Teachers Take Charge of Their Learning:
Transforming Professional Development for Student Success
II. FINDING THE TIME TO BUILD PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT INTO THE LIFE OF SCHOOLS
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Ask teachers what they need in order to do a better job, and the first response is always "more time." Teachers need time to prepare and equip themselves with the knowledge and skills necessary to maximize student learning. Professional development for teachers must become a seamless part of the daily and yearlong job. Teachers' learning must be accommodated by changes in how time is used throughout the school year and beyond it.
Introduction
Making New Time Available
Reallocating Existing Time
Teachers' Time for Individual and Group Studies
Recommendations
INTRODUCTION
Teachers have a dilemma. They spend almost all of their school days and school year in direct contact with students, which is the way it should be. Everyone agrees that maximizing instructional time is vital for student learning. Yet it is also essential for teachers to spend time planning and reviewing student work, mentoring and observing other teachers, studying, collaboratively developing new programs and methods, honing leadership skills, and managing student learning and the work of the school.
The problem is how to find this time. When asked about their need for planning time, learning time, and group decision-making time, teachers are clear that it cannot be found within the current school schedule or by reducing time with students. The time that has traditionally been available is inadequate. Professional development after school is poor-quality time because a day spent being constantly on stage leaves one exhausted. In addition, teachers understandably wish to spend time with their own families and feel this is already heavily compromised by conferring with parents, preparing lessons, marking papers, and attending meetings. Vacation time and even school-year personal time are often dedicated to earning much-needed second income from camp counseling, summer school teaching, and other jobs unrelated to education. (Nearly 30 percent of teachers reported summer employment, half in their school systems and half elsewhere, in Status of the American Public School Teacher, 19901991 [NEA 1992, 73].)
Despite these seemingly intractable problems with finding time, teachers who participated in NFIE-conducted discussion groups and responded to the national survey repeatedly expressed the need for professional learning directly related to and usable in their work. To help students achieve higher standards, teachers need to have the time and resources--and to account for their use--that will make this work possible (National Center on Education and the Economy 1992, 5).
This time for learning is especially important as schools incorporate information and multimedia technologies into the classroom. When a school proposes to install these technologies, each teacher must become adept at their use, identify appropriate hardware and software for his or her subject matter and students, and sit down to work on the computer. Learning to use new technologies well is accomplished best when teachers have time available to learn in a variety of ways. Teachers need large blocks of time to gain initial familiarity with new hardware or software, learning and practicing for sustained periods. Time to observe an experienced user model an application in his or her classroom, just-in-time technical assistance available on call throughout the year, time to design a new hypermedia stack, or time for group reflection on a recently tried application--all recommended approaches to professional development--should be made available every day.
Several studies have already pointed out the need for time for professional development. In April 1994, an independent National Education Commission on Time and Learning (NECTL) published Prisoners of Time, strongly urging a complete change in how time is used in our nation's public schools to improve learning. They cited a RAND study that found that learning "new teaching strategies can require as much as 50 hours of instruction, practice and coaching before teachers become comfortable with them" and highlighted another study showing that "successful urban schools . . . needed up to 50 days of external technical assistance for coaching and strengthening staff skills through professional development" (17). A report published in the same year by the NEA (1994a) recommended moving toward an extended-year contract for all teachers, allowing additional time for instructional planning, group work, and individual study. The NECTL concurred with the recommendation "that teachers be provided with the professional time and opportunities they need to do their job"; this time is needed "not as a frill or an add-on, but as a major aspect of the agreement between teachers and districts" (36). Time for paying attention to individual students, for planning and preparing to teach, for observing and assisting colleagues, for professional growth, for group work, and for individual study also needs to be built into the working day.
At present, all these activities are segregated from the daily teaching job. Professional development is set aside in a few scattered days and half days before school begins in the fall and during the school year. Everyone agrees that teachers need to spend considerably more time and effort to learn all year long.
