money for professional development. It’s capturing what they spend and refocusing the whole professionaldevelopment system,” Mr. Odden
T
hey are politically tough to eliminate, not correlated with teacher effectiveness outside the math and science fields, and generally unaligned with districts’ priorities for professional development. Nevertheless, salary differentials for teachers who earn additional course credits or hold advanced degrees—otherwise known as “lane” increases or the “master’s degree bump”—are among the costliest aspects of teacher development. “It is so depressing, I have to say,” Paul B. Ash, the superintendent of the 6,300-student Lexington, Mass., school system, said of the cost. “You have to pay teachers what they’re worth, ... but the issue for me is whether that’s the best way to spend money to increase teacher capacity to increase learning. Is it? I don’t think so.” An analysis released by the Center on Reinventing Public Education, located at the University of Washington, in Bothell, found that states spend millions of dollars paying teachers for earning extra credentials, even in fields like education or leadership that research does not associate with improved student learning. As professional-development spending comes under the spotlight, a conceptual challenge awaits: Should those costs be considered and budgeted as part of spending on teacher professional development, or be reserved for a larger conversation on teacher pay? Karen Hawley Miles, the president of Education Resource Strategies, a nonprofit organization that conducts analyses of district spending patterns, argues that such costs should be included in reviews of district spending on professional development, since they represent an investment in teachers’ knowledge and skills. In Philadelphia, her Newton, Mass.based group found, the increments made up nearly 40 percent of total dollars invested in teacher training in 2007-08, outpacing even the amount spent on teacher coaching and in-service workshops. Other finance experts aren’t convinced those costs should be budgeted as professional development. Allan R. Odden, a professor of educational leadership and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, points out that private industries often compensate their employees more for earning degrees like M.B.A.s and for advanced certification. “No private-sector company would consider increased salary for knowledge and skills in their training budget; that would be in their salary budget,” he argued. A more productive goal for districts would be to revamp the entire pay schedule, rather than tinker with just lane increases, Mr. Odden added. Despite a resurgence of interest in alternative-pay plans, most districts have only gone so far as to offer bonuses on top of the salary schedule. Just a few have ever attempted to put in totally new compensation systems. That’s the primary reason that Mr. Ash, in Massachusetts, hasn’t attempted to tackle the issue. “It’s hard in every way—it’s intellectually hard, it’s politically hard, it requires an enormous amount of persistence,” he said about changing the tradition of lane salary boosts. “You’re trying to overcome 80 years of history, … and in the meantime, you’re paying for those courses forever.”
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–STEPHEN SAWCHUK
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Is your school in the beginning stages of creating professional learning opportunities? Do you believe collaborative professional learning, teamwork, and problem solving are keys to school improvement? Do you have what it takes to be a Learning School? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then apply today to become a member of Learning Forward’s Learning School Alliance (LSA) — our network of schools committed to improved professional practice and student achievement. Put your school in the spotlight! Invest in this opportunity to learn with colleagues from near and far and demonstrate the power of a learning school. For more information or to apply, visit www.learningforward.org/alliance.
Learning Forward is the new name of the National Staff Development Council
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of the University of Wisconsin contended. But similar analyses of rural and suburban districts’ spending are sparse, making it more difficult to talk about their investments, he acknowledged. Ms. Miles of Education Resource Strategies isn’t convinced districts now spend enough on professional development. She points out that, among districts studied by the ers, money spent on initiatives and programming amounted to only 2 percent of Philadelphia’s total operating budget in the year studied, compared with a high of about 5.5 percent in another district, Rochester, N.Y. (Those figures don’t take into account salary costs for district-mandated in-service days.) “We felt they plain weren’t spending enough,” Ms. Miles said about Philadelphia. The bottom line, experts say, is that truly focusing professional development requires administrators to figure out where their dollars are spent, whether those patterns align to strategic goals for teacher improvement, and if not, institute changes to the spending.
