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

IV. FINDING COMMON GROUND: WORKING WITH THE COMMUNITY TO PROVIDE HIGH-QUALITY PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

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Although teachers must be allowed greater responsibility, they should not carry the entire burden alone. To increase their ability to serve students, teachers need partners who can help them enhance their knowledge and skills. Parents are teachers' most important partners. Other partners include universities, libraries, museums, other community organizations with educational missions, and businesses. Teachers and these organizations should form long-term, genuinely collaborative relationships. Such cooperation could fulfill the obligation of each of these educational, cultural, or private organizations to the public. Rich resources should be made available to support teachers' and students' learning. Each community should enhance or create long-term partnerships for teachers' professional development. In addition, the federal government should establish a national institute for teachers' professional development.

Parent Partnerships

Business and Community Partnerships

Professional Partnerships

Creating a National Institute for Teachers' Professional Development

Creating Local Homes for Professional Partnerships

Professional Development in an Era of Technological Change

Recommendations

Teachers can gain new knowledge and overcome isolation from each other through peer assistance, but the world of learning and discovery can be greatly enlarged through partnerships with parents, communities, and other professions at local and national levels.

PARENT PARTNERSHIPS

The top issue on teachers' minds when they think about education is parents. Teachers' highest priority for professional development is learning how to reach out to involve parents more effectively in their children's learning (Greenberg Research, Inc. 1996a). NFIE's public focus groups revealed a matching concern for greater parental involvement (Public Agenda 1995). Teachers and the public are very much in agreement that teachers and parents must help students succeed by combining their efforts to focus on student achievement.

The Oklahoma Education Association and many other state associations have responded to this priority among their members by designing professional development opportunities to help bring teachers and parents together. With a similar objective in mind, a group of teachers and parents in NFIE's Dropout Prevention Program in Shelby, North Carolina, took the lead in establishing a welcoming, comfortable place for parents to become involved in their children's education. Targeting the parents of preschool, Head Start, kindergarten, and first-grade students at Township Three Elementary School, the steering group designed a Family Resource Center. Critical to the success of the center are the parent partners, who prepare newsletters, flyers, workshops, and calendars to reach out into the community to involve all parents actively in their children's education. With the program coordinator, the parent partners jointly manage the Family Resource Center. Together they maintain and increase community support, manage a lending library, plan and conduct workshops for the parents and teachers, and manage the facility. Another important partner to the program is the Hoechst-Celanese Corporation, which has provided funds for technology and has offered technical assistance, including statistical analysis of student achievement. Parents, employers, and teachers together create a strong atmosphere of support and affirmation in which all students can thrive.

In two other exemplary instances, teachers have reached out to parents in ways that integrate learning for parents and teachers through a focus on student work. Kathy Howard is a middle school English teacher in Pittsburgh who became a lead teacher in the Arts Propel project, an intensive effort over six years to translate Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences into portfolio-based curriculum and assessment in writing, art, and music. At one point, Howard prepared a protocol for parents that would guide them as they reviewed their children's writing portfolios. Parents responded enthusiastically to the opportunity to engage in this process, and the results were spectacularly positive for everyone. Students were surprised and delighted to have serious conversations with their parents about the ideas in their writing, and parents homed in on those ideas as the priority in reading their children's work. Everybody learned by this focus on student work, and parents and children were drawn closer by the opportunity to reflect on the children's schoolwork.

In another instance, teachers in a small, rural town in the South were thinking of introducing literature by a number of diverse, contemporary authors into the high school curriculum. They organized a series of reading and discussion groups and invited parents to participate. The teachers and parents read such authors as Toni Morrison together for the first time. By the end of the program, parents were as enthusiastic as teachers about the chance for their children to read the same books so they could all discuss them again together.

In both examples, teachers reached out to parents by focusing on student work. Both efforts invited parents to be equal partners in their children's intellectual development. Both included parents as members of the community of learners. Parents' knowledge represents a rich resource that can benefit both teachers and students.

Parents who have been given a chance to read the books and review the portfolios side-by-side with teachers are going to be knowledgeable not only about their own children's work but also about changes that teachers hope to introduce into schools. For example, communicating what is meant by "the writing process" can be best accomplished by joining with parents in studying actual pieces in a portfolio from early notes through the drafting and editing processes. Parents and children who have opportunities to reflect on children's progress and to see what Arts Propel called "the biography of a work" in all its growing stages are learning about each other as they learn about learning.

Parent growth needs to accompany teacher and school development every step of the way. Teachers and administrators must remember that omitting parent development risks everything else they are trying to achieve. Teachers are crying out for closer parental involvement. It is hard work and time-consuming for everyone, but it is a fundamental requirement if the children are going to succeed.

ACADEMIC AND CULTURAL PARTNERSHIPS

If hands-on, active learning is the desired goal for students, their teachers need access to the actual pictures painted, stone tools carved, languages spoken, rocks heaved by seismic thrusts, and words written by poets and patriots.

Few or none of these fascinating objects and writings are to be found in textbooks, teachers' manuals, in-service workshops, schools, or teachers' conventions. Discoveries, such as a new phylum of the animal kingdom, the first extrasolar planet circling another star, a new set of ancient scrolls brought out of Judean caves, a new understanding of how cells work, a new poem or play, a new use of computers to compose music--all these and a universe of other ideas and objects, ancient and modern, need to be examined and thoughtfully incorporated into our classrooms.

Teachers need to learn how to seek out such materials, decide which are appropriate for instruction, develop ways of introducing them to children, and evaluate students' learning from them. But much new knowledge is locked up in scientific journals, highly technical Internet discussion groups, and seminars and conferences for which teachers have neither the time nor specialized vocabulary. Although there are a growing number of electronic "field trips" and other projects in which teachers, students, and scholars do science, archaeology, or history together, generally the world of discovery and knowledge across the arts and sciences and in such fields as engineering and architecture is not available in usable forms for teachers to access, synthesize, and prepare for students. At the same time, teachers and scholars need periodic opportunities to reassess the old curriculum, to recast it in light of new discoveries, and to retain the core while incorporating judiciously selected new material. Recently developed high student standards in each of the major school subjects are just that: standards for judging student performance. Creative curriculum and assessments and daily activities designed to meet those standards are supposed to be crafted by teachers. When, where, and how to do that have not been revealed. All this needs to make sense across the curriculum and connect to what came before, and what is to follow. These are not once-in-a-lifetime tasks; rather, they constitute a continuous sifting process that takes concerted effort. Teachers cannot do this job alone.

Higher education institutions as a whole, as well as schools of education, are major resources for teachers' professional development. These institutions are supported by the public either directly through tax revenues, through tax-supported grants and contracts, and in the case of private institutions, through their tax-free status. Higher education and scholarly and scientific societies all benefit directly from such public support because the public believes the advancement of general knowledge is a benefit for all. NFIE urges all higher education institutions and related research societies to recognize the public school teachers of America as a major avenue for transmitting advances of knowledge to the public.

Higher education's central mission--to discover and to educate--should include the professional development of teachers at the core of its work in all fields and all branches of learning. Teachers and districts should invite higher education to become a substantial partner in teachers' professional development in a variety of ways to be determined locally. Higher education, in turn, should acknowledge this work as essential to its mission.

In addition, most communities and regions have an array of other resource institutions that are equally vital to teachers' ongoing learning. These include public and private libraries, museums, historical societies, archaeological and natural sites, arts organizations, businesses, and government resources.

Over the past fifteen years, many of these resource institutions, as well as higher education, have joined with teachers in a host of partnerships that have proven fruitful for student learning but have been overly dependent on grants and weakly linked to schooling. Together with higher education, partnerships with such organizations need to be more strongly linked to effective professional development and with changed practice and content in the schools.

To provide high-quality resources for ongoing, school-based professional development, teachers must recognize the value of these resources, and the resource institutions must recognize their responsibility to teachers. Together, teachers and their partners create a special form of knowledge and skill that partakes of the world outside the school and builds on school-based peer assistance. Both forms of learning and growth are essential to the expanded roles for teachers in modern schools.

Institutions and individuals in the academic, scientific, and cultural worlds need a new set of permanent and powerful relationships with teachers and schools, a meeting place where research and teaching come together on common ground. Reconnecting teaching and scholarship as a dynamic part of public education is a key to restoring public trust in all levels of education.

