The Structure of Valid Staff Development
Revolution, not reform, is required to release the power of teaching.
by Asa Hilliard III
Journal of Staff Development, Spring 1997 (Vol. 18, No. 2)
This article is adapted from the keynote speech given by Asa Hilliard III at the National Staff Development Council annual conference in Vancouver, British Columbia on Dec. 10, 1996.
There is a critical problem with the deep structure of staff development in its traditional form - it cannot produce teachers who are routinely successful.
The true measure of our success lies in how we perform and how the performance produces significant positive outcomes when we meet children of the poor and of minorities, and not merely with children of the privileged.
True, we do have rituals and similarities in the process of teacher education. Many of us are satisfied with the mere presentation of our routines. But the accountability is not there, except for the presentation of the routine.
We are losing too many children unnecessarily to school failure and to low achievement.
Not only do we fail to get from our brilliant children the type of achievement of which they are fully capable, the parallel to that is that we fail to get from ourselves the power of teaching that we too are fully capable of producing.
Therefore, we have at least these two major reasons to be highly motivated for change. Our teacher education approaches are ad hoc, sometimes entertaining and quite diverse. The topics that we tackle, though interesting and potentially useful, tend to be remotely connected, if at all, to successful outcomes for learners. Our field experiences are obligatory but are not necessarily productive.
An example of the staff development cornucopia that we offer to professionals comes from a conversation that I had with a brilliant and committed principal in a large, Midwestern city. I had given a presentation about the power of teaching, along with widespread examples of it. This principal told me my examples were the kind of success experiences that she wanted to have with her school's faculty; however, she had been unable to produce significant changes in the lives of her children, in spite of extensive staff development efforts.
Intrigued, I asked her for details about what she had done. The following is a list of the staff development activities that she had arranged for her faculty during one year:
1. Team building
2. Bonding
3. Interdisciplinary planning/teaching
4. Teaching strategies
a. Cooperative learning/Socratic questions
b. Alternative assessment
c. Group development
d. Ed NicholsÑcultural style/world view
e. Learning Styles
f. Lesson plans
g. Writing of outcomes and objectives
5. Critical friends group
a. Teacher to teacher critique
b. Interaction with technologies (integration)
6. Integration of all subjects
7. Authentic assessment
8. Authentic instruction
All 15 things come from a single school in a single year!
Of course, the list of possible interesting and exciting topics is probably infinite.
In my discussion with the principal, we agreed that the items in this list suggest little real clinical classroom work and have very low possibility for direct payoff from activities. Moreover, the activities are essentially episodic and do not link together in any holistic way. The list reveals a lack of a theoretical or philosophical coherence to the approach.
In this school, as in others, such a list can lead to a school's commitment to grow without any of the necessary awareness of the school staff's strengths or weaknesses, the nature of interstaff communication, or the presence of a shared vision, ideology, and commitment among the staffÑall of which should feed the design of a plan for staff development.
One other thing stands out in this list: the children are missing! In virtually all cases, staff development activities involve adults talking to each other, demonstrating for each other, or role playing for each other without any opportunity to show that children are changed as a consequence of the activities of faculty and others.
Professional performances (master teacher/master professor) are also missing! That is to say, peak professional performances that are best practice with children are not used to validate methodologies, raise interest, or build confidence. Moreover, there is no way for collective viewing and analysis of peak performances. As a consequence, there is little shared reality among educators. Each deals with private images of classrooms uncorrected by reality.
Powerful Staff Development
My own experience with staff development has shown that, in the staff development that works, the weight of the approach is on an internship with true master teachers.
I am not interested in the preservice/inservice division in teacher education. The distinction has no meaning for me. I am interested in agents who help others to change learners in powerful ways, wherever and whenever they may be.
I believe that theory and practice in teacher education should always be driven primarily by our understanding of powerful learning environments, wherever and whenever they are.
