Teachers Take Charge of Their Learning:
Transforming Professional Development for Student Success

I. TEACHERS' PRIMARY CONCERN: STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT
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American teachers overwhelmingly judge the value of their professional growth by its effect on their students. Teachers are clear about the purpose of continuous learning: First and last, it is student learning that drives their passion for professional development. Improving the quality of teaching now means a lifetime of study and a workplace that supports continuous learning as an integral part of the daily, weekly, and yearlong job. Working toward this goal individually and collectively must become a top priority. Teachers and their organizations are ready to work for this goal in partnership with school boards, parents, government, community groups, and others.

What Do Teachers Say?

Building a Profession

Who are the Partners of the Profession?

WHAT DO TEACHERS SAY?

Teachers' interest in professional development is dedicated to improving student learning. A national study of how teachers view career-long learning was conducted with support from The National Foundation for the Improvement of Education (NFIE) and the National Education Association's (NEA) Research Department by Greenberg Research, Inc., and The Feldman Group. The study began by asking teachers, "What does 'professional growth' mean to you?" Nearly three-fourths of teachers surveyed responded that it means helping students learn. Most respondents used active phrases to define "professional growth," such as "keeping up," "with technology," "with [the] latest trends," "with my field," and so on. "Updating," "continuing," "becoming," "improving," and "increasing" abilities to serve students were at the heart of the response. Other teachers said, "improving my own skills as a teacher, as a colleague"; "[to] teach better [and] help my students"; "we are all learners [and] must grow if children are to grow"; "learning cooperatively with students, teachers, parents"; "meeting the needs of the students"; "to be a better teacher"; "becoming a better teacher"; and the poignant "being better than I was last year."

Teachers told us how profound professional growth experiences affected them (Figure 1). Once again, students came first. In response to the survey question, "Thinking back over your professional life since you began teaching full time, [describe] the one formal or informal professional growth experience that has had the most profound effect on you as a teacher," teachers mentioned specific courses, seminars, workshops, and degree programs 30 percent of the time but ranged far beyond these formal, traditional means of learning to name the day-to-day work of a teacher, including collegial interactions and the success of their students.

When teachers study, they do so to improve student achievement (73 percent). Improving teaching skills took next place (55 percent), and increasing their own knowledge took third place (34 percent). Career advancement (7 percent), financial reward (5 percent), and maintaining professional certification (5 percent) were rock-bottom motivators (Figure 2).

The NFIE survey included phone interviews with 848 randomly selected members of the NEA who have been in the classroom more than three years and an oversample of another 228 NEA members who hold leadership positions at the state, local, or national level. These leaders also have at least three years of teaching experience and may or may not currently be teaching full time.

Data Source: Greenberg Research

Figure 2 Teachers' Motivation for Growing as Professionals

The survey asked teachers to identify issues of greatest concern to them in education. Parental involvement was cited most often (mentioned by 34 percent of the respondents), followed by a number of issues relating to students and teaching, including student motivation to learn, using technology, and preparing students for the future. When given a choice of nine possible seminar topics, 93 percent of the teachers expressed interest in learning about "increasing parental involvement," and 93 percent wanted to learn about "using technology for instructional purposes." Nearly as many, 90 percent, were interested in "updating . . . knowledge or skills." All nine suggested topics received majority positive responses.

The survey reveals that teachers are people who like to learn. At the top of teachers' agendas is a concern to learn how to reach out to parents, their main partners in education, and they are just as desirous of introducing the information age to their classrooms. These two issues were repeated like a refrain throughout the survey.

Teachers surveyed told us that their learning is as often rooted in the daily work of interacting with students and colleagues as it is in set-aside course work and other traditional programs. Teachers value nonprogrammatic opportunities for learning--the learning that comes from and through doing--equally to the formal and programmatic.

Research findings support the connection between teacher learning and student performance. For example, students' achievement in science and mathematics is linked directly to the extent to which their teachers have had substantial formal education in these fields (Davis 1964; Druva and Anderson 1983). For the use of technology to enhance student learning in various fields, findings are beginning to emerge that show teacher competence directly linked to student learning (NFIE 1995a). Professional preparation for teaching, formal certification, and formal induction programs also give rise to student achievement (Darling-Hammond 1990). Research findings are emerging on the connection between school-based, peer-assisted learning and student achievement as well (LeMahieu and Sterling 1991; Newmann and Wehlage 1995). The research base is clear for both beginning and experienced teachers: sustained, in-depth teacher learning connects directly with student results. These links depend, however, on teachers' ability to use their learning in the teaching assignment. When teachers' choices for learning match teaching assignments and school programs, students flourish. One-shot, district-determined, short-term programs have little effect on either teachers' or students' growth.