Some of that time will need to come from making new time available for teachers by lengthening their working year while students are on vacation, some from clever reorganization of school schedules, and some from teachers' willingness to devote part of their after-school unpaid time. All three adjustments will be needed if the recommended time for teachers' professional development is not to reduce student instructional hours.
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Finding Time
The teacher is awake and moving at 5:30 a.m. and reaches the school by 7:05 for bus duty. At 7:30, she's waiting to use the duplicating machine to run off copies of a poem she wants to give her students, but the school ran out of duplicating paper before Christmas, and no more is to be had this year. She uses the spirit master, and the poem comes out fuzzy and is hard to read. By 8:00, her homeroom students have begun to arrive. She's dealing with their problems and a stack of forms and memos from the district's central office, and she hasn't yet unpacked her tote bag full of marked essays for three of her classes. Two other teachers enter to borrow books and discuss the upcoming group meeting. At 8:25, she's calling roll; and at 8:45, bells ring for the first class. She teaches three different preparations by 11:30, monitors the hallways between classes, and worries about the phone calls she needs to make to two sets of parents. She uses her half-hour lunch break to go to the bathroom and make the calls (from the principal's office), and wolfs a sandwich in under five minutes. The parents were unavailable.
After the break, she uses her prep period for the group meeting. She and colleagues from across her grade group are trying to fit vertically designed single subjects into a unified curriculum that makes sense horizontally, the way students experience it. They try to find a way for business letter writing and short stories, a review of the Linnaean classification of species, the Civil War, and pre-algebra to form a coherent whole. They don't get very far in forty minutes. Classes change. For two more periods, the teacher hands out the spirit-mastered poem, asks the students to read it, and fifteen minutes into each lesson, has the students hotfoot it to the computer lab to begin work on their own poetic responses. At 3:00 p.m. she is buzzed to the front office, where she learns that one of the parents had returned her call an hour earlier. After school, she tidies her classroom, finds several computer disks left behind by an unidentified student, counsels a young man who is six weeks behind with his assignments, and then looks in on the school magazine club's editorial session.
Home by 5:30, she prepares and has dinner with her family. But by 7:30, she's reading ahead in the textbooks for two of her classes, writing an assignment for another, rummaging in her filing cabinets for fresh ideas on how to teach business letter writing, trying to contact those parents on the phone, and marking essays. By 10:30 p.m., she's too tired to turn on her computer. She ought to catch up with the on-line writing seminar she joined several years ago after an exhilarating summer institute experience at the Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont. It's been weeks since she has felt up to it. And so to bed. |
MAKING NEW TIME AVAILABLE
One way to find additional time for professional development is to make new time available when teachers are in school but students are on vacation. Extending teachers' contracts into weeks when students are still on vacation is essential to meeting higher standards for all children.
An extended-year program was tried for a few years in three schools in Boulder Valley, Colorado. The experiment demonstrated that an extended block of time for staff to address needs identified by each school allowed long-range planning, intensive work, the learning of new skills, and the designing of new programs that could then be implemented and assessed during the school year. In each school, the extended year allowed major changes to take hold more quickly than when teachers attempt to study, implement, and assess changes in the midst of teaching. Current teaching practice in such cases works at cross-purposes. Teachers often describe it as being like trying to change a tire while driving a car.
Extra blocks of time can be assembled without adding days to teachers' contracts or taking time away from students. Many school districts can already find a number of days' paid time scattered in "early release" days and other noninstructional time in current contracts. Teachers can use the time far more effectively than at present if it is banked in a single, sustained, two-week annual period for intensive staff work. Two weeks is the minimum mentioned most often by teachers and administrators who have been struggling to redesign curriculum to meet higher standards, incorporate technology in instruction, reach out to parents and community partners, and conduct other major efforts to improve their schools.
