Journal of Staff Development, Fall 1999 (Vol. 20, No. 4)

JSD: In an essay you wrote for the Spring 1999 issue of the Journal of Staff Development, you cited research that describes professional learning communities as places in which teachers pursue clear, shared purposes for student learning, engage in collaborative activities to achieve their purposes, and take collective responsibility for student learning. What does such a school look like in real life?

Lieberman: I’m thinking of an elementary school that I know. When you first walk into the school’s office, you are quickly made to feel welcomed. The office is busy with lots of people working and all the doors are open. Whether you’re a student or adult, you see a responsiveness to people in the school.

If you observed grade-level meetings in this school, you would see them being led by teacher leaders who are selected by their colleagues. These teachers meet frequently and are focusing on the learning of the students in their classrooms. You would hear lots of discussion about data and the work of students, particularly students who are having difficulty. Teachers are talking about what they are learning from their students, from other people in the school, and from sources outside the school. The focus of these meetings is the work of the school. Teachers are describing what they are doing well and what they are not doing so well and how they are going to do better in those areas.

In the school I’m thinking about, the entire faculty is looking at assessment data to determine how it can close the gap between students of color and white students. While all the students are doing better than before, they are dissatisfied that the gap is still there. At a particular grade level, assessment data tell teachers that two classrooms are doing better than the third. Rather than the principal telling one teacher she is not doing well, that teacher is asking the other teachers what they are doing in their classrooms that she’s not doing. This school is such a strong learning community that teachers feel comfortable enough to admit that they need help and others feel empowered to help when they can.

Teachers in this school buy time for these meetings by coming in a few minutes early, taking a little bit of time from their lunch hour, and adding 10 minutes at the end of the day. On Friday, students come later, which gives teachers a block of time for grade-level meetings. In addition to these meetings, teachers meet voluntarily after school as an inquiry group. There, they struggle together with some of the larger questions regarding the achievement gap.

JSD: What happened to cause this school to become such a strong learning community?

Lieberman: The process began when the school received a state grant whereby the school was to restructure curriculum and assessment using standards-based reform. Teachers individually created assessments representing their standards and then eventually got up the courage to talk publicly about them. That led teachers to bring student work to their grade-level meetings and to talk about the nature of the work. While it’s now very sophisticated, the school started just like every other one in developing, little by little, a conversation about the collective as well as teachers’ individual classrooms.

JSD: How is the learning in such schools balanced between that which arises from within the school and that which comes from outside the school in the form of workshops, conferences, books, articles, or consultants?

Lieberman: This school began with outside information related to standards. The faculty used an article by Lisa Delpit which got people talking seriously about kids who were different than them. That led to some tough discussions about race and class and teachers’ feelings about students. From then on, it was really a process that both honored what people inside already knew and the value of outside articles and other things for people to chew on.

JSD: This process must require a skillful principal.

Lieberman: The principal was quite skillful at the beginning but also grew a lot in the process. While principals are not the only important people in such efforts, they are critical to their success.

The state legislation that provided the grant to this school had all the grantee schools form a network, and you know how big I am on networks. The network was the place where principals and groups of teachers talked about the issues with their counterparts from other schools. This provided a kind of nested support for teachers and the principal; the faculty built a support system in the school, and the network provided emotional and cognitive support for the school leaders as they went through the change process.

JSD: How likely is it that a school can do this kind of demanding reform without some outside form of support such as the grant and network you’ve described?

Lieberman: There are a few schools that do it, but it’s uncommon. Principals and teachers do better when they belong to some kind of external group that provides support and ideas. There are some things you can say to a group outside your school that you can’t say inside, at least at first. Outside groups are important because they up the ante on the work that schools do by helping them reach higher than they might alone. Good networks create a flexible agenda based on the needs of the participants, in effect growing the agenda as the people grow in their sophistication in making change. Networks also help troubleshoot by making the conflicts and difficulties of change part of the agenda.

JSD: In addition to the external support and a skillful principal, what are the other ingredients required if schools are to move from where they are to where they would like to be?

Lieberman: Development should grow out of the kind of changes that people want to make initially, which usually means it can’t be a predetermined package. The principal has to be really good in helping create an agenda that’s both sensitive to where people need help and the other issues that need to be raised. That leads to a kind of professional development that’s indigenous to the school and embedded in the kind of work teachers are taking on.

A school that I know well had staff members who lived some distance from the school. That meant the time they were in school was very precious and that any development had to occur on school time. As a result, the principal had something going almost every day during lunch hour. While not everyone participated each time, almost every day of the school year saw something going on that involved teachers in learning. In this way much of the development was internally cultivated and organized. Someone who was good in math, for instance, would give a math seminar for other teachers. Because the school wrote a lot of its own curriculum, teachers had many curriculum meetings in which people discussed what they were teaching. They seldom had full faculty meetings because much of the work was done in small groups. This is a pretty large school, so instead of having a vice principal who was a disciplinarian, a staff development position was created to continuously engage everyone in learning.

JSD: The average teacher thinks about staff development as leaving his or her school to be lectured to by an expert. What you’ve described is quite different. Does the more traditional kind of staff development that’s workshop and course based still have a place?

Lieberman: The district still needs to have a role, but, in most places, it’s overdone. Districts can provide an orientation and resources, but, beyond a few generic workshops, it won’t mean much without some strong school counterpart. It’s probably a waste of money to have teachers attend a lot of staff development at the district office without a strong school support system and time to work through the ideas acquired in one’s own classroom.