BUILDING A PROFESSION

Teachers' unions were formed to negotiate with the industrial-model school system and to establish due process and fair employment practices. Today, the unions recognize that schools must change and that with them, teachers' representative organizations must also change. In this report, therefore, unions will be referred to as teachers' organizations to signal the nature of that change, and many of the recommendations will specifically address the roles and responsibilities they should take to assure high-quality teaching. Both the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the NEA and their state and local affiliates have formed partnerships in some states and communities with education agencies and districts to support many aspects of school reform, including peer assistance and review, professional development schools, school restructuring, school-based management, charter schools, and other structural, policy, and professional development reforms. Taking these efforts to the scale of their entire memberships should be a priority for every local, state, and national teachers' organization.

The NEA represents two-thirds of America's 3 million public school teachers, and the AFT represents another 12.2 percent. The subject-matter societies, such as the International Reading Association and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), represent, along with the NEA and AFT, the professional interests of nearly every public school teacher in the United States. These associations are working to raise the standards for students and the ability of their members to teach to those standards. The subject-based groups will be designated specialized professional associations throughout this report.

At the March 1996 Education Summit in Palisades, New Jersey, the cochairs were a governor and a corporate executive. Many of the headline-grabbing pronouncements on what is wrong with public schools and how to fix them have been made by government and corporate leaders, researchers, and others far from the classroom. Teachers have meanwhile begun to take an active role both in expressing their analyses of the issues and in devising professional means of improving their teaching. Teachers' specialized professional associations, not the federal government, have devised rigorous standards in school subjects, and these are the reference points for student standards being put in place by the states now. Teachers have devised teaching standards for the national certifications issued by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS), a private, nonprofit, professional organization. Teachers' organizations, such as the NEA and the AFT, help sustain the accrediting agency, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), that is working to set high standards for teacher education. Independent state standards boards, primarily composed of teachers, now exist in thirteen states to establish and enforce initial teaching licenses on the basis of high standards of performance.

All these groups are increasing their efforts to enable teachers to take responsibility for a high-quality profession. But many barriers to professionalism persist. Resistant, top-down, and inflexible bureaucracies, paternalism toward a feminized workforce, and the sheer inert weight of habit are among the many barriers to real reform. Of paramount concern to teachers, however, is finding the time to learn and to prepare for the expanded work necessary to successful teaching today. Teachers' organizations have in many ways found themselves acquiescing in the roles structured for them by a poorly organized system. The system sometimes victimizes its workforce, and the workforce sometimes behaves like victims. The collective bargaining table, for example, was both a response to the realities of an adversarial system and a participant in creating it.

Both individual teachers and their organizations are trying to use the tools available to them to reshape that system--to provide room for professional behavior and to reach out as partners to management, governance, and the public in order to meet the needs of their students. Collective bargaining, where it exists, and advocacy can become powerful tools for reform and for increasing the quality of teaching and learning. This report calls for greater efforts on the part of the profession and its partners to make the changes we need to increase student success.

Although all the teachers' organizations have a clear stake in meeting the learning needs of their members, none has yet acted on a large scale to change what and how teachers learn on the job. A larger scale is precisely what is needed to improve our schools.

The constraints of traditional supervision, narrowly defined incentives, and other regulations limit the place of professional development in the schools to a marginal add-on. Both the system and the teachers themselves must invest in the profession and stand firmly for specific high levels of quality. The public must be assured that teachers' increased autonomy will be repaid with increased responsibility. In return, the system must reorganize to support teachers' professionalism.

Teachers themselves are willing to accept a large measure of responsibility for their own growth, as individuals and as colleagues, and to measure that growth by changes in their practice that enhance student achievement. This report examines what nearly two decades of reform have proven effective in developing teachers' knowledge and skills throughout their careers. It urges teachers to take charge of their learning. Our public schools can and will meet the future needs of every American child if every teacher rises to the challenge and if every school and every state match the teachers' initiatives with the systemic changes necessary to nurture a high standard of professionalism.

Many governors, legislators, researchers, reformers, and others have tried to improve schools by tinkering with testing and policymaking or by exhorting changes in management designs, but they have too often neglected to look inside the minds and wills of the people who actually teach the children. For their part, teachers have sometimes stood aside while others have spoken at and for them, thus allowing those who do not teach to control teachers' professional growth.

Teachers agree that the academic and civic development of children is the primary purpose of school. They also agree that the continuing intellectual growth of teachers should be a central purpose of the organizations that represent them as well as of the specialized professional associations. Fundamental change in our public schools will depend on the knowledge and skill of every single one of the nation's 3 million teachers working in concert as a profession to enhance knowledge and skill and with administrators, school support personnel, parents, and communities to provide opportunities to use that knowledge and skill to help our children learn.