The Union Factor Such changes generally require delicate union-management partnerships. Collective bargaining contracts, for instance, specify whether some of the daily preparation hours teachers are entitled to could be appropriated by building administrators for collaborative teacher learning. Breaking those logjams can be tricky, but the number of districts that have done it shows it is not impossible. Beginning in 2004, administrators and union officials in Flint, Mich., for instance, used the collective bargaining process to institute a different school calendar, resulting in more than 20 late-start Wednesdays freeing up 75 minutes for teacher collaboration. The tradeoff: slightly longer school days and a reduction of several half-days formerly spent on district-directed professional development. Mr. Odden favors a more radical restructuring of school schedules that gives teachers time for collaboration in the regular school day and doesn’t detract from other in-service opportunities. The 38,000-student Beaverton, Ore., district is now using such a model in several of its eight middle schools. Cedar Park Middle School, for instance, uses a schedule that adds collaboration time for teachers in the same grade without lengthening the school day or taking away from instructional minutes. Eighth grade-level content teachers have a period that’s used on alternate days for small-group student interventions or for collaborative teacher learning. Their
students take electives, like physical education or foreign language, during that time. Then, in the afternoons, the core-content teachers instruct in double-length classes. The schedule comes with its own trade-off: somewhat larger class sizes.
Accountability Question The final task for school districts is to better tie their professionaldevelopment spending to student outcomes and other measures of teacher improvement, something that has been lacking in nearly all the extant literature on the topic. That isn’t an easy task, especially because the culture of professionaldevelopment funding hasn’t emphasized accountability—a problem that starts at the top. The U.S. Department of Education continues to give out nearly $3 billion a year in federal aid for professional development under Title II-A, its largest teacher-quality program by far, even though it has never fully studied the effects of that spending. Even as new forms of teacher training, such as collaborative teacher teams, have grown popular, districts have done little to prove their efficacy. “Educators have yet to demonstrate that, across many different contexts, they are using [professional learning communities] to improve their performance or that of their students,” said M. Hayes Mizell, a distinguished senior fellow at Learning Forward. “School systems have yet to demonstrate that they can or will collect data necessary to demonstrate that plcs are achieving such results.” The group supports proposed new language in federal law that would require recipients of federal professional-development funding to evaluate the effectiveness of school-based teacher-learning activities. Ms. Rice of the University of Maryland cautions that it will entail painstaking work to make sure such measures are accurate. “I worry a lot about ‘gaming,’ that there are ways to overgeneralize the effects of a particular initiative, or that we’ll demonstrate impact on outcomes that are too narrowly defined,” she said. “From an ideal perspective, I think that’s the right direction,” she said of greater accountability for professional development’s effectiveness. “From a realistic perspective, I worry that districts just don’t have the capacity.” n Coverage of leadership, human-capital development, extended and expanded learning time, and arts learning is supported in part by a grant from The Wallace Foundation, at www. wallacefoundation.org.
curriculum
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Content Seen Lacking Specificity
Casey Templeton for Education Week
Researchers are trying to identify the most beneficial information to give teachers to help them in their professional growth.
By Bess Keller
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n the video clip, the middle school teacher stops in midstep to fix her eyes on two students in the second row who have just exchanged mock jabs. In exactly the same tone that she has just used to tell the class she is passing out papers, the pony-tailed teacher pronounces the word “boys,” and the two combatants straighten up and fade into conformity. The episode takes about four seconds. The goofingoff is nearly invisible to the untrained eye. But in the course of a few years, the teacher could save precious hours with such acuity. “You did not lose any instructional time,” her teaching coach wrote approvingly after viewing the video of the lesson. “Good work.” The program that includes that teacher and her coach, Sharon Deal, who taught for more than 25 years before joining the University of Virginia’s MyTeachingPartner, represents a new wave of teacher professional development. However many other shortcomings have kept professional development from boosting teaching quality, proponents of the approach argue, the lack of specific and concrete content may be the most serious. What should teachers be learning? One answer stressed in the past decade is the how and why of student assessment. Another favorite topic is lesson planning. There’s general agreement that those skills are important, and yet both research and intuition suggest they are not enough. Nor will a merely broad-brush picture of effective teaching do the job. For instance, many educators, researchers, and professional-development providers call for a positive climate in the classroom. While identifying such an aim is useful, teachers need to know the patterns of specific behavior, often interactions with students,
that build and maintain a positive climate over time, according to Robert C. Pianta, the dean of the education school at U.Va. and the head of the research team behind MyTeachingPartner. For some 15 years, Mr. Pianta has been delving into the quality of teacher interactions with students and testing those for effects on increased student learning. The MyTeachingPartner professional-development program is one result. It uses the Pianta framework to pinpoint strengths and weaknesses in teachers’ ability to, as one example, engage students. Interested in those same interactions as a practitioner, Doug Lemov turned for enlightenment to master teachers he knows from his experience as an administrator for Uncommon Schools, a network of charter schools in New Jersey and New York. Mr. Lemov traveled to classrooms with a videographer to capture and classify the specific ways that accomplished teachers engage students, keep them on task, and get them through the rough spots of thinking hard. The result is the book Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College, published this year. He says he learned that technique is often the missing link in superior teaching. “The thing that gets in the way of implementing strategies is technique,” Mr. Lemov said. “When our principals want to make our teachers better, they spend a lot of time working on technique.”