The elements of success for elementary, secondary, or other levels, and among the variety of age groupings of learners from preschool through the geriatric are all quite similar as far as pedagogical principles are concerned, as least it seemed so from my examination of many powerful learning environments.
Much of the language that we use for talking about the teaching/learning process has evolved out of abstract discussions among professorial types.
I often ask audiences of educators -- including teacher educators, audiences in college and university communities, in public and private school communities, or in public policy communities -- a simple question: How many here have ever seen a public school where the lowest income students are the highest academically achieving in the school system?
In most audiences, when asked for a show of hands, there are none! It is hard to see how such a background can be the source for lessons about powerful education environment or about the type of schools and staff development that leads to such a powerful environment.
The simple fact is that there are many examples of teachers and teacher educators who do turn low academic performers around
(Backler & Eakin, 1993; Hughes, 1995; Mayshark, 1996; Sanders & Rivers, 1996; Sizemore, 1988).
If we were to pay close attention to the excellent education models and to the excellent teacher education models, we could discern the elements of a strategy for the design for powerful staff development; that is, staff development where teachers are trained in such a way that the students of those trained perform at levels of excellence.
Some of the many people who have been able to use staff development build an excellent teaching and learning environment are as follows:
- Shinichi Suzuki is a Japanese teacher of world-class musicians and a teacher of very young children who perform on the violin at levels of excellence. He is also a teacher who is adamant that talent is not inborn but must be trained. According to Suzuki, a child systematically exposed to the right environment will become excellent. In fact, a child will become almost anything, positive or negative, based upon exposure (Suzuki, 1984).
- Reuven Feuerstein is a psychologist who, with his associates, has spent over 40 years demonstrating and teaching others to demonstrate the power of teaching for students who are not only low achieving, but who are thought to be mentally impaired, even severely and profoundly so.
He has developed an approach that he calls Òcognitive modifiability,Ó producing the Learning Potential Assessment Device and Instrumental Enrichment to make relatively permanent changes in cognitive structures (Feuerstein, 1980) and consequent changes in student achievement for both regular and special education students. Some of his work with children with Down's Syndrome is called miraculous.
- Bill Johntz was a Berkeley, California high school mathematics teacher who got fed up with the low achievement of his children, especially his urban poor minority children, K-6 and other levels. He created Project SEED, an approach to teaching higher-level mathematics that has raised the achievement in both arithmetic and mathematics (algebra) and produced a model for staff development.
For more than 20 years, hundreds of mathematicians have been trained to produce high achievement with traditionally low-performing children. The SEED project depends on training mathematicians in a relatively short time (Mezzacappa, 1990; Project SEED, 1991; Russell, 1991).
- Everard Barrett of North Baldwin, New York, known as Professor B., has spent the better part of his career demonstrating how to raise the low-performing students' academic achievement to levels of excellence and how easy it is to train staff to do likewise. After a year of working with a fifth-grade class in Bedford-StuyvesantÑwhere achievement is normally two to three grade levels below averageÑthe students took and passed the ninth-grade New York State Regency Examination in mathematics. Professor B. also taught the faculty his approach, and the next year they achieved similar results (Barrett, 1992).
- Anyim Palmer founded the African-American Marcus Garvey school in Los Angeles nearly 20 years ago. It has become one of the highest achieving elementary schools in America, in spite of socioeconomic status, race, and language background. This African-American student body, among other things, has been a powerhouse in mathematics. Students are routinely introduced to calculus in fifth-grade. Few teachers have degrees, necessitating ongoing, on-site staff development.
- Jaime Escalante is well known to many Americans because of the movie, Stand and Deliver, which is only a partial representation of the power of the man. In Garfield High School, a low-income Los Angeles high school, Jaime Escalante was responsible for averaging 50 passes on the Advanced Placement section of the SAT Calculus test each year for 10 years. Jaime Escalante was also responsible for training at least two other mathematics teachers at the high school so they performed equally impressive feats (Escalante, 1990).