The district should provide a set for the big issues, like K-12 literacy. Then the superintendent or assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction should work with principals and groups of teachers on what they need to do in their schools to make use of these ideas. Everything has to be thought out so that it actually gets to the classroom. Much professional development stops short of the classroom because teachers are not allowed the time, reflection, feedback, and further trials to actually make it work. Where did we ever get the idea that teachers could simply be exposed to good ideas that would then magically appear in their practice?

JSD: You’ve mentioned two roles for teacher leaders — facilitators of grade-level teams and as building-based staff developers. What other leadership roles can teachers play?

Lieberman: Over the past decade, Maine has given small grants to teachers who were willing to engage in some sort of innovative practice. In a school in the Southern Maine Partnership, two teachers used a grant to do research in a particular area. When they described the research to their colleagues and principal, the faculty decided it would be interesting to have teachers actually do research for the school. As a result, the school created a role it called teacher scholar. Every year, a different teacher gets some released time to be the school’s scholar. It’s a marvelous idea that turns on its head the accepted cultural idea that teachers cannot be scholars. It also helps create a leadership role for teachers that’s shared and enables them to do research for the school. An offshoot of this approach was that teachers began to do their own action research.

Another leadership role is that of teacher on special assignment. Teachers get a year or two off to work in an area they are particularly good at before going back to the classroom.

Still another leadership role has teachers teaching their peers. That’s the approach used in Scarsdale, New York at the district’s 20 year-old teacher center, where teachers take courses from one another. This structure makes good use of the indigenous knowledge of teachers who have become experts in a variety of fields.

But teacher leadership doesn’t always have to take a formal role. In schools where it’s legitimate to learn as an adult, teachers are a lot freer to be colleagues, giving and taking ideas, supporting one another, inventing ideas — all of these are acts of leadership and characteristics of real learning communities.

JSD: What kinds of learning opportunities and other supports do teachers need to fulfill the responsibilities you’ve described?

Lieberman: Teacher leaders need serious, organized learning opportunities as well as informal ones. For instance, San Jose State University has a master’s degree in teacher leadership. It has courses that address what teachers need to know to lead, to understand school change, to deal with conflict, to understand school culture, and to create professional communities.

Teacher leaders also need to know more about their own subject-matter content. Unfortunately, we know quite a bit about teaching strategies and very little about how to deepen teachers’ content knowledge.

We all know that there’s something very isolating and closed in about teachers’ classrooms, no matter how good the teachers are. It’s extremely liberating for teacher leaders to go to places where people are talking about learning and the issues of the day. For instance, it’s important for teacher leaders to go to national conferences like the one offered by NSDC. More teachers are also going to the AERA conference. They’re not just watching everyone else, but participating in the sessions. All of these things open people up to different ideas. That’s why I’m so excited about networks. They provide incredible avenues to stretch people and enlarge their sense that they are part of a community that is much bigger than their schools.

JSD: What advice would you give to principals or teachers about what to do first to move their schools from where they are to where they want them to be?

Lieberman: I would encourage them to begin by getting teachers to talk to other teachers and administrators about some of the good things they’re doing in the school and a couple of areas they think they could improve. This leads to the creation of a beginning agenda. The school can then take one area where there is agreement that improvement is needed and begin to work on it. It is good to start with something small and concrete where success is more likely to happen. In this way people see the fruits of their labor and often are willing to take on tougher issues. This process can then continue with increasing sophistication. Most schools don’t have mechanisms for talking about these things as a regular part of teachers’ work.

JSD: How does this slowly building process fit in with the sense of urgency and impatience that many political leaders and educators feel? They want things to change fairly quickly for the benefit of the students who are now in our schools, not their younger brothers and sisters or the next generation of children.

Lieberman: I have this discussion every single day with my husband who represents the view that we can’t wait 10 or 15 years to make things better. Whoever leads school change has to negotiate between the urgency that schools do need to feel and the support that must go with it. I understand that people want to have it happen now, but it can’t be done in five minutes. There aren’t any good answers to this. There’s a lot of talk of urgency and silver bullets, but there still isn’t very much support for what it takes to make these things happen.

To get that support we need to engage the public in a serious discussion about education — what we want from our schools and what we’re willing to give to get those things, and how we can involve all of the community more in our schools. If more of the community were involved in schools, we’d have broader support for teacher learning and the kind of things we’ve been talking about. As long as schools are isolated enclaves that don’t reach out to their communities, decisions will be made without an adequate understanding of what is required to successfully teach all kids.

While pressure is necessary, we have to support people by providing the time and necessary human and material resources to get better. But the work has to be close to the kids and the real problems that teachers describe. That’s what we haven’t done. We do millions of things that stop short of helping the teacher in his or her classroom. When teachers learn more, students will do better. There is no short cut here.

Job: Senior scholar, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and a visiting professor at Stanford University.

Education: B.A. in English literature at University of California-Los Angeles, M.A. in educational psychology, California State University-Northridge, Ed.D in the sociology of education, University of California-Los Angeles.

Professional history: She is an emeritus professor at Teachers College, Columbia University and was president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in 1992. She is widely known for her work in teacher leadership and development, collaborative research, networks and university partnerships and, increasingly, on the problems and prospects for understanding educational change.

Books: The International Handbook on Educational Change, with Andy Hargreaves, Michael Fullan, and David Hopkins (Kluwer, 1998).

The Work of Restructuring Schools (Teachers College Press, 1995).

Teachers Transforming Their World and Their Work with Lynne Miller (Teachers College Press, 1999).

To continue the conversation with Ann Lieberman, write to her at the Carnegie Foundation, 555 Middlefield Rd., Menlo Park, CA 94025, (650) 566-5141, e-mail: annl1@leland.stanford.edu.

Dennis Sparks is executive director of National Staff Development Council.