Many institutions other than schools and colleges have public education missions. Such institutions should be major partners in teachers' professional development as well as student learning. In the late 1970s, the American Association of Museums began to work on reconceptualizing the very nature of museums. The rethinking has placed public education at the center of the museums' mission. More and more museums, archives, and historical societies have opened the heart of their work to teachers and students, encouraging them to get to know the collections and inviting them inside the "staff-only" parts of museums to learn to interpret the collections for themselves. In Philadelphia, the school district has had teachers on the payroll for decades who work full time in the city's major museums. In Toronto, the Science School at the Ontario Science Centre enables teachers to work there on loan from their schools.

Museums have sponsored a rich array of workshops and seminars for teachers and students and are learning how to help make these interactive, collaborative ventures an opportunity for teachers to use collections as curriculum centerpieces. Archaeological sites, architectural treasures, nature preserves, and an almost limitless list of other cultural and scientific resources are forming partnerships with teachers and schools in every part of the country. Most of these outreach programs provide direct services to students; but the best also work closely with teachers to introduce them to the site and its resources beforehand, enabling the teachers themselves to develop appropriate curricular uses of the resources. It is essential that visits to museums should not leave children in the hands of docents while teachers step aside. Teachers and curators should jointly develop curricula in which the museum collections are fully integrated. Field trips should be, not isolated events, but a necessary part of students' work in school. For this, teachers must first learn about the collections in depth and develop curricula suitable for their students.

Artists have found their way into many schools to enrich curriculum. In some programs, such as those sponsored by the Community Programs in the Arts (COMPAS) consortium in St. Paul, Minnesota, artists and teachers from rural as well as urban areas study together to learn how best to devise arts curricula that are then implemented in the schools, studios, concert halls, and theaters of the region.

All these programs are vital resources for schools, but they need to be sustained and powerfully connected to the curriculum. This is the job of teachers working jointly with their partners in the cultural community. Time to enable teachers to learn collections and work with artists and writers is one requirement. Long-range support for sustaining the partnerships is another. Schools are increasingly leaving arts education to the ability of struggling nonprofit organizations to raise grants, an untenable position in the long run. A recent New York City schools chancellor was heard praising the Brooklyn Museum's fine arts education programs and saying that this was going to be how the city's students would learn about the arts. When he suggested that, he must have momentarily forgotten he had nearly 1 million schoolchildren on his hands.

There are 44 million schoolchildren in America, and they all certainly deserve a chance to learn from real objects--authentic documents, archaeological digs, art, poetry, business, nature, and the rest of the real world outside the schoolhouse door. Such learning has proven enormously exciting and effective when done well, but it cannot be made available without tax-based support and deep learning about these resources by teachers.

Specialized associations, teachers' organizations, cultural institutions, and libraries should conduct conversations in each locale about how to secure more permanent support for partnerships and how to make such learning more available at a distance. Our cultural and natural heritage should be a laboratory for professional growth for all teachers and should also figure in preservice education, where it is currently greatly neglected.

Drawing on these resources is fast becoming a necessary area of specialization. Schools are recognizing that fulfilling a broad array of knowledge-based roles may not be possible with school employees alone, and important learning opportunities for students should be organized in other settings. Object-based learning based on museum collections, historical documents, archaeological digs, and science labs is fundamental to learning. Schools everywhere have access to one or more of such resources. Each school should enable designated staff members to learn the collections and sites thoroughly in order to use the potential of these resources well at appropriate points in the curriculum. External organizations are eager to put their resources to use in children's learning; but at present, many do not know where to turn to gain access to the curriculum. Schools need liaisons, teachers who know the children, the school's curriculum and philosophy, and the community's resources well enough to facilitate a productive match. Such liaisons or coordinators would act as contact points between the school and specific learning resources, such as museums or artists.

Each area of expertise requires nontrivial learning for the teacher. A teacher might need more than one full summer to get to know the collection in a single historical society, another teacher could gain expertise in relation to one or more arts in the region, and others could make contact with a local science laboratory or arboretum. Each teacher would also have to combine knowledge of local resources with relevant subject-matter study.

Wisconsin Teacher Enhancement Program in Biology (WTEPB) I am writing to express my profound gratitude for the programming provided by the Wisconsin Teacher Enhancement Program in Biology. I am a third-grade teacher with a master's degree plus twelve graduate credits and thirty-two professional advancement credits. I received the Wisconsin Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award from the Wisconsin Council for the Gifted and Talented in 1986. I state this only to let you know [that] I have always had a love for education and felt I was a dedicated teacher. I also knew, however, that I had a terrible gap in one area of the curriculum--science. Until my first class with WTEPB (formerly named the University of Wisconsin Genetics Institute), my science teaching was almost nonexistent. I could always manage to avoid teaching science because there were so many other areas of the curriculum I could address. I felt guilty. . . . In the spring of 1990 . . . I took a two-week class on the University of Wisconsin campus. . . . This class was the beginning of my transformation into an enthusiastic, enlightened, and confident science teacher. It was a totally exhausting two weeks, but I came away so enthusiastic that I spent the rest of the summer preparing materials for my classroom. . . . I started making contacts on campus, after living in Madison for twenty years . . . but not having the courage to reach out to scientists for help. I managed to get two surplus microscopes from one of the presenters in our class. I had never had a microscope in my own classroom before. In fact, we only had one in our school of 450 students. The following fall, I could hardly wait to try out my hands-on, organized program. My students loved it. Their parents were most appreciative. The first thing my students would do in the mornings would be to check their fast plants, mealworms, fruit flies, or bacteria. We pulled apart flowers to study the parts of a plant and the purpose of each part. The students used the microscopes almost daily. We borrowed chick embryos from Poultry Science, and the students found it fascinating to see the daily development of a chick, even if they were all in preservatives. We borrowed stuffed birds from the Zoology Museum and drawers of insects from the Entomology Department so the children could observe the variation within species of birds and insects as well as among different species. We built models of plants, insects, and birds. We used sea urchins to look at sperm and eggs and then combined them to see fertilization. We drew up pedigrees, made models of offspring based on dominant and recessive genes. We had professors from Soil Sciences and the UW Medical College visit our classroom (and they continue to come each year). We set up composting containers, and this led to a study of ecology. I was hooked. I wanted more. The following summer, I was a facilitator for the "Elements of Biology" class. I also took a new one-week course that was offered by the Genetics Institute entitled "Tools to Teach Elementary Biology." Here we investigated several areas, such as corn, carrots, mosquitoes, and microscopy. As each year passed, I was eager for the new recharge of enthusiasm I received from these classes in the summer. I've taken week-long sessions on microscopy and mosquitoes, which grew out of the "Tools" class. I've also taken the "Cell Biology" class and helped to facilitate it at the Cray Academy in Chippewa Falls and at a two-day seminar for teachers held at Promega, a genetics company in a Madison suburb. Last summer, I facilitated "Science for Head Start, Preschool, and Primary Grades" because requests were coming in to meet the needs of teachers of younger children. I also taught the "Mosquitoes" class at the Cray Academy last summer. During the summer of 1993, I spoke to science professors on the UW campus, encouraging their participation in the Science Scholars Program for undergraduates, where a triad of a researcher, a teacher, and an undergraduate education major would work together to guide the undergraduates in research and then adapt their information into practical classroom materials. I continued with that program in 1994. In February 1995, I sat on a panel of researchers and teachers for "Bridging the Gap." The purpose of this one-day symposium was to help connect teachers with scientists. I also was a presenter representing the Science Scholars Program. Some of my past and present third graders are being mentored by UW researchers and professors. . . . I have gone from avoiding science to being an enthusiastic missionary for reform in science in the elementary schools. I feel this transformation was possible because of the format of the WTEPB. The first commitment was for just two weeks. If it had been longer, I fear I never would have gotten involved. The follow-up one-week modules continued to draw me back each summer because I could slot them into my summer around my own classroom planning, taking classes in technology, and family plans. . . . Elementary teachers need to refresh their curriculum with classes in reading, math, social studies, and new technology, as well as science. The one- and two-week modules are a great way to improve their science programs in an enthusiastic and manageable setting. . . . Programs that are less than a week often leave clever ideas in suspended animation--entertaining but not enough context and time for changes in philosophy or deeper understanding. . . . . . . Following my first class in the program, I was impressed and amazed that the planning committee for the following summer included as many teachers as scientists. . . . This attitude of respect continues. . . . We are taught by scientists! . . . They obviously love the content and process of science, and their enthusiasm is contagious. . . . Professors have often commented that they learn so much from the teachers about exciting ways to present their material that they use some of those ideas with their university students. What a delightful partnership. . . . During the modules, teachers can work in groups to share experiences and activities. Since there is never enough time to do this during the school year, this setting is a powerful environment for change and development. It is a rare and wonderful opportunity to develop teaching materials and techniques in an atmosphere of mixed levels of teachers, having a scientist available to us for accuracy, and the input of the scientist's own refreshing pedagogical style. . . . Of course teachers continue to build on these materials as they have the opportunity to field-test and assess them with students. In this way, the materials are directly relevant, as opposed to the cookbook approach to science instruction. Betty Overland Glenn Stephens Elementary School Madison, Wisconsin

The Science School Since 1982, the Science School at the Ontario Science Centre has provided opportunities for fifty-six high school students a year to study biology, physics, chemistry, calculus, and "Science in Society" in a premier museum environment. The school is supported by Toronto's boards of education and the provincial government. Teachers from the metropolitan Toronto area apply for one-year appointments (which are often extended) at the school, after which they return to their home boards. Although teachers and students have some formal class time together, the program also enables them to explore projects and become an active part of museum work. The job of the museum is to communicate science to the public through the design, construction, and interpretation of hands-on exhibits. Students, teachers, artists, scientists, and others plan exhibits together and design and construct them. Teaching requires deep understanding and the ability to explain visually in three dimensions as well as verbally and numerically. The Science School's work is an intimate collaboration between teachers and museum staff and an opportunity to understand science from the inside out--all for the benefit of students.