- Paolo Freire, a Catholic priest in Brazil, tried to respond to the needs of the dispossessed, largely poor Indian population by creating an approach to literacy training which is chronicled in his books, Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Education for Critical Consciousness. One of the students of Paolo Freire is Cynthia Brown from the San Francisco Bay area who wrote a book entitled Literacy in 30 Hours to punctuate Freire's success in teaching adults to read. In an amazingly short time, men and women who had not been literate became so in 30 to 40 hours in a "circle of culture" lead by Freire or by students trained in the Paolo Freire approach (Brown, 1975; Freire, 1973).
- Rene Fuller, who describes herself today as a gifted dyslexic, created an approach to teaching reading that she named, "Ball, Stick and Bird." Fuller's approach, which was designed to raise the achievement of gifted dyslexics, was tried by her graduate students on the lowest performing students, those with IQs in the low 30s and high 20s. Amazingly, many of the children not only learned to read but spontaneously taught themselves to write and did write numerous creative texts. This was achieved with a minimal staff development (Fuller, 1977).
- Septima Clark of Charleston, South Carolina, was responsible for one of the most successful literacy campaigns in American history. In Freedom Schools, she taught thousands of adults to read and hundreds of teachers to teach so that African-Americans would be able to pass literacy tests in order to vote and operate for their own liberation. Most of the teachers were former illiterates who had just been trained by the Freedom Schools! Septima said she tended to avoid teachers with degrees and certification because "they tended to be arrogant."
- Diane Barriball and Anne McKinnon of New Zealand led a group of nearly 100 New Zealand teachers to develop an approach to teaching algebra to preschoolers. In 1995, at Longfellow Elementary School in Pontiac, Michigan, a school with a large number of low-income children, 92 percent of the students performed satisfactorily on the Michigan Achievement Test (MEAP). Previously, 80 percent of those children had done unsatisfactory work. This math program comes from the same country that gave us Reading Recovery. Someone knows how to teach and how to teach teachers (Miller & McKinnon, 1995).
In each case cited above, student achievement was extraordinarily high. In each case, we also have examples of
teachers who were trained to get the highest level of academic and social results. Success was not confined to the creator of the idea. The creators trained other teachers who also became successful.
Naturally, I am interested in the extraordinary academic achievement of the student learners. But, for our purposes, I am more interested in the staff development that produced other people who could produce high levels of extraordinary achievement in children.
Although much serious systematic ethnographic study of each approach is needed, I have tried to summarize the elements of the staff development approach that I saw as common to each of these examples. They are as follows:
1. In each case, the staff developer was a master teacher who provided a success model. They demonstrated, with students, what they could do and were available to be observed and critiqued.
2. In each case, the staff developers were physically present virtually all of the time when new teachers were being trained. They were present and interactive with the new teachers in the teaching and learning environment, following best practice in internship.
3. In each case, they had evolved a theory to fit their successful practice, which was expressed explicitly in most cases and implicitly in others. Not all theories were the same!
4. In each case, they provided ongoing, focused feedback to the teacher in training in the class setting.
5. In each case, time was set aside for deep reflection about the shared experiences that the teacher and teacher trainer had had.
6. In each case, specific techniques were developed. However, as varied as these techniques were, at the deep structural level, most of the approaches shared a common set of elements. There probably is a very small range of core elements in valid pedagogy. Why mystify a simple process?
7. In all cases, the technique, while important, was much less important than matters that we normally classify under "affect."
These great educators emphasized liberation, love, constructivism -- pointing to high goals, communication, relationships, and immersion in a success environment, and developing a sense of family among teachers in training and the staff development
(Freire, 1973; Hughes, 1995; Ladson-Billings, 1994; Sizemore, 1988; Willis, 1995). These emphases are in stark contrast to the limited emphasis on technique and technology that is so prevalent in much of our staff development.
As we look at these examples, it is natural to wonder how we could make them typical rather than exceptional. What are the impediments to changing from what we are to what we could become?
