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Form strong partnerships to ensure quality professional learning

By Dennis Sparks

Results, March 2003

Copyright, National Staff Development Council, 2003. All rights reserved.

While there is power in partnership, not all partnerships are equal in their ability to bring about important changes. The National Staff Development Council is particularly interested in encouraging partnerships that ask collaborators to take on worthy and challenging goals that could not be achieved without the interdependence and synergy that such work requires. This kind of partnership plays a prominent role in NSDC's five-year strategic plan.

NSDC's goal that all teachers in all schools have quality professional learning as part of their daily work by 2007 is one whose magnitude is intended to inspire interdependence among normally independent national and state education associations. The year 2007 was selected because it signals the Council's intention that such improvements in professional development will improve teaching and learning for the benefit of students who are now in our schools and deserve the best that educators and their communities can give them.

Two critically important and connected ingredients of success in this effort, NSDC believes, are skillful leadership, particularly at the school level, and the creation of high-performing cultures within schools that focus on collaboration and the continuous improvement of student learning. Both require the committed, sustained engagement of many individuals and organizations at the local, state, and national levels who will work together in creative ways to accomplish these critically important goals.

Here are two such partnerships that I believe could have a profound effect on professional learning in schools. The first addresses leadership development and the second focuses on the underlying conditions that support high-performing cultures within schools.

• Leadership development: The major organizations that represent principals, teachers, superintendents, and school board members, along with their state and local affiliates, collectively advocate for and educate policy makers about the most effective forms of professional learning for principals and teacher leaders. These organizations speak with one voice using a common set of simple but powerfully expressed ideas to emphasize the vital nature of ongoing, high-quality professional learning related to teaching and leadership in creating schools in which all students experience success. In addition, these organizations advocate funding for personalized assistance such as mentoring and coaching for all beginning principals so they can steadily become more effective and remain in their increasingly demanding jobs.

• High-performing cultures: Organizations representing school board members, superintendents, and teachers develop and advocate contract language and work rules that support job-embedded collaboration and professional learning. Publications, meetings, and conferences sponsored by these organizations educate their members, particularly those on the front lines of contract negotiations, about the absolute necessity of high-quality professional learning for all teachers and the types of collective agreements that support this effort. These organizations are relentless in pursuing this goal.

These important national organizations and their state and local affiliates have the collective capacity to alter how school board members, administrators, and teachers think about professional learning and to affect the day-to-day actions taken in tens of thousands of schools that ultimately determine the quality of professional development experienced by teachers and principals. Based on its belief that all children who are now in our schools deserve the high-quality teaching that high-quality professional learning produces, NSDC will do everything within its power to assist these partnerships. Such professional learning is within reach for all educators and we will not rest until it is achieved.

Read NSDC's strategic plan online. The Council welcomes your comments and invites your active participation in achieving its goals.

Dennis Sparks' latest book, Designing Powerful Professional Development for Teachers and Principals, is available for free download at www.nsdc.org/sparksbook.html.

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