BUSINESS AND COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIPS

In many communities, business has become a supporter of schools through myriad programs of giving, volunteering, and working on behalf of fiscally sound, well-managed, and innovative schools. For example, Trail Blazers, one of NFIE's current grantees, includes a business-school partnership that provides professional development for teachers in the latest techniques for computer-assisted design. Housed at the Odyssey School in Rochester, New York, Trail Blazers links staff at Erdman, Anthony, and Associates, Inc., an engineering consulting firm, with teachers from the school to help students build a fitness trail on school grounds. This real-life application of engineering helps students put their mathematics and writing skills to work. According to Jay Jones, engineer and director of professional development, the partnership gives students and teachers access to engineering expertise, sophisticated computer workstations, and state-of-the-art design software the school could not otherwise afford. The company increases its future employment pool of able young people by upgrading the technical knowledge of practicing teachers, and teachers and employers gain mutual understanding of their expectations for young people.

Businesses in a number of cities have pooled their resources to create teacher academies. Businesses have also underwritten local education funds, invited teachers to learn about business through internships, offered to share their own management development programs with teachers, and in a host of other ways strongly supported teachers' professional growth to strengthen the schools.

An important need at this time is for corporate technology developers to work with teachers and students as they consider new products and access to information. Recognizing that the next generation will be familiar with information technologies from early childhood and that this has the potential to revolutionize teaching and learning, the corporate world has a major stake in ensuring teachers' sophistication in using technology and affecting corporate activity in this realm. Private-sector support, friendly criticism, and collaborative work with teachers are vital to school improvement, but both parties need to overcome uneasiness about working more directly with teachers' organizations. Local teachers' organizations can and should become partners with the business community, particularly in promoting professional development opportunities. Business, school districts, parents, and teachers' organizations should honor one another as full partners in school reform.

The multiple roles of business in teacher's professional development should include the continued provision of local support and friendly criticism and the formidable convening power of the corporate world to help create fruitful partnerships and advocate sound policy. Business has preeminently led the way in adopting "learning organization" theory into practice and organizational change. Recognizing how hard it has been and how long it has taken major corporations to restructure, business can perhaps be helpful to schools in publicizing the long-range planning, learning, and implementation phases prerequisite to successful results. As a school board member mentioned in a conversation about the ACT Academy, his corporation had taken many years to effect changes similar to those that ACT was proposing to accomplish in a few months. Successful businesses that invest substantially in human resource development understand its signal importance. The business model for the time and investment necessary to create ongoing learning should be made accessible for all schools.

Business, teachers' organizations, universities, states, and others have already begun to form coalitions to improve public schools. Where they exist, such consortia should direct a major part of their work to teachers' professional development. When teachers' organizations become positive partners with business, teachers' professional development may have a chance to gain the political advocates it currently lacks.

Above all, business should devise rich opportunities for all employees, especially those who are parents, to take an active part in the local schools. Providing time and incentives for such partnerships is a critical need for a society in which the majority of parents work outside the home.

Communities must also be strong partners in education. Every business has a stake in the quality of the local schools' graduates, and every civic and nonprofit organization in the community can and should be a resource to help young people thrive. But resources are inequitably available, and need is inequitably located in our cities, suburbs, towns, and countryside. States have an obligation to assess the professional growth opportunities available and to find formulas for distributing additional support to schools with less access. Teachers in small towns and suburbs have had less access to the major reform efforts of the past thirty years because entitlement funds have been concentrated in large urban centers and poverty areas, but urban areas that are poor in revenues are often rich in cultural resources. Teachers' organizations should become partners with states to assure that teachers everywhere have rich opportunities to learn. If each locale conducts an inventory of learning resources, states can adjust support to locales where teachers might need extra travel funds or computers to support their learning. Assessments of need by states and teachers' organizations should also include assessing the quality of available resource institutions, such as museum collections and science labs. Teachers and schools that are far from the best resources should have access to study-travel allocations in order to explore these resources. Community members and school staffs also need to travel to other communities and schools on a regular basis to learn and to evaluate practices that could be incorporated in their schools.

Students in different communities have inequitable access to computers. The National Center for Education Statistics found computer use higher among whites than among blacks and Hispanics at home and in school (U.S. Department of Education, 1995a). States must ensure that school use rises to a level at which there will be no ethnic or racial differential in student or teacher access to equipment and the Internet.

In a 1994 National Governors' Association (NGA) report, Transforming State Education Agencies to Support Education Reform, Paul LeMahieu and Bonnie Lesley recommend that "educators, parents, business leaders, community members, and the broader citizenry . . . all participate in [a] discourse" on the needs of schools and "contribute to [their] improvement" (David 1994, 26). They also recommend that districts devise a new form of reporting to the community on the state of their schools that will go beyond test scores to a richer and deeper discussion of learning reflective of the kind of vision for schools that NFIE advocates. Jane David, in the same NGA report, suggests that "state education agencies also can communicate new images of teaching, learning, and managing by offering guidance on school self-evaluation and review, modeling what is expected, encouraging risk taking, and aligning evaluation and accountability criteria with these images" (13­14).

Communities will need to learn to be supportive and patient while continuing to be critical of their schools. This will depend on the ability of schools effectively to engage communities deeply in vision setting for students and on the emerging work of students. The case to be made for investing in the human capital in our schools will depend on communities learning as teachers learn what it means to educate all children.

The "We Relationship" The New Iowa Schools Development Corporation (NISDC) was established with the strong support of the Iowa State Education Association (ISEA) and the state's governor. It brings together virtually every major educational policy player in the state. The corporation is funded by a provision in the state budget and is governed by an independent board of directors, which includes representatives from ISEA, the state's area education agencies, higher education, the state legislature, school boards, business, the governor's office, the state board of education, the PTA, and School Administrators of Iowa. NISDC maintains a network of approximately eighty districts, many of which are affiliated with NISDC through membership in a federation with an area education agency that, in turn, is working with the corporation. The network operates according to several guiding principles, including a belief in the local control of, and responsibility for, school reform, a commitment to quality public education for all students, an understanding that positive change in education is based in large part on effective leadership and collaboration, and a recognition of the benefits and rewards of lifelong learning. Through leadership development, school-based improvement, and community collaboration efforts, this network promotes the creation of "new Iowa schools." The success of the enterprise will depend on professional development. NISDC has a large team of advisers who work with participating districts to accomplish the network's objectives. For the most part, these individuals hold positions within school districts where they serve as NISDC facilitators. At least two are presidents of their districts' local teacher associations. NISDC also employs several consultants, chief among whom are Stan Burke, an NEA UniServ director (local teacher representative) from West Des Moines, and Peter Holly, formerly with the Gheens Academy. These consultants work with individual schools on professional development issues, such as the need to establish a climate of collaboration and leadership within buildings, and other teaching and learning issues. Gerald Ott, NISDC executive director, identified the need for a common vision for schools and for a "we relationship" based on a commitment to collaboration. In reflecting on the changing role of the union in school reform, David Wilkinson, an NISDC facilitator who is involved with school improvement issues in the Des Moines Public Schools, said that when collective bargaining began and for many years following, association leaders had one objective: to advocate for members. Now these association leaders are at the reform table, and their obligations are far more complex. Today, they can choose to be educational leaders who work on behalf of students and the community, as well as advocating for members. Rather than sitting outside the arena, they are part of the process.

