Professional Development and Community Organizing:What is the Connection?
Remarks of Hayes Mizell on June 26, 2004 at the workshop "Retaining High Quality Teachers: High Quality Professional Development." The workshop was one of five that composed the Education Forum for community organizers attending the ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) National Convention in Los Angeles, CA. Approximately 75 persons attended the workshop at Thomas Bradley Hall on the campus of the University of California at Los Angeles. Mizell is the Distinguished Senior Fellow of the National Staff Development Council.
Imagine that you are a new teacher. No matter how well or how poorly your college's teacher education program prepared you, there comes a day when the classroom door closes and you are alone, facing 25 or 30 or 35 or more students. Regardless of how dedicated you are to teaching, or how much you love children, you will be overwhelmed by the realities that face you. Nevertheless, your job is to make sure that each student-every single one-increases his or her knowledge and skills to meet the state's standards for academic performance.
You will find that students in your classroom learn in dramatically different ways, at widely varying rates. A few of your students learn quickly, many learn at a steady pace if they apply themselves, and some students learn much more slowly than others. There are complex reasons for these variations in how fast and how well students learn. Some students have greater innate ability than others; some students make greater effort. Some students simply find it easier to master certain subjects.
There are other reasons as well. As a new teacher, you quickly learn that some of your students come from families and communities that value education but others do not. Some students entered your class performing at or near grade level. Others entered performing far below grade level and perhaps a few even began the school year performing one or two years above grade level. These are just a few of the variables you must take into account as you try to help your students learn what the state requires, and to learn it as fast and as well as the state expects.
You discover that some of your students struggle with issues that on their face have little to do with education but which nevertheless affect your students' learning. Some of your students come from homes where English is not the primary language, but the school's primary language is English. Some of your students come from low-income families where economic and related pressures command the attention parents might otherwise devote to supporting their children's education. Some of your students like school or experience it as a sanctuary of predictability and order that provides welcome relief from uncertainty and disorganization in other areas of their lives. Some students dislike or fear school because at earlier grade levels they did not get the support they needed to develop the attention, effort, and reflection all learning requires.
Though as a new teacher you are reluctant to admit it, you may be responsible for some students' learning problems. Perhaps you do not know as much about the subject you are teaching as you thought you did, or how to engage students in learning what you do know. Maybe you do not devote as much time and care to planning lessons as you should. As a result, your teaching may rely too heavily on the textbook. This can, in turn, cause your instruction to be boring rather than stimulating, and snuff out students' latent spark of potential interest in your class. You may also find that you are not very good at what educators call "classroom management," that is, how you organize your class, create a positive environment for learning, and guide and react to student behavior.
These are just a few of the many factors that may shape how you teach and interact with your students. But your task is even more complicated because you do not have the luxury of considering only one of these factors. For many of your students, multiple factors work in combination to affect how well students respond to your teaching. As you imagine yourself as this new teacher, keep in mind that in most schools in this country you will have little or no help in figuring out how to adjust your instruction and your personal interactions with each student to take into account the diverse factors that may affect students' learning. Most of the time, day in and day out, you will be alone.
Now, while holding onto this image of what it would be like to be a new teacher, also begin to imagine yourself as an experienced educator who has been teaching four or more years. Unlike the 30 percent of your colleagues who quit teaching within their first three years in the classroom, you are a survivor. You have adapted to your school's operations and culture. You have mastered the routines of school openings and closings, required paperwork, testing, faculty meetings, parent conferences, and the like. You may have made some progress in understanding the many factors that influence your students' academic performance. You may have even become more effective in modifying your teaching to increase the academic achievement of some students. To survive as a teacher, you have had to learn, but most of what you have learned you have had to figure out for yourself.
Still, significant problems remain. Too many of your students continue to read too far below grade level. You base your instruction on the state's standards, but you understand little about the connection between what and how you teach and what students actually know and can do. You have settled into an instructional routine that varies little from year to year, even though your students change each year, as do the challenges that impact their learning. You have acquiesced to the school's feel good culture that discourages an honest discussion of school problems or serious efforts to solve them.
This litany, which is by no means exhaustive, illustrates why for experienced as well as new educators, teaching and learning is a complex process. It also reminds us why the academic performance of many students is so disappointing.
Teachers and principals do not know all they need to know when they graduate from college or when their states certify them to teach and lead public schools. They have to keep learning. If new teachers are going to choose to remain in their chosen profession, and if experienced teachers are going to become more successful in helping students increase their performance levels, both groups need more support to improve their teaching. Students will not learn more until teachers learn more, and become more successful in applying what they learn to their instruction and their interactions with students.
Ironically, there is a process in all schools and school systems and schools to support teachers and help them become more effective. This process is called "professional development" or "staff development." Both terms mean more or less the same thing, though strictly speaking "professional development" applies to teachers and administrators and "staff development" applies to all staff in a school or school system. There is also a new term, "professional learning," that more accurately describes what has to occur for educators to improve their practice.