Impediments to Change
Our current approach to education is imbedded in a structure, and it is the structure itself which must be changed. However, the structure cannot be changed unless it is understood.
The structure is physical, procedural, policy, ideological, and inclusive of theory and philosophy. Rarely do restructuring efforts address all of these things, or the most important of these things -- the philosophy and theory, core beliefs that drive behavior and expectations in teaching. Yet they must be confronted if real change is to occur. How else can a teacher develop confidence, inspiration, vision, and a sense of mission?
1. Implicit in our current view is a default view of staff development as technology. This is exactly the opposite of how great teachers see it. The technology of staff development is merely a small and, in some cases, even insignificant part of what really matters; belief systems, attitudes, commitment, sense of mission, passion, and family matter more than anything else!
2. There is a failure to consolidate a collective view of the salient elements and parameters in staff development. That failure leads to an ad-hoc-cracy of staff development similar to that exhibited by the list of workshops from the principal I mentioned earlier who was trying hard but going nowhere. Often, there is no good reason to choose one approach over the other.
3. We operate today with no explicit benefits criteria for evaluating educational alternatives. In other words, we do not demand that proposals or practices in staff development yield the highest level of result for the lowest performing students. As a result, again, one practice in staff development is just as good as another. This is just not the way that it should be.
4. Especially where minorities are concerned, we tend to accept small gains produced by popular strategies as sufficient reasons to adopt those popular strategies for staff development. Nothing serves to make the system more rigid than this low-level goal for the traditionally disenfranchised. How many times do we have to prove that demographics, race, ethnicity, gender, and language are no barrier to excellence?
5. We need to consolidate knowledge about staff development that leads to excellent student achievement. We can abstract certain general principles that lead to staff development which leads to highest student achievement. We cannot do less than that.
6. We need to document valid staff development practices, preferably through the visual media.
7. We need to engineer access to staff development. In many cases, those who practice successful staff development are known only by a small circle of friends and colleagues. As I said earlier, I frequently ask professional audiences, "How many have seen staff development where teachers are taught so that they teach low-income poor and minority children to achieve at the highest academic level?" Most of the time I get no hands!
This is serious because there are examples of successful staff development that produces the high achievement. But, if they are not accessible to teachers and those who train teachers, then we will repeat only those things which we already know and which, most of the time, are things that fail. Why is failure so visible and success so obscure?
8. Existing policies, accreditation criteria, licensing criteria, and other structures make for an uphill battle to improve education for children. For example, space and time are not appropriate or available to do the job right, to permit a collective effort, and to document successful approaches.
9. We need a reference bank of real-time videos of powerful teacher educators in action in order to share the varied experiences that we have of good teaching and good teachers. There is a tendency to make film or videos in the same manner that we do entertainment videos. But, to show teachers what really happens, we need real-time, raw footage. Sometimes it takes a while for things to happen. All real-life problems are not solved in a 30-minute television format.
10. Finally, perhaps the greatest impediment to change is our pathological preoccupation with questions of student capacity and student rankings. An ideology exists that makes us believe that estimating student capacity is a useful and beneficial professional activity (Hilliard, 1994; 1996). That ideology tolerates pervasive doubt about the capacities of able students. The effect of the ideology is debilitating when perceived by students, and it is also debilitating to teachers who are unable to develop the excitement, energy, and perspective to overcome the ideology of failure.
Excellence is Possible
We have work to do, but not impossible work. It is a matter of focus. It is a matter of appropriate criteria. It is a matter of communication. It is a matter of collaboration. It's a matter of will.
We could, if we chose to, wrap this up overnight. That is, within two or three years. We could know by then what some of us here know right now, what the state of the art is in valid power staff development. By establishing that on a sound basis, trivial, routine, superfluous, and weak staff development will have to face a challenge that will be obvious to all.
The weight of our operating assumptions in the design of staff development must rest firmly on recognizing the following empirically demonstrable facts.