PROFESSIONAL PARTNERSHIPS

Most teachers enter the field because their hearts are with the children rather than just with their subjects, which is as it should be. In 1991, nearly two-thirds gave as their principal reason for becoming teachers in the first place their desire to work with young people. Only a third gave as a principal reason an interest in subject matter, heavily weighted by senior high school teachers (59.2 percent) and rather light at the elementary school level (16.2 percent) (NEA 1992, 62, 230). Teachers, however, are responsible for transferring a growing amount of knowledge to the next generation, making the need for lifelong study of subject matter more important every year. According to The National Education Goals Report, the percentage of secondary "teachers who held an undergraduate or graduate degree in their main teaching assignment" has decreased since 1991, from 66 percent to 63 percent in 1994. That means a large percentage of our junior high and high school students are learning mathematics or history from teachers with no formal degrees in that field. However, most teachers (93 percent) do hold certificates in fields related to their assignment (1995). Furthermore, although few inquire about degrees in subjects for elementary or middle school teachers, these teachers are the first to introduce the subjects of mathematics, history, literature, and science, and generally do so without having taken more than a course or two in these subjects, at best.

Teachers' connection to and interest in formal study of subject matter has declined during a period when central offices of school districts have increased their control of professional development. This trend is visible in the NEA's 1990-91 Status survey (56), which reported that nearly three-fourths (73.5 percent) of teachers had taken school system­sponsored workshops in that year and that another quarter (24 percent) participated in school system­sponsored summer professional development activities. There was a parallel and substantial drop over the 1971-to-1991 period in the taking of college courses in subjects other than education, from a range of 22 to 40 percent in 1971 to only 4 to 21 percent in 1991.

Some of this shift can be attributed to the aging of the teacher workforce. Younger teachers take more college courses and degree programs than older ones who already have their master's or master's-plus degrees and credits. Even so, the data reveal a general decline in study of the arts and sciences. This trend is very disturbing at a juncture when many education analysts support the need for all teachers to have an undergraduate degree in arts and sciences and when more and more decision making about the content of curriculum is being placed in teachers' hands. The professionally developed student standards presuppose an immensely sophisticated understanding of subject matter at every level, including elementary and middle levels as well as high school. "Authentic" assessments, largely teacher-generated, can only be authentic if they represent a deep conceptual understanding of complex subjects by the teachers setting them and assessing them. The task is daunting for all teachers, and especially so for elementary teachers.

The problem of insufficient subject knowledge is exacerbated by districts' policies that hire and place teachers with and without relevant subject-matter credentials and teaching expertise. Although inner-city and rural districts have difficulty attracting highly qualified teachers and there are perennial shortages in science and mathematics, good teaching at any grade level depends on subject-matter knowledge and the ability to teach it as well as on understanding of children's growth and development.

As we devolve curriculum and assessment design away from district offices and textbook companies to the schools, we must also find ways to make rich and powerful curricular ideas and materials directly available to those staffs. If teachers are to make the most of these new opportunities, they need access to additional information and resources.

Subject-based Professional Development. Judith Warren Little's seminal study "Teachers' Professional Development in a Climate of Educational Reform" (1993) emphasizes that the first principle for professional development is that it must offer meaningful intellectual stimulus to teachers from sources both in and outside of teaching. The second principle is that professional development must be tailored to the context of the workplace and teachers' experience levels. Teachers under ressure to do everything all at once will understandably forestall their longer-range learning and instead deal with immediate crises. Changing teaching approaches and methods, bilingual and special education, organizational and leadership skills, and far and away, technology are the top choices for learning that preoccupy teachers today. Core subjects run far behind these. Yet when teachers do study the content in the right settings, their level of excitement and their desire to share their own new knowledge with their students are extraordinary. In project after project where teachers have engaged in intensive arts and science study, evaluations have yielded strongly enthusiastic results, and all students, including those with learning disabilities, have benefited. Here is the response of one teacher who joined with colleagues in the History Project to study early American historical documents in the very setting in Philadelphia where that history was made:

I remember sitting in the American Philosophical Society and being given information on how to do research in the library. . . . And I remember being in total awe of sitting there in this very prestigious institution, where you can't just walk in, and just thinking "oh my goodness . . . this is just too exciting.". . . which then said to me "Hey, if I think this is pretty cool, I will bet kids might like to be out in a place that is really special too" (Useem et al. 1995, 12).

In keeping with the primacy that they give to student learning, teachers usually measure the usefulness of professional development programs in strict terms of their immediate relevance to their classrooms. Elementary school teachers' autonomy is much greater than that of secondary school teachers, for whom state mandates and college entrance requirements specify numbers of years of English, mathematics, languages, and so on for graduation and for whom college entrance exams and departmental structures, tradition, textbooks, and habit all conspire to produce a virtual national curriculum that differs little from place to place and leaves little room to innovate. Professional development offerings like those experienced by Betty Overland at the University of Wisconsin have a far greater chance of actually influencing curriculum in elementary schools because elementary teachers have far greater flexibility and autonomy and the self-contained classroom, permitting them to use what they learn. The externally offered college- or museum-based programs sponsored by federal and private resources have been and continue to be signally ineffective at the high school level or only temporary aberrations from regular offerings as add-on honors or special electives. They have generally operated apart from the decision-making processes of districts and states. Some have been instrumental in standards development because many of the same teachers who have volunteered to engage in such study have also been tapped to join specialized association work on standards development, but such connections have been happenstance rather than deliberate.

Teachers' excitement with such study depends on the presence of several prerequisites. The program must offer substantive knowledge; respect teachers' intellect; be genuinely collaborative; last for a substantial, uninterrupted time (at least two weeks); include local, readily available, and structured follow-up; be designed to respond to schoolwide requests and teachers' authority to implement changes on a substantial scale in the school; provide both time and opportunity for teachers to make the transition between what they are learning and how to teach it; allow a period of at least three years between the start of intensive study and expectations for broad-scale implementation in classrooms; and allow even more time before that implementation can be evaluated for its impact on student achievement.

This list of requirements is based on evaluations of dozens of major grant-funded attempts to strengthen arts and science teaching in public schools over a ten-year period. The efficacy of such professional development has been proven, but it is as yet unattached to systemic reform. Finding a permanent home and support for such work is fundamental to improving teachers' career-long learning.

Teacher Networks. Teachers are willing to acquire this knowledge and have already taken numerous steps to organize opportunities for lifelong learning. Formally structured, purposeful teacher networks have grown up in a wide array of subjects dedicated to the development of new curricula and more effective teaching. Such networks have revolutionized the two most basic of the basic subjects: writing and mathematics. Alene Tudor participated in both movements, nationwide efforts begun by teachers and sustained by networks of teachers, professors, specialized professional associations, and a host of friends and supporters. In both writing and mathematics, teachers started by honestly confronting the dilemma of an American student population that just wasn't getting it. And in both cases, teachers realized the problem was not the students; it was how they were being taught.

In the case of writing, the discussion began in 1974 among schoolteachers and university English teachers as the Bay Area Writing Project. By 1996, the new approach to teaching writing (the process referred to by Tudor) has reached most of America's elementary teachers and many secondary teachers not only of English but of all subjects across the curriculum. It has also reached most universities, where the writing process approach has created new, separate departments and programs of writing and rhetoric, new professional societies, journals, computer networks, and centers where third-grade teachers and graduate professors interact daily to share their research findings and to build a new discipline together. The new writing discipline was created jointly by teachers and professors from the beginning and has matured with equal contributions from both groups ever since. It has found permanent homes in the National Writing Center at the University of California, Berkeley (partly supported by federal funding), at the Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont, and in school and college partnerships across the country and many abroad.

The mathematics revolution is in full swing, initiated solely by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics in the mid-1980s and spread through NCTM's workshops, conferences, and publications to become the model for state standard setting and general practice from kindergarten through high school graduation. Largely supported by the mathematics teachers' association on its own, NCTM standards are reaching teachers more slowly than the writing process did, but the acclaim the standards have earned will prevail over time in every classroom where mathematics is taught.

The information technology revolution has created new ways of doing basic research in every field and is beginning to take hold in teacher networks as well. For over a decade, the new writing movement has flourished, partly because widely scattered teachers who studied together in the summer on a university campus have gotten together on-line all year to develop research and teaching around their students' work. Discussion groups often bring teachers and students together into the same networks, across the country and even internationally, and across all age groups, to develop their writing, teaching, and assessment. Electronic networks have revolutionized the teaching of writing and, by extension, promise to change fundamentally how teachers conceptualize teaching. Electronic networks break down all barriers of position and status and allow the quality of conversation to determine value. This democracy of learning brings together graduate professors, elementary teachers, and students into a vibrant community of learners and researchers.