There are many different types of professional development and their quality can differ tremendously from activity to activity. Teachers have typically participated in workshops and conferences for professional learning, but there are many other means of learning. These include studying student achievement data, joining with other teachers to discuss a book or analyze student work, interacting with a mentor, working with an instructional coach, observing another teacher's class, taking a college course, pursuing certification from the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards, or using technology to participate in an on-line professional development experience. In fact, the No Child Left Behind Act includes a one-and-a-half page definition of professional development that lists the types of activities school systems can support with NCLB funds.
Unfortunately, much professional development has been poor quality, and much remains so today. Too often, it is neither good nor effective. School systems and schools provide learning experiences for teachers that are superficial and do not adequately address real problems teachers encounter in their classes. Professional development presentations by experts and consultants are often boring, sometimes entertaining, but rarely engaging or sustained enough for teachers to develop new knowledge and skills they can successfully apply in their classes. Even the No Child Left Behind Act warns that professional development activities should be not be "1-day or short-term workshops or conferences." While these approaches to professional learning are still in use, change is beginning to occur.
What, then, is the link between professional development in public schools and community organizing? First, if communities want their schools to become more effective in preparing all students to meet state standards, improving professional development is one way to improve instruction. Indeed, it is the only practical way to strengthen the teaching performance of educators currently working in public schools.
Second, school systems and schools depend on local, state, and federal funds to provide professional development. There is never enough money for this purpose, but whatever amount is available, public schools should use it wisely to support teachers and improve their instruction. This means there is a financial accountability dimension to how school systems and schools use taxpayers' dollars for professional learning. If they are wasting money on professional development that does not, in fact, result in higher levels of performance by teachers, that is an issue citizens should be concerned about.
Citizens should demand that school systems and schools use their professional development resources to produce demonstrable improvements in student performance.
Third, many educators want higher quality, more effective professional development. They may not take the initiative to make it happen, perhaps because they fear offending the school system's central office or their principal, but they wish someone would make professional learning more appropriate and useful. This may create opportunity for citizens to develop alliances with teachers or their unions to improve the quality of professional development. Citizens can raise issues of professional development quality and results more forcefully than educators, and they can follow through to make sure that changes occur which produce authentic learning benefits for both teachers and students.
Fourth, the bottom line in professional development is whether or not teachers' participation helps them change their classroom behaviors to cause students to perform at higher levels. What counts are the results of professional development.
With that in mind, there is potential to organize citizens around the following four key elements of professional development:
- High quality professional development should be an integral part of every school day, not a special event that occurs infrequently.
- High quality professional development should produce classroom-focused results, not "awareness" or learning that teachers and principals do not apply.
- High quality professional development should be so powerful that it stimulates educators to seek more professional learning, not so off-target or demeaning that teachers avoid or passively accept future learning opportunities.
- High quality professional development should include an evaluation process that produces evidence of what educators learned, how well they learned it, how well they applied it, and how their students benefited from it.
These are essential elements of professional development that busy and distracted educators frequently do not consider and that is exactly why citizens should raise them.
How can communities learn more about professional development? A first step is to have informal conversations with teachers about their professional development experiences. Keep the conversations simple and practical. What types of professional development activities did the teachers participate in last year? Do the teachers think it was helpful? Did they use what they learned in their classrooms, are they still using it, and do they think it made a positive difference? How do they know? How do they think professional development could be improved to impact teachers' instruction more positively?
Citizens will also want to identify the person in the central office, the administrative area office, and/or the school who is responsible for conceiving, planning, and organizing professional development. Find out how much money the school system or school has its disposal, from all sources, to provide professional development. Learn who makes decisions about which professional development activities to provide, how they establish priorities for professional development, and how they evaluate the effects of the activities on teachers' and students' performance in the classroom. Also seek opportunities for citizens to sit in on and observe professional development in practice.
There are many resources that can assist citizens in learning more about professional development; among the most useful are those published by the National Staff Development Council. For example, NSDC has developed a series of books titled "What Works" that provides information on results-based staff development. The books identify specific professional development programs in reading, math, science, and social studies where there is some evidence that teachers' participation in the programs has helped to increase student achievement. NSDC has also developed standards for high quality staff development and a growing number of states are adopting these standards. Whether school systems are conscientiously and consistently translating these staff development standards into daily practice is another matter.
There is no one approach to professional development that is guaranteed to improve the methodology and results of teachers' instruction, just as there is no one best means of educating children. However, we know a lot about adult learning and how to increase the likelihood that adults who participate in learning experiences will benefit from and apply what they learn. Neither educators nor communities should be satisfied with professional development for teachers and principals that is not effective and that does not increase student achievement. Citizens need to make sure that professional development is working, not only for educators, but for children.
Thank you.
Hayes Mizell
Distinguished Senior Fellow
National Staff Development Council
6408 Goldbranch Road
Columbia, SC 29206
803-787-0760
hmizell@msn.com