A statewide poll conducted for the Connecticut Education Association by Abacus Associates in 1995 revealed that a majority of teachers favored extending the school year by one week for the purpose of engaging in professional development. Extending teachers' contracts was the first and, according to the faculty, most important decision made by the Texas ACT Academy staff. The National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) calls for extended contracts in its report on the high school for the twenty-first century (1996). The Boulder Valley experiment engaged teams delegated by their colleagues to participate in the summer work, and the NASSP suggests that districts could rotate one-fourth of faculty through the extended program each year (1996, 51). Given that time for teachers' group work and professional development can already be found in most districts' calendars, NFIE strongly recommends that all districts collect such days into a single period to be used by each staff to address the needs of the students they jointly serve.
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The Boulder Valley, Colorado, School District
Extended-Year Program
In the summers of 1993 and 1994, the Boulder Valley, Colorado, district provided three of its schools with salary supplements to allow the staff members of each school to work together for an additional two weeks after students left for the summer vacation. Each school staff determined for itself how to use this time. The former superintendent, Dean Damon, pushed for this as a result of a conversation some years earlier with education reformer John Goodlad.
Edward Ellis, the former principal of Nederland Middle/Senior High School, says, "The extended contract was the salvation of the school." The school's test scores reached a nine-year high. Twelve certified teachers, paraprofessionals, education support personnel, and the principal formed a planning committee charged by the entire staff to design a study program to develop a faculty-student mentoring program, a mediation process for student discipline, and a study program to prepare faculty to use new curriculum standards and assessments. They studied Howard Gardner's writings and William Glasser's The Quality School, reviewed and discussed qualifications of applicants for staff openings, and worked with nearby Nederland Elementary on smoothing transitions from elementary to middle school through common academic expectations. The summer plans enabled continuing work during the school year to run smoothly. High school teacher Jim Martin says, "I see that during the school year, in-services deal with immediate concerns. With the extended time, we could do visioning in a long-term perspective. We could dream a little bit." The school's office manager adds, "We got a level of discussion you can't get in sixty minutes on a Thursday afternoon." The staff development to create the mentoring led to "adults interacting with students in different, better ways," and students were better prepared for graduation, according to a teacher. The school has become a beacon for applicants elsewhere in the district and has reduced the number of students seeking to transfer out.
At the second Boulder Valley pilot school, Coal Creek Elementary, the extended contract was used to introduce the entire faculty to computers. The intensive two weeks allowed faculty members to work through management issues, become adept with the technology, and prepare themselves as active users of it for teaching. The faculty also consulted parents about their concerns. Teachers focused hard on their ability to teach mathematics. The school's principal says, "We wanted the kids to be mathematics thinkers. The dialogue among the faculty was key. The teachers looked at both gaps and overcoverage in mathematics instruction. We really turned around our whole approach to mathematics."
And at the third school, Nederland Elementary, a faculty decision to focus on student writing resulted in using the extended contract to revamp a writing assessment tool and to plan a yearlong faculty development program. Prior to the extended-contract program, former principal Holly Hultgren had been the only one planning and organizing the in-service days before school opened each fall. "This staff development was limited to one-time, isolated presentations given by outside consultants," she says. The extended contract allowed the participating teachers to investigate specific topics more thoroughly and share relevant information with all staff members. Staff development was planned for the entire year using the theme of writing assessment and literacy portfolios to record student progress. The following year this theme was extended to include reworking the report card format and parent conferencing process to match the writing procedures established. Hultgren says, "These efforts could not have taken place without an uninterrupted, extended period for discussion, planning, and writing."
Members of all three faculties learned by connecting with grant-funded networks of teachers and scholars: the Collaboratives for Humanities and Arts Teaching, the Colorado Partnership for Educational Renewal (part of John Goodlad's National Network for Educational Renewal), and the American Council of Learned Society's Elementary and Secondary Schools Project. They look forward to a newly forming Humanities Center codirected by school and university faculty at the University of Colorado at Boulder. |
REALLOCATING EXISTING TIME
Another approach is to make better use of time in the school year and day. A Phi Delta Kappan article recently reported on a school organized with four daily, eighty-five-minute instructional periods. All teachers teach three such periods and have the fourth free for study, group planning, and observation. The authors recommend that such plans be based on student needs (Means, Olson, and Singh 1995). There is no reason for concern that longer periods will be too much for children's attention spans. In a visit to another school where second graders had spent well over two hours on a science project, NFIE heard the children lament "Do we have to?" when told to clear away to prepare for gym. Students thrive when appropriate amounts of time can be devoted to certain studies. Flexibility in using time not only promotes student achievement but also uses teachers' time more efficiently and enables teachers to perform the new duties expected of them in modern schools.