NFIE's innovative projects have communicated for years via such moderated forums and discussion groups. At this writing, twenty-two sites are participating in NFIE's The Road Ahead program, a developmental project to connect schools, community agencies, and students to learning with information technologies. Supported with the proceeds from Microsoft CEO Bill Gates's recent book The Road Ahead, sites are electronically networked by a former teacher turned entrepreneur. The moderator asks probing questions, keeps the discussion moving, and makes sure all participants take an active part in the discussion.

Students [Who] Can't Wait for Math to Begin I would like to tell you about three of the most revolutionary experiences any teacher could have. We in Kentucky have reformed every part of our educational system, and I feel we will be an exemplary leader of the next decade. Most of the success of this reform can be attributed to [a number of] excellent programs in professional development. One is the writing program at our universities called "The Writing Project." The one I attended was at Eastern Kentucky University. . . . Every teacher emerges a prophet of the program. . . . The teachers also go forth in the summer to teach workshops, so many [others] are converted this way. Our students are completing excellent writing portfolios, and their ability to express themselves in the fourth grade is amazing. Added to this experience, I attended the "Writing Project Workshop" at Columbia University. . . . This program is an annual event the first two weeks of July. During this experience, I felt like I had died and gone to heaven. In this workshop, the morning was spent with Lucy Calkins motivating, inspiring, and making you think. The afternoon followed in a group setting of twenty teachers under the leadership of a published educator. . . . The third experience I have had that changed my whole teaching method was the "Middle Grades Math Project of Kentucky." I attended two 45-hour sessions from January 1995 to the end of June. Every mathematics class I teach now has exploration, discovery, real-life problem solving, and students [who] can't wait for mathematics to begin. . . . I help teach other teachers to incorporate the NCTM standards into the mathematics program. I feel so lucky to have had these three opportunities to develop as an educator. I wish I could . . . help other teachers experience what I did in New York City. Words cannot describe the profound effect it has had on me as a teacher. . . . Alene L. Tudor White Hall Elementary School Richmond, Kentucky

CREATING A NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR TEACHERS' PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

These grassroots, professionally devised networks, and especially the writing movement, marry teaching and applied research to create common ground for teachers and researchers working together to solve a shared problem. When teachers and researchers get together in genuinely collaborative partnerships, they produce valuable results. Such partnerships overcome the isolation of teachers, build knowledge and skills, and make subject-matter resources available to students. NFIE suggests that teacher-scholar networks in all subjects should be fostered and sustained both locally in new or existing institutions dedicated to professional development and nationally through a national institute. A national institute could house the leading edge of applied research, sustain and encourage experimentation in teaching each subject, and provide demonstrations, models, and exemplary materials for dissemination. It could be a base for visiting, nationally certified teachers to work with scholars and teacher leaders on special projects. It could explore applications of databases in the arts and sciences for school use and sustain electronic networks for teachers.

Sustained funding for such activities and adequate dissemination are the most important ingredients that are lacking in the current reform effort. The National Center for History in the Schools based at UCLA and the Organization of American Historians (a consortium of teachers and scholars from a variety of associations) have for years invited teachers and scholars to join in selecting primary resource documents in history and designing appropriate school activities for various age groups with guides for teachers. The packets are inexpensive, easily reproduced, well laid out, and immensely useful. Several hundred are currently available, with titles such as Women of the American Revolution (grades 5 to 8); The Port Royal Experiment: Forty Acres and a Mule? (grades 8 to 12); The People's Republic of China: Who Should Own the Land? (grades 7 to 10); and The Golden Age of Greece: Imperial Democracy 500­400 B.C. (grades 6 to 12, this one a 168-page book). Work of this kind is basic. It allows a scholar and a teacher to work closely together; sustains professional development for both, as the scholar learns to think about teaching and the teacher reads in depth in current scholarship; and produces a document of value to other teachers and students. Such materials should eventually replace dull textbooks, enabling students to read original documents and, when supplemented with visits to museums in person or via the Internet, view artworks and other related historical objects. The cost of creating such materials is minimal, and schools eventually will be able to reduce textbook purchases substantially by using them instead. The proposed national institute for professional development should ensure that this kind of work is promoted in all subjects. Defining the work and role for a national institute should be carried out by teachers' organizations, specialized professional associations, and scholarly and scientific bodies, all of whom should advise policymakers. The national institute should promote exemplary work to advance teachers' professional development throughout the United States.

CREATING LOCAL HOMES FOR PROFESSIONAL PARTNERSHIPS

In a recent American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) survey, 861 colleges and universities of the 2,594 polled (two-thirds public, one-third private) reported 2,322 partnership programs with schools, most of which were conducted by academics other than teacher educators (Albert and Wilbur 1996). Nearly two-thirds of these partnerships were with high schools, one-third were with middle schools, and another 26 percent were with elementary schools (many programs served multiple levels of schooling, hence the total of levels served exceeds the number of partnerships). More than half of these programs started up in the past five years. The partnerships are largely urban, and slightly over half are devoted to direct services to school students. Only 29 percent are dedicated to professional development for teachers and school administrators.

AAHE houses the Education Trust, an agency that promotes K­16 councils, school-university partnerships to design local goals for students, improve and change school-to-university transitions, support teacher networks and subject-based academic alliances, and generally aim for a seamless education enterprise among all institutions working together on behalf of all local students. The American Association of Colleges and Universities has also done exemplary work in linking schools with higher education for many years that has had a significant impact on improving college as well as school curricula and instruction. Partnerships among schools, universities, businesses, and communities have been flourishing since the late 1970s, when the Ford Foundation began to fashion such partnerships in "local education funds." Currently operating in forty-seven urban areas, public education funds often have strong business and foundation support (Philadelphia; Los Angeles; Denver; Worcester, Massachusetts), have ties to universities and cultural agencies and to school districts, and serve teachers' professional development needs with philanthropic support. Like the K­16 councils, local education funds are not strongly linked to school or state policy. And although their work does great good by designing models of excellence in professional development programming and community partnering, few have been able to effect systemic changes.

Most such university-school partnerships are designed not to create policy change, but to provide critical friends for public education. They often include teachers' representatives on their boards alongside corporate CEOs, superintendents, and school board members, but they also often operate in parallel to the district's in-house professional development work and the teachers' organization efforts to increase school-based decision making. NFIE recommends that local education funds and K­16 councils join forces with teachers' organizations to establish strong links for their work in local schools. Existing alliances and consortia are important first steps, but schools will not change or improve until and unless powerful partnerships are built into the system.

Federal agencies support a number of important efforts to build subject-matter learning into school reform. The National Science Foundation's systemic initiatives in urban, rural, and state settings are designed to build partnerships among schools, universities, and other school reform networks and agencies. The National Humanities Center (NHC) in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, primarily an academic research center, has for some years offered professional development programs for high school teachers in the state. Working with approximately one-quarter of a given school faculty at a time, the NHC helps design seminars and planning sessions to address curricular needs identified by the teachers. Participants describe the program as "10,000 times better than our normal in-service days." Solicited by the teachers and jointly designed with academics, the program spans two years--the first for planning and the second for study. Long-range funding for the NHC's work with teachers and strong links to state, district, and school professional development funding and curriculum policy are needed.

The federal government has provided a legion of teachers with excellent professional development over the years. The content of the programs has been superb; their impact on individual teachers' knowledge has been profound and lasting. But their impact on school change has been minimal. A federal program that was mentioned numerous times by older teachers dates back to the 1960s. Jim Griess, executive director of the Nebraska State Education Association, remembered: "When I taught history, the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) summer institutes helped to provide an excellent professional development experience. It brought interested teachers together to plan and teach units under the guidance of excellent higher education faculty. It was a partnership, and it [repeated] over several summers." Early in his teaching career in 1966 and 1967, James Walsh attended two NDEA institutes for seven or eight weeks in each of those summers. "It opened up my life," says Walsh, who is now superintendent of the public schools in Brookline, Massachusetts, where he encourages all faculty to reach out for learning opportunities in the fields they teach. NDEA programs that flourished nearly thirty years ago continue to form the foundation of learning of many science, mathematics, language, and history teachers. The design and purpose of these programs have been repeated countless times by government and private, nonprofit agencies of all kinds. We know how to do these things. We do not yet know how to make them an effective and fundamental part of school change.

