By Dennis Sparks

Journal of Staff Development, Fall 1998 (Vol. 19, No. 4)

JSD: For many years, you’ve been a strong advocate for staff development that improves students’ learning. You’ve also worked a great deal at the classroom level helping teachers learn new strategies. Based on your experience, do we know enough to say staff development can lead to improved student learning?

Joyce: First, we need to acknowledge that not all staff development is intended to affect student achievement. It can legitimately serve other purposes. However, we do need to examine the implementation of those programs in which a new teaching/learning repertoire is the content — where staff development generates a different practice, and then study classroom implementation and student learning in those particular areas.

Can we say that any staff development will affect student achievement? I don’t think so. There’s no question, however, that staff development can raise student achievement when it addresses the academic content that teachers teach, their teaching repertoire, and the amount of practice they provide students in particular areas.

JSD: You’ve done research and had a great deal of experience in the kinds of learning processes that work well for adults. How would you summarize what you’ve learned?

Joyce: If a staff development program is to have an impact, teachers and administrators must continuously study what they are implementing. If we do some training in June and hope that it will have impact in September, our chances are terrible.

The person who is conducting training needs to be in a school about a day a week, which includes watching teachers teach, talking with them, and spending a couple of hours of study with teachers on how to implement what they are learning.

More specifically, the training has to include a rationale for what teachers are being asked to do and lots of demonstrations. In our experience, if teachers are learning new repertoire, they need to see 15 live demonstrations or videotapes for a modest-size change in practice.

JSD: I heard you say a year or two ago that we should expect the effects of staff development on student achievement to show up in the first year.

Joyce: Emily Calhoun and I reviewed the literature on school renewal efforts that succeeded in affecting achievement. We didn’t find any examples in which people focused on something of importance that didn’t produce effects in the first year. If the change in content or teaching/learning process is going to affect the kids, it is going to affect them very rapidly. By the way, all successful programs had curriculum and instruction as the content.

An example of this is the Second Chance Reading Program that we developed for middle school or high school level students who didn’t learn to read effectively in the primary grades. ("A Second Chance to Learn to Read,’’ by Beverly Showers, et al Educational Leadership, March 1998.) We found that a multi-dimensional literacy program for these students can produce substantial gains in the first semester. Once implementation was achieved, the quality of students’ reading progressed five or six times more rapidly than it would have otherwise.

Staff development that improves student achievement embeds formative evaluation in the day-to-day teaching and learning process and becomes collective action research for the trainers and for the teachers who are learning to teach more effectively. It’s not expensive or difficult to study implementation when it’s an embedded part of one’s work. That’s very different, however, from how staff development is currently practiced.

Because kids and teachers need to be partners in looking at learning all the time, staff development needs to include the study of implementation and student learning. Essentially, a community of action researchers is developing, including staff development organizers, providers, the teachers and administrators, and, with respect to student achievement, the students themselves.

I recently worked with the Department of Education in Florida in looking at that state’s staff development practices. We found almost no examples in the state of anyone embedding the study of implementation. As a result, they didn’t know if, in fact, any new practices were actually being used in classrooms.

JSD: What are some practical techniques or processes that people in schools can use to find out if what they are doing is affecting students?

Joyce: As in the previous example, let’s suppose we’re trying to help high school students who haven’t learned to read very well. Among other things, those kids need to read a great deal.

So we can study how much they are reading. Kids can take five minutes a week to fill out a log of how many books they’re reading independently; that could be verified independently by interviewing a few of the kids to make sure you’re getting accurate information. The same is true of developing sight vocabulary and word attack skills. You measure implementation and student progress while teaching.

Some faculties develop rubrics as if they were external examiners of their students who do only summative measures of student progress. But teachers are really internal examiners who should be assessing student progress on almost a daily basis. Assessment shouldn’t be separate from the process of instruction.

JSD: Many educators approach evaluating staff development as if it must meet academic research requirements and feel overwhelmed by that expectation.

Joyce: What springs to many people’s minds when you talk about evaluation is a programmatic line of research that’s practically designed to win the Nobel prize. So much attention is given in graduate courses to control groups and things like that that people feel stymied.

We need to relax into formative evaluation. You and I are English teachers who have looked at the students’ writing and think that they will benefit by using more analogies. So we model that for them by adding analogies to sentences they’ve written. Then we ask them to try that in their own writing. We’d see right away whether they could do that. You don’t have to have a control group of kids to evaluate whether or not these students are better able to use analogies.

Simple techniques also can be used to study teachers’ learning. For instance, we use practice logs in which teachers record how much they’ve used the new practice, how it went for them, problems that occurred, and the help they need. We can get a very accurate picture of implementation from that process. Then we use this information to decide what to do next. In these examples, the evaluation is part of the learning process for both the kids and teachers.

Unfortunately, I have a hard time getting staff developers to use this sort of process. I work with quite a number of fairly big school districts. I ask them to narrow the focus to the most important content they are teaching and then embed the study of implementation and student effects formatively in the training. I find that this is unusual enough that very few people take my advice. I am almost completely ineffective in getting people to do that unless I am one of the central planners and providers.

JSD: Are there other barriers?

Joyce: It’s very difficult to get classroom implementation of new practices when you’re offering things to people who work as individuals. In order to have peer coaching and the other things that get people to work together, it’s important to work with whole school faculties. A lot of folks are unaccustomed to that, including school faculties. As a result, we have to go to work on the workplace so people can learn together regularly and study their students’ learning.

Good staff development requires that schools strive to become self-renewing. It focuses on building a professional culture concurrently with changing curriculum and instruction. When that happens, people can move a great distance very quickly.

Job: Director of Booksend Laboratories, which conducts research on staff development, models of teaching, and school improvement. Booksend also produces instructional materials for preservice and inservice teacher education programs, and conducts regional staff development institutes.

Education: B.A. in philosophy from Brown University, and a Ph.D in education from Wayne State University.

Professional history: Joyce has been a teacher with the U.S. Army and the Delaware public schools. He also has served as a professor at the University of Delaware, the University of Chicago, and Teachers College at Columbia University, and as a visiting scholar with the Center for Research and Development in Teaching at Stanford University.

He has worked as a staff development consultant and trainer with numerous U.S. school districts, state departments of education, universities, and other agencies. In addition, his work as a teacher, staff development consultant, and researcher has taken him to numerous other countries, including India, Egypt, Australia, Hong Kong, and Finland.

Books: Joyce has written numerous books, some of which have been translated into Hindi, Arabic, Spanish, German, and Greek.

Phone: (760) 742-3190.

Dennis Sparks is executive director of the National Staff Development Council.