A member of the University of Virginia’s MyTeachingPartner team, Sharon Deal works one-on-one with teachers to guide their practice.
Foundation Interest Cheap and easy-to-use video technology is responsible for some of the burgeoning interest in teaching methods writ small, but video is not the only possible tool for either the research or the professional-development side of this work. Deborah Loewenberg Ball, one of the pioneers of looking in close
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Erich Schlegel for Education Week
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When I asked about differentiation or scaffolding for students who didn’t come to the table with ‘average’ grade-level background knowledge, everyone looked at me like a crazy person.”
To see teachers discuss their thoughts on professional development, go to www.edweek.org/go/pdprofiles.
detail at a teacher’s classroom performance and now the dean of the University of Michigan education school, uses a special classroom where educators and others observe a teacher and struggling math students from bleachers on the sidelines. Ms. Ball, a former elementary teacher, focuses on math instruction, as does her former student Heather C. Hill, now a co-director of the National Center for Teacher Effectiveness at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Ms. Hill is one of five “observational” researchers who are part of the Measures of Effective Teaching project financed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The others are Mr. Pianta, Pamela L. Grossman and Raymond Pecheone at Stanford University’s education school, and Charlotte Danielson, a consultant based in Princeton, N.J. Gates officials hope the $45 million project involving 4,000 teachers will show how instructional performance can best be measured, evaluated, and improved. In addition to observation, Gates is putting money into three other approaches: “value added,” in which learning gains are linked to teachers by sophisticated manipulations of student test scores; tests of teachers’ knowledge; and student reporting on teacher effectiveness. (The Seattle-based foundation also provides grant support to Editorial Projects in Education, the publisher of Education Week.) But classroom observation has an edge on at least teacher tests and student evaluations because it translates so readily into “curriculum” for professional development. That’s especially true when video allows teachers to watch masters of their craft and themselves over and over again.
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But have researchers been able to tag the true levers of student learning? The Gates-supported observational scholars say yes, pointing to studies that show teachers who routinely practice at higher levels as identified by the observational-assessment systems have students who do better on achievement tests.
Concrete feedback In the case of the Pianta group, the comparisons extend over years and have involved about 5,000 classrooms, though the work on secondary-level teaching is just yielding its first results. One of Mr. Pianta’s findings drawn from several thousand pre-K-3 classrooms across the county is that teachers on average provide good emotional support and keep students organized for work fairly well, but do little to promote learning beyond the rote level. Many observers have suspected exactly that. More recently, Mr. Pianta and his team have begun investigating whether the professional-development program based on their system pays off in student learning. Early results are positive because, the researchers conjecture, the system provides a framework for highly structured and specific feedback that is focused on behaviors with proven links to student learning. More general approaches to videotaped lessons, such as “reflection,” Mr. Pianta has written, don’t work. Classroom observers tend to turn one of two ways in their work. Mr. Lemov, Mr. Pianta, and others take the position that many of the core elements of effective teaching transcend the subjects taught. Ms. Ball, Ms. Hill, and the
Stanford researchers use a more subject-specific approach. Ms. Grossman, an education professor at Stanford, has devised a classroom observational system for language arts, for instance. It includes both skills that cut across subjects and those that wouldn’t be found in every subject, such as guiding discussions in which students frequently refer to evidence from the text under study. Not that proponents of the two approaches necessarily see themselves in disagreement. “I really do think there are parts of practice that are more general—relationship-building, ways to relate to different age groups, use of time—but other aspects of teacher practice are inherently subject-specific,” said Ms. Grossman, a former English teacher. So observers using her system give high marks to teachers who build students’ understanding of different types of writing or show them how to move from soundedout spelling to the conventional kind.
