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The intellectual and creative capacity of educators

The ability of teachers and principals to develop and tap their own capacity for innovation is ultimately a school's most potent tool for long-term success.

By Dennis Sparks

Results, February 2004

Copyright, National Staff Development Council, 2004. All rights reserved.

The intellectual and creative capacity of principals and teachers to make significant improvements in teaching and learning is an underdeveloped and underused resource. The most enlightened and powerful forms of leadership and professional development tap this resource by promoting intellectual rigor and continuous innovation in practice. Such schools are "innovation machines" in which students and adults continually invent better ways of achieving their purposes and places that amplify the best practices of "positive deviant" teachers across the faculty.

Many policy makers and educational leaders, unfortunately, do not share this view. Professional judgment is not to be trusted, they claim, and intellectual rigor is beyond the reach of many teachers and principals, particularly those who serve in schools that have a long history of complacency and failure. The only solution, some policy makers and researchers believe, is to prescribe solutions down to the detail of daily lesson plans and time allotments, to carefully monitor compliance, and to carry the big stick of sanctions and other negative consequences. Outside "experts" serve as the brains of schooling and direct the work of teachers and principals who are not perceived as smart or motivated enough to do the job correctly.

Some low-performing schools, no doubt, require strong measures to get the attention of adults and to focus them on the welfare of students. But even in these schools, it is essential that teachers and principals be meaningful partners in directing and controlling the work so they develop and tap their own capacity for innovation and sharpen their professional judgment. These capacities, I believe, are ultimately a school's most potent tools for long-term success.

My views are reinforced by the example set by hundreds of successful schools and by the work of Jerry Sternin in "positive deviance." The literature of our field is filled with discussions of school-focused forms of professional interaction in which teams of teachers develop and use various cognitive processes as they analyze data, critique student work, establish goals and priorities for improvement, strengthen lessons, and provide feedback to one another. These methods have been applied in all types of schools and are well described in books and journal articles--including many published by NSDC--and can become part of a school's practice within a year if it so desires.

The second stream is found in Jerry Sternin's work for Save the Children on "positive deviance," which is described more fully in the Winter 2004 issue of the JSD. Sternin has found that within virtually all communities a range of practice exists and that the best practices--those of the positive deviants--can be identified and spread throughout the community. The means for doing so, however, are more complex and respectful than simply holding up someone's "best practice" and telling teachers to replicate it. Instead, community members are meaningfully involved in defining the problem, listing the attributes of a successful solution, identifying individuals who have already solved the problem, and designing the method of spreading the skill throughout the community.

To a large degree, the success of the methods mentioned here depend on skillful leadership by principals and teachers in establishing a high-performance culture that has at its heart mutual respect and trust, collaboration, and continuous improvement. Teachers whose contributions and talents are recognized and valued will not only consume research but will also generate knowledge as peers and partners with researchers. It is only out of such appreciative and mutually respectful relationships that leaders will create schools in which all students and teachers learn and perform at high levels.