Such national programs profoundly affect individuals and set the pace for high-quality local work, but only the local partnerships can work to instill their learning into the local curriculum. Because the school is the basic unit of change, individuals in the school must study to effect change, and school staffs must have the power to effect change based on that study. Teachers need powerfully connected centers for study, but they also need larger networks and alliances that draw them together with scholars and others working in common cause. Academic alliances are forms of networks that took shape in the 1980s to provide local opportunities for teachers and academics to share study. The earliest of these were foreign language alliances. Even the largest schools usually have only a single teacher of French or Spanish, or at best, two. These teachers spend most of their day teaching beginning levels of the language. Language teachers preeminently need a social context to keep their skills well honed. Without continued practice at advanced levels, teachers run the risk of serious loss of skill. This is as great a need for higher education teachers, who are often equally isolated from other speakers in their languages. Academic alliances flourish in rural areas and small towns where other options for cultural exchange and language use are limited. Operating like subject-based clubs, such alliances of teachers in schools and colleges cost little and benefit all members by creating small study communities in specialized fields. Local partnerships can provide a home base for existing alliances and promote their creation for new subjects to stimulate cross-fertilization among interested teachers and scholars from a variety of institutions.

The WTEPB, which started Overland and her third graders on a grand scientific odyssey, has been available to teachers in every subject area since the 1960s. Study opportunities in the arts and sciences have been funded with grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and private foundations such as the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation, and a host of others, large and small, national, regional, and local. The soul of such programs has been the desire to make available to schoolteachers rich ideas, materials and resources in the arts and sciences, to update teachers on new approaches to these subjects, to provide hands-on experiences for teachers and students, to enter into seamless partnership with the public from kindergarten through graduate school, and to help make learning an exciting exploration for young people well beyond the two-column dullness of textbooks and mechanical scoring of worksheets.

All these programs have had a history of being voluntary for teachers, and most have been designed to attract individual teacher applicants willing to devote a few summer weeks to intensive study with college professors. It is hard to gauge how many teachers have participated over the past thirty years; but in each of NFIE's focus groups with NEA leaders over the past year, some 10 to 20 percent have cited such programs as "the best professional growth experience I have had," often harking back a decade or two to describe a particular science or history program's profound influence. When NFIE surveyed teachers on what policy changes they would recommend to improve their professional growth, 66 percent said they would definitely support and 27 percent said they would probably support the need to "establish professional growth opportunities that provide the means for teachers to collaborate with university faculty, businesses, the scientific community, and cultural organizations."

Legislation in Florida and elsewhere has proven effective in enabling such collaboration. Florida's Teacher Education Act of 1973 created regional teacher centers throughout the state and assigned the responsibility for operating these centers "jointly to the colleges and universities, to the district school boards, and to the teaching profession." By a stroke of the pen, this act legislated the "common search for the most beneficial educational experiences for the students" that higher education shares with public school teachers. The Dade-Monroe Teacher Education Center (TEC) in Miami, for example, is led by a teacher director, includes representation from the local teachers' organization on its board, and for years has collaborated with a number of area universities in a highly productive enterprise designed to provide high-quality professional development opportunities for local teachers. Across the state, the Pinellas County TEC, with its emphasis on Total Quality Management, is a resource for teachers for their work in restructuring schools.

Other states have also passed model legislation. Missouri's 1993 Outstanding Schools Act legislates two separate allocations of 1 percent of state education funds each for teachers' professional development, one for district-level work and the other for state-level work. Each 1 percent works out to approximately $10 million in statewide support. District-level dollars are spent for purposes determined by committees, generally on traditional forms of professional development, such as support to attend conferences and workshops, to bring in speakers, and for curriculum development and materials. At the state level, ongoing investments in such programs as ReLearning and Accelerated Schools are supported through the 1 percent mandate. Some of the state funding is being used to set up regional professional development centers that are expected to become self-supporting after three years.

The Missouri allocation of funds sets an important precedent but is vague about what the centers or districts are to do. Because forward-looking guidance is lacking, much of the work continues traditional forms of professional development. The three-year limit of tax-based support for regional centers should be extended indefinitely to provide a long-term home for this work. Each center will soon be looking for grant support, which is scarce and inadequate; consequently, few have a hope of long-term survival.

Districts, teachers' organizations, and universities have also created model agreements to serve large urban settings. One model for effecting exchange of services is the agreement among Ohio State University (OSU), the school districts in Franklin County, and their local teachers' organizations. This agreement provides university credit available for use by teachers in the participating districts in exchange for opportunities for OSU faculty and students to conduct research and other fieldwork in the public schools (Zimpher 1995). This arrangement has afforded all manner of learning opportunities for teachers in the Columbus Public Schools, whose local NEA affiliate has been instrumental in keeping the agreement alive and active. Columbus Education Association President John Grossman comments, "We need written documents to keep us in business when personalities change." The association has included the "college scrip" arrangement in the teachers' contract in order to use this valuable resource equitably and most effectively.

Other models of state support for professional development partnerships include California's state curriculum frameworks, which were matched with the creation of statewide subject-matter collaboratives where teams of teachers from schools studied together. Kentucky provides $23 per pupil to each school for professional development for school-level use. And in Vermont, teachers' required professional improvement plans are reviewed and approved by local professional standards boards established by a state professional standards board, all of which have teacher majorities.

Features of all these pieces of state legislation need to be combined for long-term support of university-school partnerships and enhanced with strong links to standards for high-quality professional development. Diane Massell and Susan Fuhrman tell us that "part of the resource problem is that staff development lacks political legs" (1994, 50). Specialized professional associations need to be active partners with scholars' associations and teachers' organizations in drafting legislation in order to ensure that their work is formally recognized and powerfully incorporated into what teachers learn. Neither scholars' nor teachers' subject associations have yet gained a power base at the state level, where education is legislated. University power is often exercised in statehouses; in many states, education legislation often reflects the wishes of the largest producers of teachers in the state. But the influence of arts and science power has been singularly missing in state policies regarding teachers' professional development. Teachers' organizations and subject-matter associations can and should reach out to their counterparts in the scholarly world--the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Council of Learned Societies, their respective member associations in each of the arts and science fields, the American Association of Museums, and the American Library Association, to name the most obvious groups--to work together on behalf of strong state legislation for tax-supported local or regional partnerships. Such legislation should be designed to broaden, deepen, and enrich what teachers learn well beyond education-focused subjects in order to bring the world into the classroom and reconnect teachers with researchers in each of the disciplines. And such legislation should pay heed to building into higher education institutions faculty incentives and rewards for such work. These entities, funded by state, district, and university support, should become a permanent feature of the landscape. They should be fully cooperative enterprises between teachers and researchers (and artists, curators, and others), with teachers making up the majority on their independent boards.

The core of the proposed entities exists already in many locales. Business-school partnerships such as the Mayerson Academy in Cincinnati, public education funds such as the Public Education and Business Coalition in Denver, subject-specific work sponsored by state humanities councils such as the Humanities Alliance in Connecticut, museum-based programs such as those centered at the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia, arts advocates such as COMPAS in St. Paul, university-based programs such as K­16 Councils, and untold numbers of other agencies and consortia already serve teachers well in local, regional, statewide, or national programs.

Where such programs already exist, states should support their enhancement to serve all teachers in the region; and where none exist, they can be created by drawing on high-quality expertise from suitable nearby institutions. Where access to high-quality resources is limited, states should provide support for teachers to travel to and hold residencies at available study centers and provide similar support for resource personnel to travel to schools for extended residencies. Enhancing distance learning will also be necessary in many locales but cannot completely supplant in-person, hands-on learning.

Such entities should also become proving grounds for some of the most difficult work in the world, such as developing actual curricula that flesh out subject standards and periodic reviews of how and when to incorporate emerging knowledge into schooling (Wheelock 1995). Discussions of this kind were conducted by the privileged few teachers and scholars who have labored over the past decade to create curriculum standards and frameworks, but all teachers and scholars need to conduct similar conversations at the local level and should probably repeat the process at ten-year intervals. A curriculum cannot be taken off a shelf the day before you begin to teach it. Every teacher needs to be broadly and deeply engaged in its development and periodic revision.

Partnerships should create the common ground where teachers, researchers, curators, artists, scientists, and others can make that transition between what's new and what should be taught, what needs to enter the schools and what else must therefore drop out, and where what's esoteric and theoretical becomes understandable, concrete, and teachable. This is work that has been left to textbook manufacturers most of the time or conducted by a few teachers and scholars working with scarce grant dollars a little of the time, but that needs to become a regular feature of all teachers' work.

Partnerships will need to reach beyond the confines of locally available information and stay in touch with nationally and internationally important developments. They could house and support applied research and communicate it to teachers on-line.