Teachers and other professionals working together thrive when new learning acquired during intensive periods of study is followed up by frequent and concerted technical assistance, coaching, reflection, and evaluation. In many states, instructional time is mandated by hours--and even minutes--of seat time spent per subject. But schools such as the ACT Academy measure achievement by successful demonstration of benchmark standards and completion of projects. One group of students wanted to know why they were trudging through a textbook on health. When the teacher told them the state required coverage of several more topics, the students asked to turn those topics into projects. A few days later, their projects completed, the class moved on to new learning.
Flexible use of time also encourages students' growth and initiative and breaks the tyranny of time. Learning proceeds organically and efficiently-- indeed, far more efficiently than mechanical mandates for specific lengths of time per subject. Students know when they are done because they can demonstrate knowledge of the material, not because they have sat through a prescribed number of lessons. Students will take greater responsibility for their own work and will learn how to master time effectively if their classes are less rigid in the use of time.
Project-based education creates the freedom to work and to learn for both students and teachers. Team teaching also creates such freedom. In the younger age groups at Texas's ACT Academy, a pair of teachers is jointly responsible for forty-six children. They work separately at times and together at other times. An experienced teacher can spend considerable time mentoring a new teacher in such an arrangement; and there are many opportunities for either to prepare to teach, work individually with students, assess student portfolios, study, and carry out the multifaceted job of teaching.
The keys to the ability to work effectively as a teacher are the time and the opportunity to carry out the many necessary tasks that make up teaching. Some of these tasks entail direct student contact, and some do not. These are daily and weekly tasks that begin with students and return to students, but that also require adult interaction and adult independent work.
Through team teaching and sharing responsibilities among several qualified adults, and through encouraging greater facilitation of student-initiated work, schools can improve both student achievement and faculty quality. All states should deregulate instructional time mandates as they instill higher academic standards for students. By establishing the standards, states make clear what they expect of students. By deregulating time, they allow the faculty to help students to achieve those standards more efficiently and effectively.
TEACHERS' TIME FOR INDIVIDUAL AND GROUP STUDIES
Teachers have always spent considerable amounts of personal, unpaid time preparing to teach and studying to keep up with their fields. They search out both formal and informal opportunities to learn from each other and from any and every possible source of help. Any teacher facing five or six classes a day and repeating ninth-grade world history or biology year after year or assigned for the first time to include children with special needs in the classroom is nearly desperate for new activities and new ways of motivating and relating to their students, for new approaches and perspectives to enliven their classrooms and improve their students' success.
The state of Virginia formalizes a personal development plan for each teacher to work out with an adviser. What is present in this approach is an opportunity for the teacher to build knowledge and skill over time in reference to the current and prospective teaching assignment. What is missing from this is a broader reference to the needs of the school as a whole (Virginia Department of Education 1990).
The Virginia plan, like all state plans, focuses on the isolated teacher's growth. NFIE is concerned to balance this with schoolwide faculty growth. The first step to professional growth is agreement among the staff and the community on a philosophy and vision for students. The second step is group learning of skills, approaches, and knowledge designed to help the entire faculty implement that vision. The third step is assessing staff strengths and assuring that the school provides a balanced program for its student body. Individual study should be chosen in part to meet schoolwide needs and in part to enable the teacher to pursue individual interests and talents. External guides can help schools to assess whether they are able to offer a balanced program. Such guides should include teaching and student standards set by states and districts. No single school faculty, no matter how large, will ever be able to provide all the knowledge that students should encounter; the world is too big and knowledge has expanded too far for this ever to be possible. But faculties can and should assess strengths and weaknesses to determine priority areas for their own growth and development. Faculties then will have options for filling the gaps:
- They can provide opportunities for members to take on responsibility for learning the missing or weak fields.