The educational system for the twenty-first century cannot and must not be the same educational system that was founded 150 years ago and that has strained to meet the demands of the past 50 years. Likewise, professional development for teachers cannot and must not be the same that barely sufficed in the twentieth century. A very different system that supports and encourages teachers' professional growth goes hand in hand with teachers' enlarged responsibilities. Each is important to the future of public education, and each is important to the other. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say explicitly that one without the other will not work.

WHO ARE THE PARTNERS OF THE PROFESSION?

The teachers themselves, as well as their organizations, specialized associations, teacher networks, and others, including the public, researchers, policymakers, and critics of the existing system, were canvassed for this report. Teachers' organizations have entered into considerable reform work, but they cannot achieve massive results alone. Legislatures, governors, districts, school boards, educational administrators, the private sector, parents, and all taxpayers have major roles to play in supporting the professional growth of teachers and the professionalization of the teaching workforce.

Many reforms currently being advanced focus on improving schools of education and tying them to public schools. But other institutions also have a role in helping teachers learn. Many institutions of higher education, individual academics, museums, libraries, and other cultural institutions have conducted small, high-quality professional development programs with teachers over the past two decades. University-based teacher education divisions have been partners in such work, but important professional development opportunities also abound across all fields and branches of higher education, including arts and sciences and the other professions, such as medicine, architecture, engineering, and law. Largely grant-supported, partnerships between these groups and teachers have been valued by teachers but have not been transferred to many classrooms or continued on a long-term basis.

The recommendations offered in this report closely heed the voices of teachers. External and school-based learning are recommended in equal balance. Collaborative decision making, assessing students' needs and guiding teachers' learning to meet those needs, and extensive opportunities to learn from and with colleagues are major mechanisms that correspond to what teachers find most helpful. Of equal importance are opportunities to gain access to the world of learning outside the schools as long as teachers have opportunities to adapt that learning to the needs of their school and their students and the ability to integrate technology into all these objectives.

This report cites many examples of schools in which teachers are learning from and with each other and with parents through concerted, shared efforts to improve student learning. It also cites many schools that have successfully incorporated technology into instruction and that have found teaching and learning transformed by it.

These are the priorities, coming first and foremost from the people who work with students every day and corroborated by the public that supports education for the common good. As one teacher said, "It's the kids."

 