It is vital that participation in partnerships include substantial numbers of faculty from a given school in their programs at any given time and that programs are designed to meet whole-school and whole-department or grade group needs within schools whenever possible. Individual teachers can and should continue their studies on their own and as they choose, but individuals cannot by themselves create lasting change in schools. That has been proven in program after program. School staffs with decision-making authority can and should refer to state standards and reach out to local partnerships for the appropriate, long-range arts and science learning they need to enrich their students' experience.

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN AN ERA OF TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE

NFIE's focus groups revealed that the public views technology as a new "basic," as fundamental for learning as the skills of reading, writing, and calculating. Yet for schools to use technology effectively, their teachers must be trained in its use. Bringing information technologies into the public schools and helping teachers recast their practice to use technology wisely may drive the rest of the professional development agenda more rapidly in the years ahead.

Incorporating technology into schools has been identified as a priority for business leaders and governors, the Vice President's national infrastructure commission, students, and the public. In a recent discussion of public investment in infrastructure, the Economic Policy Institute recommended the creation of a human capital fund to match and support an infrastructure fund (Baker and Schafer 1995). In short, machinery can only be built, maintained, and well used if people are capable of doing the work. America's teachers are hungry not only to learn how to use information technologies but also to adapt teaching to incorporate their use most effectively for student achievement. The Greenberg study for NFIE showed 93 percent of teachers ranking technology as their priority for professional development, equaled only by their eagerness to learn how to involve parents more closely in student learning and by their interest in peer assistance. These three top concerns of teachers are the linchpins of this report.

With this high level of agreement among the public, business, policymakers, and educators, which is perhaps unprecedented in any other education issue, putting technology to work in our schools should be a priority action immediately undertaken by all stakeholders. As of 1991, few of the nation's teachers were regularly using on-line databases (NEA 1992). In such a rapidly changing field, five-year-old surveys are ancient history, but several interesting patterns emerged in that study. Elementary teachers used the equipment significantly more often for instructional purposes than secondary teachers did. This may be due to the ready availability of software for drilling basic skills. But the incorporation of the computer in the classroom has gone far beyond merely allowing the machine to replicate rote learning.

To date, the integration of technology into teaching and learning as a tool for challenging and meaningful study has been more a goal than a reality. The spotty record of success has resulted from teachers' limited access to technology, inadequate or nonexistent planning, rapid advances in hardware and software, antiquated or deteriorating school facilities, and limited budgets for maintenance. Even good technology plans and abundant, state-of-the-art equipment and software, are still insufficient to ensure the integrated use of technology in most classrooms. Well-trained, knowledgeable teachers are essential to successful, high-quality use of information technologies for student learning. Technology cannot be "teacher-proofed," nor can it replace teachers.

Several studies have reported that information technologies used wisely substantially increase achievement in schools (Fletcher 1989; Sivin-Kachala and Bialo 1995). In addition to building skills, technology can motivate students to become self-starters and researchers, improve their writing, find multiple ways of presenting their conclusions and arguments, interact confidently and productively with peers and adults, and see themselves as successful problem solvers. Wise use of information technologies, however, means more than just replicating traditional teaching devices; it also means exploring the ways in which technologies can promote unique and more effective approaches to learning in all areas. Early uses of computers, for example, often focused on drill exercises that allowed each child to practice isolated skills in subjects such as grammar or arithmetic. Such work mimics paper and pencil or oral rote learning but provides for individualized practice, self-selected pacing, and instant feedback in a motivating, nonjudgmental environment as a student moves forward through a program of exercises.

Computer drill can individualize skill acquisition or enable students to succeed where traditional rote methods have failed. But using technology to stimulate the extensive use of writing and revision as a mode of communication is widespread, and encouraging students to conduct research, produce multimedia presentations of their findings, interact with specialists in the subjects they are studying, collaborate on learning projects with students around the world, stimulate inquiry and problem solving, and even create brand-new knowledge are among the more sophisticated approaches being tried by teachers with students at all age levels.

Professional Development in Technology. To create such student-initiated uses of technology, teachers need extensive professional development. NFIE has learned that teachers need to become confident users of the equipment and of appropriate software; they need to interact with the technology tools in ways that will model their expectations for students; they need to refocus their own role as guides and coaches; and they need to build on electronically linked networks of their peers with similar teaching interests. Becoming confident and capable teachers who use technology to its full potential for children requires sustained on- and off-site mentoring and professional development. Given that innovations in technology are proceeding at a dizzying pace, this professional development may need to continue at a high level of intensity for all teachers for a considerable stretch of time.

Most teachers report that they have not received adequate professional development to integrate technology into their classroom activities (Anderson 1993). Most training offered to support teachers' use of technology occurs in workshops outside of classrooms and is limited to operational aspects of hardware, software, or networking (U.S. Congress 1995). Informal peer-to-peer assistance and individual study, the other most common ways teachers learn to use information technologies, rely on individual initiative and happenstance access to experienced, technology-using educators.

Technology-related professional development should be multilayered, mixing operational workshops with modeling by expert teachers, in-classroom coaching, small-group practice, and other formats that have a specific purpose and that are focused on the needs of particular groups of students.

For example, the Tennessee Education Association (TEA) saw the need to provide an introduction to instructional uses of technology for teachers who had limited experience with computers and were hesitant about their ability to use computers in the classroom. TEA developed a classroom-focused professional development program that became the model for the state. In addition to workshops held at the TEA Technology Classroom in Nashville, the staff provided customized professional growth experiences for school faculties throughout the state.

The NFIE teacher survey confirms that NEA members of all ages and levels of experience are eager for professional development in technology. Libby Black, director of the Boulder Valley Public Schools Internet Project, explains that there are two ways to use the Internet: (1) to support the way teachers already teach and integrate it into the existing curriculum and (2) to help change the way teachers operate in the classroom. "The latter is much more difficult." It requires redesigning the curriculum. She says that Boulder Valley is trying to figure out how to structure staff development to facilitate this end. Black says that one tries to support teachers with the vision of technology's potential for teaching and learning. It is important to align this with content standards and new instructional approaches. "I don't know exactly how to go about integrating all of these things," says Black.

No one quite knows how to do what Black--and most teachers--are aware needs to be done. NFIE has been supporting teams of educators nationwide for a decade to try to find out and currently supports thirty-two nationwide projects exploring a broad array of pilot programs. After years of research on technology-rich environments, Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow acknowledged the crucial role of professional development in the successful instructional use of computers by creating four professional development resource centers in schools around the country.

Changing Roles for Teachers. What we have learned so far is that the use of information and multimedia technologies can accelerate changes in teachers' roles. Such changes, including becoming coaches and facilitators of student-initiated work, are hastened when students are placed at the controls of the technology and hence in direct touch with information unmediated by textbooks, manuals, and prescribed activities. Teachers learn to step aside from the front of the classroom to let students become organizers of their own learning and creators of knowledge. Although such role shifts are occurring in relation to teaching in general, technology use precipitates the changes.

For example, one of the Vermont middle school teachers who participated from 1992 through 1994 in a statewide project supported by NFIE's Learning Tomorrow program reported what happened when his students gathered information to prove or disprove a group-developed hypothesis regarding a current public policy issue:

There was no way I could do it for them. . . . The technology combined with the number of issues both allowed and forced the change in the expectations of the students. . . . My role was to help with spelling and buy more cardboard! . . . My class had enjoyed the "new way of learning" in which they were given choice and responsibility. (Lewis 1994, 2)

Another teacher who took part n the Vermont project wrote:

The students received direction and information electronically (by computer and modem). This was a totally new experience for these students. Not only did they learn about a specific topic, but they had to learn how to use new hardware and software. Eighth period became a whole new way to learn. . . . Students need to know that they are capable learners. This project allowed students to discover that they can learn on their own with some direction from an adult. For the first time ever, these students conducted research, collated data and presented their findings without having a teacher in front of them [every day] telling them what to do. They emerged as independent learners able to find and do what they needed to be successful with this project. I was very proud of my students for what they accomplished and hope they will continue to have opportunities to learn this way and be independent thinkers. (Donahue 1994, 1, 3)

At the start of the project, students could read graphs; at its conclusion, they were producing and entering their own graphic and other supporting data. They learned mathematics, science, and geography and improved their reading and writing. They took over the class. The teachers "learned along with [the] students" (Barry 1994, 8). The learning about technology and public policy was as great for teachers as it was for students; and for teachers, it was a whole new way of experiencing teaching and learning. Students quickly became adept at consulting legislators, scholars, parents, and community members as easily as their other cyberspace partners and each other. In one of the Vermont schools, parents demanded the entire curriculum shift to project-based learning as a result of the success of the program.