Pedagogy vs. Content In the jargon of education, the first approach is more focused on “pedagogical knowledge” and the second on “pedagogical content knowledge.” The latter represents the particular knowledge educators need to make a subject understandable to students. Mathematics educators have put the strongest emphasis on content knowledge. Math builds on itself more than other subjects do, the thinking goes, so students are more likely to end up stranded if teachers can’t help them grasp a concept or catch up with it later. Any math professional devel-
EDUCATION WEEK: professional development > www.edweek.org/go/pdreport
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Laurie Hahn Ganser Lanier High School Austin, Texas Age: 28 Years of teaching: 4 Laurie Hahn Ganser, an English teacher for 9th and 10th graders, recalls a teacher-training session that was a disaster. The teacher works in a school where 600 of the 1,470 students are English-language learners. She remembers that the leaders of that professionaldevelopment session had no experience working with reluctant learners or ells. “When I asked about differentiation or scaffolding for students who didn’t come to the table with ‘average’ grade-level background knowledge, everyone looked at me like a crazy person,” she wrote in an e-mail. She said it was frustrating not to receive any suggestions for working with high-needs students. Ms. Ganser has had a positive experience, however, with Quality Teaching for English-Learners, or qtel, a professional-development program created by WestEd. She has attended two weeklong sessions with the program and been part of a leadership team for the three school years it has been implemented at Lanier High. Qtel aims to train regular content teachers and ell specialists in how to better engage English-learners in schooling. It focuses on preparing teachers to provide scaffolding, or supports for such students in the classroom. The philosophy behind the program is that language is learned best in a social context. Ms. Ganser says she appreciates how qtel taught her concrete strategies based on research. “I loved the qtel professional development because I left feeling like I had specific scaffolding exercises that I could apply in my classroom immediately,” she said, “and I believed in the sociocultural theory behind the training.” —MARY ANN ZEHR
ingPartner at the University of Virginia follows the dictum that to some degree “good teaching is good teaching.” The program looks for patterns of observable behaviors that show teachers providing emotional support, organizing classroom interactions for efficiency and productivity, and promoting deep learning—the three “domains” of the system. Now in the second round of piloting its system for secondary classrooms, MyTeachingPartner has recruited about 100 teachers in a Virginia school district. The volunteers videotape a classroom lesson and post it on a secure website. A master teacher like Sharon Deal reviews the video and clips out several segments as starting points for discussion of teaching technique. She draws the teacher’s attention in writing to classroom moments done well and, later, as trust builds, not so well. The teacher and the coach discuss the clips by phone or Internet chat, and the teacher responds in writing. Then the cycle begins again with the two deciding what next to work on, continuing for the length of a school year. The basis for all that is an ex-
haustive catalog of putatively effective teacher behaviors, especially interactions between teachers and students, running the gamut from using a warm, calm voice to producing varied examples.