The ACT Academy: The Vision in the Making At the Academic Competitiveness through Technology (ACT) Academy in McKinney, Texas, professional development is interwoven throughout the school year and day. Like many other schools in transformation, it is a work in progress, providing one example of how the issues discussed in this report are being addressed. The learning center is designed to test innovations and to discover which are most effective in reaching the diverse student body and each of its individuals so that successful strategies can be studied by other schools for replication. Seven months before the ACT Academy opened, staff members were chosen based on their willingness to be lifelong learners and question their approach to education and teaching. The ACT Academy was awarded a unique U.S. Department of Education grant, and 34 percent of the $5.5 million was used to renovate an old school for state-of-the-art use of information technologies. The newly selected staff worked with the architect to design a home for learning. The seven months of planning time before students entered provided unprecedented opportunities for staff planning and research, for molding a school philosophy, for designing the school, and for selecting technology based on the purposes of the school. No bells ring at the ACT Academy. Each day begins with agenda setting by each of the multiage classrooms. Once each student and each group of students have clarified the work for the day with guidance from their teachers, they are ready to spend the day carrying out the work. Although there are times for science labs, physical fitness, lunch, and art, the day is organized largely by the learners to meet their needs. At the end of the day, each class has a reflection period. Students and teachers sit in a circle and thoughtfully consider how the day has gone. Entering the one-story school with its lofty ceilings and airy, broad spaces awash in light, the visitor encounters a study lounge furnished with deep couches, rocking chairs, bookcases, computer stations, and desks. Older students are working together on a project with hushed voices and seriousness of purpose. One or two young teens are at stationary computers. The school is filled with productive activity. Spacious, carpeted corridors lead to classrooms and labs. Broad entrances to classrooms provide views of students working in small groups and a few studying on their own. In one or two classrooms, students and teachers form a circle for a discussion preparatory to the next project. The entire school is quiet, yet no one asks for quiet. Everyone works all day long, yet no one stands in front of the room to demand work. Students and teachers, called learners and facilitators here, proceed about their business, yet no one needs to monitor them. The building, the light, and the daylong mutual respect, self-confidence, articulateness, and purposeful work by children and adults remind one of a study center at a private liberal arts college. But this is a K­12 public school in McKinney, Texas, where the young people are just like young people one can find anywhere else in the United States. Expectations for learners' achievement are high, chiefly because the students, parents, and community have helped to set them. The most striking reorganization of time at ACT was the staff decision to design a 185-day, year-round school calendar. ACT teachers work a 226-day year. The staff and parents are convinced that the year-round program for students means no wasted time starting up or winding down, no long breaks for students to lose momentum and memory. The extra staff days, many during short breaks interspersed in the student calendar, are the core of professional development for ACT. There is no "off" time during instructional days. The extra staff days, $750 per teacher for travel, and $1,500 per teacher for supplies and materials add up to a per-pupil expenditure of $4,680, slightly over the district's average of $4,500. Staff members often pool their resources for special staff development opportunities. The decisions on these expenditures are entirely in their hands. Thus far, the district's growing population and tax base have absorbed these extra costs without necessitating higher taxes, but any extension of such benefits to more buildings will require some ingenuity if tax increases are to be avoided. Staff development costs at the ACT Academy, however, cannot be calculated on the basis of the costs of travel or materials or workshops and conferences alone. The school defines the teacher's job as teaching and learning, for each individual and for the faculty as a whole. Professional development is not just an added, discretionary cost; it is an integrated way of improving student success throughout each working day. A Vision for Student Achievement Every teacher in the ACT Academy is a leader, and every teacher is a member of a community of learners. In the spacious room used for staff meetings, the walls are covered with large sheets of paper that describe the collectively determined school philosophy. Every decision made by individual teachers and the staff as a whole is made with reference to the posted, detailed analyses of what to look for when children at various ages are learning. This constant reference to what the staff has jointly devised and jointly believes about children and learning reaffirms, revises, and reconnects the school philosophy with the actual experience of the children's progress. The staff has an anchor as they and the children plan, work, learn, research, and revise. Are the children learning? Parents and teachers say yes. Students who entered from special education backgrounds earned regular diplomas and fully demonstrated their right to these diplomas. Every year since its opening, the school has received far more applicants for each available place in this school of 250. Students send their portfolios to college admissions offices accustomed to seeing standard transcripts and grades, and students get into the colleges of their choice. Use of Technology as a Tool Although the building is as well equipped as any in the country, ACT's faculty views technology as only one tool of many. Desktop and laptop computers are widely available, and students use them in many ways, from doing research on the Internet to preparing multimedia reports of their findings. There are network connections throughout the building and in the school yard. On sunny days, it is not unusual to see students clustered around a computer on a picnic table. In addition to a media production studio, cameras, and video-editing equipment, students have access to handheld devices such as laptops and scientific calculators. But despite all this hardware and software, technology has not yet been fully integrated into the curriculum. ACT faculty and staff have only partially succeeded in weaving technology seamlessly into teaching and learning. When and how technology operational skills are mastered remain concerns. The faculty and staff are undertaking the extensive professional development needed to understand how to make the best use of technology to further academic understanding through student-designed experiences and projects. Technology has been a catalyst for the teachers to change the content of the curriculum, their methods of instruction, and their interactions with students and other staff. Teachers encourage students to use technology to take charge of their own learning experiences, including electronic research, working cooperatively in small groups with portable technology that goes where students go, and achieving intellectual clarity about important concepts through the use of multimedia tools to present what they have learned to others. Sustained and significant professional development is essential to technology's integrated use in school. Partners The primary partners of ACT's staff are an outstanding, focused school board and superintendent, highly capable and supportive middle managers, and enthusiastic parents, joined by working partners in the McKinney Education Association, local businesses, and the higher-education community. The academy staff stresses the need for professional growth to include parents. There are certainly dissenting voices. Not all parents and children find this school right for them. ACT's staff has intensified the preentry interview process to make sure students and parents are aware they will have to give up some cherished aspects of traditional schooling to take on the ACT challenge. The staff is also struggling to give up old habits. One teacher, Nana Hill, wrote a letter to herself listing all the old ways of teaching she intended to give up ("I will not make the students walk in a straight line"). She also gave up her old ditto masters. The nearby Heard Museum and Austin College work closely with ACT to strengthen its higher-level science and mathematics offerings and provide on-campus mentoring for all staff. The ACT Academy is one example of how a school has reorganized itself to support continuous learning by both students and staff. It is still exploring ways to incorporate professional development even more fully into the life of the school. Still, there is great pride in the work and learning accomplished thus far and confidence in the direction for the future. At the ACT Academy, when the lights flash as a signal to prepare to leave at the end of the day, students often sigh with disappointment that they can't stay longer and learn some more (Resta and Kennedy 1995, 76­7). As for the staff, Sue Gleghorn speaks for her colleagues when she says, "We are passionate about what we are doing."

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