1. The largest single source of variation in school achievement among students is a corresponding variation in the quality of teaching services to which students are exposed. In other words, the gap in achievement between and among racial, ethnic, class, or gender groups is due mainly to the gap in service quality. Therefore, staff development should be designed to ensure an appropriate level of valid teaching skills in general. Only after this is done should we tailor teaching to specific groups, and then only if valid group specific approaches can be demonstrated.
2. While we have many assessment routines that are assumed to be valid diagnostics and validly linked to valid instruction, this is rarely, if ever, demonstrated empirically. Therefore, the empirical validation of pedagogical practices for regular or special groups is absolutely essential. The automatic assumption of validity for specific general or special practices (methods and approaches) is a major impediment to the improvement of teaching since it supports a faith in current practices, many of which are non-beneficial or, worse still, actually harmful.
3. Preparing teachers who can be successful is a straightforward matter, not a mysterious process. It is not so difficult or complex a process as to be beyond virtually all who are willing to study teaching seriously. It is not a process that requires more than a few months to develop basic level of competency. It is not a process that requires a particular technique. It has as much to do with belief, attitude, effort, and commitment as to any other factors.
4. Truly advanced staff development has value added over the staff development that is done every day by ordinary educators with no special training who have created their own approaches. Advanced staff development should be more powerful, more efficient, more rapid, more articulated, and better documented. Better staff development would be embedded in philosophy and theory, would be culturally salient, and would be understood in its historical and political/economic context.
No nations have invested more of its resources in educational research and staff development than have the United States, Canada, and a few other European countries. Moreover, any practices by educators in the United States, Canada, and other Western nations, by virtue of our lucky location in history, will be widely influential throughout the world. It behooves us to take our responsibility to humanity seriously. We must lead, not mislead.
At some point we are going to have to answer the question of why it is that the most powerful teachers, schools, and principals (the ones who produce the highest levels of student achievement) always seem to be in trouble with the central office, with peers, and with professional organizations.
One would think that a school principal who took a high school, the Science Skills Center in Brooklyn, from the bottom quartile to the top of the city's academic pyramid would be a hero. The mostly poor and minority children, selected by lottery, are all expected to pass the New York State's standards for a regents diploma -- and do. Attendance is near the top of the city. Dropouts and fighting have virtually been eliminated. Even special education students, for the most part, are expected to meet the same high standards. Then why is principal Michael Johnson a pariah to the union, to the central office, and even to the school reform movement
(Mosle, 1996)? This is not atypical!
Successful educators often are accused of not being team players when they challenge low expectations, require accountability, demand hard work from themselves and others, question bureaucratic rules, question personnel assignments, and question the use of curriculum materials.
It is as if their great success is an embarrassment to those who fail to perform. It is as if their break from standardized routine is too troubling for those who are comfortable with their habits. It is as if there may be a perceived threat to competitors or supervisors who have not matched the performance of the power educators.
Whatever the reason, something is dreadfully wrong when bad practice is celebrated and great practice is unknown or ignored. How will we ever be able to use our best practice as the source of the design of teacher education?
Conclusion
One thing that is clear is that the outstanding teachers and teacher educators share in an explicit or implicit view of the child quite unlike that held by so many successful educators. Educators like Suzuki, Fuller, Shabazz, and others do not see broken students who need fixing.
Instead, they see students who are alive with minds hungry for intellectual activity and with their spirits starved for meaningful involvement in school and life. They view children as born learning and structured to learn. They recognize that outstanding learners can be crippled by exposures they encounter, but they also realize that teaching is a powerful tool that, when used appropriately, can awaken the genius in children.
Virtually all teachers possess tremendous power which can also be released, given the proper exposure. We can't get to that point by tinkering with a broken system. We must change our intellectual structures, definitions and assumptions; then we can release teacher power.
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About the Author
Asa G. Hilliard, III is the Fuller E. Callaway Professor of Urban Education at Georgia State University, 30 Pryor St., Suite 450, Atlanta, GA 30303, (404) 651-1269.