Practice Makes Perfect Ms. Grossman welcomes the different ways of parsing what teachers do and say in the classroom. Research should provide more and better clues about how fine-grained the picture of an effective teacher should be and how much it needs to include subject-specific detail, according to the Stanford professor. “No one has the answer to the right grain size yet, nor subject specificity,” Ms. Grossman said. “With the variety of these different tools, we’ll be able to study it.” And by studying it, the researchers will improve professional development based on it, she believes. Still, she is concerned about a cornerstone of changing teacher behavior. In addition to needing ways to represent the best teaching approaches and deconstruct them so they can be better understood,
teachers have to practice. “They need lots of opportunities to try something out and get feedback, and preferably not in a high-stakes environment,” Ms. Grossman said. Classroom-management guru Lee Canter has perfected coaching in real time, for instance, with the coach giving feedback as the teacher works in the classroom. Mr. Lemov’s work with teachers routinely includes role-playing, with the staff acting the parts of students and teacher. One teacher might play a child with his head down on the desk, while other teachers take turns handling the situation until there’s a teacher “who nails it,” Mr. Lemov said. “If you are a high-ranking tennis player on the eve of a big match, it’s not so helpful for a coach to tell you, ‘You can win this thing if you charge the net,’ ” he said. Instead, “a great coach would have had you practice your backhand and forehand over and over in the weeks before.” n Coverage of leadership, human-capital development, extended and expanded learning time, and arts learning is supported in part by a grant from The Wallace Foundation at www.wallacefoundation.org.
“
I really do think there are parts of practice that are more general— relationshipbuilding, ways to relate to different age groups, use of time—but other aspects ... are inherently subject-specific.”
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opment that “is not designed to transmit mathematical understanding” is bound to fall short of what teachers and students need, said Julie Greenberg, the senior policy director at the National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington-based research and advocacy group. Andrew Chen, the president of EduTron, a for-profit group that has provided professional development for more than 1,000 Massachusetts mathematics teachers, agrees. In the United States, given inadequate student and teacher performance in math, content knowledge must take priority, he said. So Mr. Chen, a physicist, doesn’t observe lessons, he gives them. Teachers become students, pushed out of their comfort zones by “serious” math problems a few grades beyond where they teach. Pedagogical content knowledge “is very relevant, but it doesn’t address the deeper issue of weak content knowledge,” Mr. Chen said, adding that it is harder to address sheer mathematical content than pedagogical content. At the pedagogical-knowledge end of the spectrum, MyTeach-
Pamela L. Grossman Education Professor Stanford University
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Texas District Targets ELL Teaching Training is designed to help regular educators. By Mary Ann Zehr
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ot a school day goes by that Laurie Hahn Ganser doesn’t use something she’s learned in a professionaldevelopment program designed to help regular classroom teachers reach English-language learners. The English teacher at Lanier High School has received extensive training and coaching from Quality Teaching for English Learners, or qtel, during the three years the Austin district has implemented the program. Ms. Ganser is poised to become a coach herself as part of the 85,000-student district’s efforts to sustain the training without the consultants it hired to launch it here. Enough administrators and teachers at Lanier High have bought in to the program and carried out its strategies that district officials credit it for some positive academic outcomes for ells at the school. For example, the achievement gap between English-learners and other students narrowed during the first two years of qtel implementation for 10th grade English, mathematics, and science, and for social studies in all grades. An evaluation conducted by the district of the first two years of the program concludes that it was “moderately effective.” The professional development is intended to be a high school reform effort taken up by a whole school, not just the English-language-learners department. Aida Walqui, the director of the teacher-professional-development program for WestEd, and other researchers at the San Francisco-based research and development nonprofit organization developed the program. The Austin district hired her and other WestEd consultants to carry out the training at two demonstration schools: Lanier High, a regular comprehensive high school, and International High School, for 9th and 10th graders who are newcomers to the United States. All of International High’s 200 students are ells. Qtel is what Ana Pedroza, the district’s executive director for special programs, acknowledges is a “deluxe program” because it’s intensive and expensive. Many teachers at Lanier and International have received 20 days of professional development tailored to their content areas annually. The district paid WestEd $694,000 for each of the first two years of implementation and $450,000 for the third, according to Melissa Hutchins, the administrative supervisor of the district’s office of redesign. Most of that cost was covered by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. (The foundation also provides grant money to Editorial Projects in Education, which publishes Education Week.)
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learn how to provide scaffolding, or supports for ells in the classroom, with the goal of increasing student engagement in the subject matter.