- They can seek out new colleagues with the requisite skills.
- They can team up with community resource people from museums, the arts, universities, and other appropriate sources.
- They can use technology to access expertise.
- They can combine these possibilities.
At present, teachers isolated from group decision making have few ways of knowing what needs exist and what the staff's priorities are. Therefore, they each make their decisions about what to study and how to reach students in isolation. District-level supervisors cannot help guide individual teachers' study because they do not work with the school's children and consequently know less than the school staff about the school's needs. When faculties have time to conduct professional assessments of their own abilities and the school's offerings, teachers can step forward to plan their growth appropriately.
Today, teachers have time for intensive individual growth and learning only during vacation periods and infrequent extended leaves. Teachers no longer receive regular opportunities to take half- or full-year sabbaticals. However, in Dade County, Florida, all high school teachers are eligible to compete for forty-eight annually available residencies at the Dade Academy for the Teaching Arts (DATA), which is modeled on an idea originated at Schenley High School in Pittsburgh.
The DATA program, like Schenley High School before it, provides an opportunity for teachers to take a substantial break from full-time teaching for study of, and in, exemplary operating classrooms in the same school district. Such breaks provide enough time for sustained individual study, but they are geared to the individual teacher's need for renewal and a chance to interact with like-minded professionals.
Alternatively, The Gheens Academy in Louisville, Kentucky, and the Humanitas program in Los Angeles tried weeklong visitations of teams of teachers to other schools to observe exemplary programs, to study, and to plan what to do when they return to their home schools. The Texas ACT Academy got its fresh start from a seven-month opportunity for the entire staff to develop the program, and it has shared its knowledge through ACT II, whereby teams from other schools visit ACT for a week or longer. In most of these cases, the team visits were funded by grants. When the funds were used up, the visits ceased.
Extended planning and review of program and teacher study require more than a few minutes snatched here and there. Sustained time must be dedicated to this purpose. Meaningful amounts of time for work and study when students are not present also must be a part of the daily and weekly life of schools.
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Virginia's Requirements
In the state of Virginia, as in many other states, teachers fulfill professional development requirements for periodic renewal of their teaching licenses. Since the late 1980s, activities included in required professional development in Virginia have been expanded well beyond formal course taking to include peer observation, publications, serving as a mentor, participating in curriculum development work, educational travel, independent study, work exchange, and special projects. For each of these alternatives, criteria for successful completion are provided by the Office of Teacher Licensure, which acknowledges explicitly that this variety enables the professional to tailor learning to changing needs over the career. The entire process involves working closely with a superintendent-appointed advisor, who is not otherwise specified and who could therefore be a teacher or an administrator. The focus of study must address the subjects taught; areas of specialty or proposed specialty; methods and concepts of teaching and administration, including leadership skills; the development of children and youths; learning theory; and effective relations among schools, families, and communities. The plan of work is conducted throughout each five-year renewal period.
There are states with no such requirements; and there are states where, as one teacher put it, "Recertification? Oh, I remember. I send them the ten dollars every five years, and they send the renewal."
In a well-ordered school, relicensure should be superfluous. The kinds of professional activities listed by the Virginia Recertification Manual would be the normal operating procedure of the school. Virginia's emphasis on school-based work begins to shift the balance of professional development away from formal or programmatic learning and toward school-based learning (Virginia Department of Education 1990). |
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DATA: Creating a Community of Learners
The Dade Academy for the Teaching Arts (DATA) occupies three trailers adjacent to Miami Beach Senior High School, a once-temporary solution to a large expansion in the student population brought on by enormous immigration to the district over the past decade. This influx added 120,000 to the district's rolls; and in one school year alone, 2,700 new teachers were inducted into the district. The less-than-luxurious trailer accommodations have sagged into permanence and are now "home" to DATA Teacher-Director Evelyn Campbell and the rest of the DATA family.