Jennifer Smith’s world history students prepare for a class presentation. The teacher, center, coaches regular classroom educators to be more effective with English-learners.
Tapping Creativity
“If you add up all the dissonant programs brought to schools, I assure you, it would be two times what qtel costs,” Ms. Walqui said. “Most schools do not have coherent programs for professional development.” The whole-school aspect of qtel is important, she said. “It helps to build a culture of excellence in a school and allow for professional conversations among teachers. They share the same language and many of the same practices.” Districts in New York City and San Diego have also implemented the program.
A unit on poetry that Ms. Ganser recently taught to a mix of English-learners, former English-learners, and native English-speakers illustrates how scaffolding works.One of the unit’s learning goals was for the sophomores to write a poem about their own identity. Ms. Ganser gave them the first line, “I am what I am.” But before she asked them to write a poem, she guided them in preliminary steps. They practiced the use of such literary elements as alliteration, metaphor, and diction, and filled out a chart about themselves focused on such topics as personality, appearance, culture, and music. So when it came time to sit down and draft their poetry, they already had acquired skills and material to work with. The supports were helpful even for students who aren’t ells. At first, 15-year-old Pedro Juarez, who had missed the lesson about charting his ideas, sat with writer’s block. “I don’t know what to write about,” he finally said when his teacher checked in with him. The youth’s first language is Spanish, but he’s not an ell. The teacher gave him a copy of the chart that the other students had filled out. For the personality topic, he wrote “real calm.” For appearance, he wrote “white T’s.” Soon he was on his way in writing a poem: “I am what I am. A calm person who just likes to kick back. The old school Texas boy with the white T’s, J’s [Michael Jordan tennis shoes], and fresh fade [a haircut style].” Checking back in with Mr. Juarez, Ms. Ganser was pleased to see his creative juices starting to flow. “Qtel,” she said in a later interview, “is about tapping in to prior knowl-
Preparing for Independence How to teach secondary-level content and English at the same time is a huge challenge for comprehensive high schools that have many English-learners. Nearly 600 of Lanier’s 1,470 students are ells. The philosophy behind qtel is that language is learned best in a social context, so lessons should be planned to engage students in structured social interactions about the academic concepts they’re learning. In other words, students are not learning and practicing English if teachers are doing most of the talking. For each of the first two years of qtel implementation, all teachers and administrators received at least six days of professional development. And many teachers got substantial additional training or coaching in their content areas. First, the WestEd consultants provided the coaching. Then, they trained a small group of teachers to be coaches. Next year, they’ll be on their own. A key part of the training is for teachers to
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edge before you set students loose.” Meanwhile, Lanier High’s coaches are working to help other teachers get to the same place that Ms. Ganser is. Jennifer Smith, the social studies and English coach, spends half her time in that role and half as a teacher. Lanier has another half-time coach for math and science. On a recent day, Ms. Smith observed Guillermo Tabasco, a third-year world geography teacher, deliver a lesson. Mr. Tabasco and Ms. Smith had met in advance to discuss the lesson. He hadn’t participated in qtel coaching before. Mr. Tabasco runs a tight ship. During the lesson, his 30 freshmen were quiet and seemed to follow his PowerPoint presentation about different kinds of maps and how to read them. He used a lot of visuals, which are helpful to ells. After introducing each concept, he asked students to answer a question or two on their own. After observing for about half an hour, Ms. Smith filled out a template with feedback for the teacher. In the final stage of the coaching cycle, Mr. Tabasco and Ms. Smith met to reflect on the lesson. Ms. Smith noted that only a half-dozen students had regularly responded to the teacher’s questions. “Have you thought about how the students could be a little more engaged—with each other or with you?” she asked. Mr. Tabasco suggested that he call on students by name. As they later wrapped up, Ms. Smith urged Mr. Tabasco to “slide” more interaction into his lessons and offered to set up an opportunity for him to observe other teachers. “Maybe they are doing something that I see helping a kid,” he said. “Maybe I can steal something from them.” n Special coverage of district and high school reform and its impact on student opportunities for success is supported in part by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
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