On a February afternoon, Campbell, a dozen teachers (known as externs) spending a nine-week sabbatical at the academy, and eight residents (veteran teachers who assume leadership responsibilities for the academy) crowd into one of the trailers to hear DATA resident Ellen Kempler conduct a seminar entitled "Archetypes: The Hero Within." The seminar is one of several that bring the teachers together on a regular basis to discuss ideas and compare experiences. Kempler's presentation is based on the work of Carol Pearson. It involves an assessment similar to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and is designed to help define personality types. It is clear that Kempler is confident and accustomed to her role of speaking in front of colleagues. Her presentation is followed by a lively conversation that questions certain aspects of her presentation and affirms other aspects. The conversation also revolves around how the materials presented by Kempler could be applied in the classroom and the advantages and disadvantages of doing so.
The people in this room have created a true "community of learners." Their vigorous enthusiasm for DATA charges the air. The chance to break away from six periods a day of teaching--150 students and no prep period, as one teacher describes the job--to reflect, to share, and to regroup one's professional life is a precious opportunity. Their concern is solely to improve their ability to serve children, in this instance by considering a new approach to broadening their understanding of, and ability to work with, diverse learning styles. They learn to think by questioning assumptions and analyzing practice. The resident teachers model such questioning; they probe the assumptions, such as the Jungian model of psychology, on which the presenter's seminar is based. The externs have been taking notes as if the seminar were gospel. The resident teachers, through their questioning, make it clear that just taking notes is insufficient. The seminar's purpose is to engage and examine new ideas, not just accept them.
DATA offers structured, nine-week sabbaticals for middle and high school teachers in mathematics, English, science, social studies, foreign language, and exceptional student education. The academy is funded entirely by the district and serves twelve externs during each of four sessions throughout the school year. The staff of DATA includes Campbell, who is teacher-director of the academy; twelve adjuncts, fully credentialed teachers who assume the classroom responsibilities of the externs while they are away from their home schools; and the eight residents, experienced teachers with master's degrees who have reduced course loads at Miami Beach High and who provide guidance for the externs and coordinate the workshops, seminars, and classroom observations that accompany the sabbatical experience.
DATA aims to stimulate lifelong learning, teacher leadership, collegiality, professional self-esteem, action research, and efforts to solve educational problems. At the heart of the DATA experience is a research project designed and conducted by each extern with assistance from DATA residents. The quality of the research proposal is one of the criteria for admission to the academy. DATA externs have completed reports on topics such as "Strategies for Teaching Mathematics to Low-Functioning Learning-Disabled Students," "A Teaching Approach to Gabriel Garcia Marquez," and "Computer-Assisted Instruction for Haitian Students."
Externs are free to design their own program of study. The DATA experience is an opportunity for externs to "plan their own destiny," says Campbell. They find this very difficult during the first week of the sabbatical but become more accustomed to directing their own learning in subsequent weeks.
The freedom of inquiry and experimentation built into the academy troubles many district administrators. "People want to know where we are all the time," said one DATA resident. "We are professionals. We can be trusted. We've been held with the fire at our feet over this program." DATA is an invaluable opportunity for renewal for these teachers. |
RECOMMENDATIONS
Find the Time to Build Professional Development into the Life of Schools
Teachers spend almost all of their school days and school year in direct contact with students. This time is precious and should not be reduced. Yet time for teachers to plan and review student work, mentor and observe other teachers, study, develop new programs and methods, hone leadership skills, and manage student learning and the work of the school is essential to good teaching in the classrooom. Some of the ways to find time for this work include the following:
1. Flexible Scheduling
Reorganize time in the school day to enable teachers to work together as well as individually both daily and weekly and throughout the school year.
2. Extended School Year for Teachers
Redefine the teaching job to include both direct student instructional time and blocks of extended time for teachers' professional development. Extend the length of the school year, allowing for up to four weeks for teachers' professional development while students are on vacation. Organize the teachers' year to include intensive, sustained study by staff as determined by school-based decisions directed toward increasing student learning. Intensive study should be supported by yearlong follow-up.
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