NFIE has discovered that many schools find it necessary to establish the role of technology coordinator. Among the responsibilities of a technology coordinator are advising administrators and teachers on the selection of hardware and software and providing the technical assistance necessary for other faculty members to integrate technology into the curriculum. This work needs to be rooted in instruction and in the evolving understanding of how technologies support student-centered learning. The duties of a technology coordinator, however, often become the de facto responsibility of a teacher who happens to be an enthusiastic early adopter of technology in the school and are simply added to his or her other teaching duties. Standards for fulfilling such a role, reduced duties of other kinds, and time to work with colleagues all have yet to be worked out.

NFIE also found from its many technology projects that some of the new technology roles tempt interested educators out of teaching. Although electronic networks can help teachers overcome isolation by connecting them with others who share their interests in learning communities, the success of these on-line communities depends on the existence of people who stimulate discussion and pass on the best of their learning to others. Such networks, as well as those for student use, have created a need for moderators who facilitate on-line discussion and provide technical assistance to users and for on-line editors who edit and publish informative discussions among communities of learners. Teachers who become interested in supporting electronic collegial networks usually find that they must leave teaching because existing parameters, such as district boundaries or school hours, do not accommodate their engaging in such intensive on-line work. That much of the best such work in education has been supported by limited-term grants (e.g., Breadnet and NFIE's electronic networks) exacerbates the situation. To sustain their new roles, these teachers often either go to work for technology companies that market products to education or become independent entrepreneurs. Teachers' organizations, states, districts, and education technology specialists should initiate discussions to consider how to support these new teaching roles, to design them, to develop standards for them, and to find appropriate homes for them. Some of these roles should be housed in schools or districts; others serve entire states, regions, and the nation and could best be housed in state, regional, or national organizations.

Some of the most powerful technology resources, such as large historical and scientific databases and multimedia development tools or three-dimensional rendering software originally created for business or scholarly research, are not practical for instructional use in their "pure" form and must be mediated before teachers find them adaptable to K­12 learning. These tools can be the source of the most current and accurate information in the subjects and can enable students to learn in new ways. They are, however, often very complex. A user must have not only the subject-matter knowledge but also the time to become adept at gaining access to and using each of these resources and the instructional-design knowledge to figure out how they can be applied to specific curriculum objectives. Without such help, these rich sources for learning are bypassed by K­12 teachers. Teachers and scholars need to work together to make these technology resources accessible to teachers and applicable to student learning.

Professional organizations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Library Association, and the American Council of Learned Societies should join with teachers' associations of all kinds in promoting this fundamental work to make emerging research bases, texts, documents, images, and other information available and accessible to all public school teachers and students.

A recently organized consortium, the National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage, proposes to link major American art and museum collections, libraries, archives, historical documents and databases, and related research conversations. As such interconnections develop, it is crucial that teachers have a major presence at the table to assist in designing them for school use. To date, the national discussions of the "information superhighway" have not sufficiently reflected either scholars' or teachers' needs, nor have they provided avenues for scholars and teachers to make common cause. Their respective professional associations urgently need to join hands to assure that information resources are accessible in forms that will readily welcome students and teachers into a new adventure in learning. We cannot rely on the commercial sector to serve this function. Although commercial services have developed for the delivery of knowledge on-line in a form accessible to teachers and students, the connection of schools to scholarship is not likely to be a profitable enterprise. Large successes such as National Geographic Kids' Network are few. The more challenging and demanding the conversation and the subject matter, the more an on-line moderator will be needed.

A Glimpse of the Future. We are facing an era when the creation of knowledge will increasingly take place in schools, where staff and students create small communities of learners, and in cyberspace, where these learners will be linked to the world. Not every teacher in the future will be working in schools. Some will be responsible for networking teachers and students via the Internet; some will be responsible for mediating and relating information available from the Internet so that it is useful to teachers and students. These teachers need a place to inhabit and a permanent position to fill that is vital to the development of educational technology. States should begin to recognize that need by supporting such positions, and resources should be made available for teachers to band together to develop models and standards for their work.

Identifying ways to address the organizational, developmental, and professional issues that emerge as a result of teachers assuming these new roles is a major priority. The responsibilities, structure, and compensation for these positions are among the questions that must be addressed if large numbers of teachers are going to use technology as a tool to facilitate active student learning.

Some technology leadership roles must be filled by experienced teachers familiar with the local students; others require expertise in curriculum design, subject matter, information retrieval, and technology applications. If we fail to provide positions in our schools for gifted technology users, we will continue to lose them from the teaching ranks. Although the work of these former teachers serves education in the most fundamental sense, rarely does our educational system provide a place and the incentive for expert technology-using teachers to remain in schools working with their colleagues to improve student learning.

Part-time, periodic staffing assignments to local partnership entities and the national institute to carry out technology-based work should be a goal for teachers' organizations, specialized associations, states, and districts. Joint appointments in districts and universities or partnerships for teachers expert in professional development for peers and computer-based instructional research is another option.

The issues that must be considered in making technology a useful tool for schools provide a metaphor for this entire report and press hard for change in every aspect of a teachers' learning. Teachers and students need time to work with computers, resources to invest in productive learning, leadership to access valuable instructional approaches, and partners in the community, business, universities, and states to pull it all together meaningfully so that students--and they are what this is all about--can learn.

Let us end where we began, with the words of a teacher. Barbara Heinzman teaches fifth grade in Geneva, New York. Her district is a Learning Lab, one of the NEA's network of site-based decision-making demonstration schools, and is also the recipient of NFIE support.

As I reflect upon the last twenty-five years of my life as a teacher, I never thought that anything could be as fresh and as exciting as my first few years of teaching. How wrong I was! Over the years, I've been to innumerable workshops, attended conferences that promised to solve all of my problems, and participated in programs that were the answer to--well, I'm not sure what. Throughout those years, I came to realize that there is no one answer to all the problems we as teachers face in the classroom. There are no "cure-alls". . . . Then, thanks to our superintendent, George Kiley, and my principal, Mary Luckern, came the computers and the training to go with them. Six computers were set up in my room. . . . It was exciting, but very overwhelming. Could I do this and everything else, too? . . . For me, the past three years have been the best.

Maintaining this level of enthusiasm for teaching and learning is the goal of this report. Professional development in using technology and seeing students succeed as a result should make every classroom in America an adventure for students and teachers that prepares students for their future and that leaves the twenty-five-year teaching veterans in those classrooms eagerly preparing themselves to keep on learning something new.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Find Common Ground: Work with the Community to Provide High-Quality Professional Development

Teachers are emerging from the isolation of the classroom to reach out to peers, to parents, to other professionals, and to community resources. To achieve success for all students, existing partnerships must be strengthened and new partnerships created in every locale and at the national level, and information technologies should be used throughout. Partnerships will support student learning in and out of school and create networks of learners among students, parents, teachers, scholars, artists, scientists, curators, librarians, business, and community. To bring the world to the classroom and raise young people for success in the world, teachers and their partners will have to create a new common ground.

1. Involve Parents, Business, and Community

At the local level, parents, business, and the community should continue to help schools set the vision for students' success and support teachers' learning. Business should provide employees greater time and opportunity to be active partners in teachers' and students' learning. Parents, communities, and business should work in partnership with schools to reach these goals.

2. Community Inventory and Plan

Teachers' organizations should collaborate with districts to invite local leaders to join in conducting an inventory of available local resources and institutions for teachers' professional growth, including higher education, business, cultural, scientific, and other relevant agencies. "Higher education" should be understood to include entire institutions in all fields and branches. Having conducted the inventory, these partnering institutions should prepare a plan to join with teachers and districts for long-term collaboration for teachers' professional development. Districts and schools should support teachers' incorporation of the results of this professional development in instruction. Schools should provide time and opportunity for teachers and parents to become partners in the education of students. States should review local inventories and partnership plans to produce statewide analyses of teachers' access to high-quality resources for professional development. Based on these findings, states should develop plans for assuring that such access is sufficient for all teachers.

3. Establish New or Enhance Existing Partnerships

Many local entities--called teachers' "centers," "academies," "partnerships," "local education funds," or other designations--have been established by districts, states, businesses, higher education, and others over recent years to bring teachers together with other professionals for learning. Each district and state should assure that teachers and resource providers enhance existing entities or establish new ones where teachers, librarians, scholars, scientists, artists, information technology specialists, and others can conduct work they hold and create in common. This work differs both from the profession-building work of peer assistance based in schools, on the one hand, and from scholarship, curatorship, and artistry conducted outside of schools, on the other, and therefore can best flourish in a setting understood to create common ground for both. Each state should assure that partnerships to conduct high-quality professional development, curriculum and assessment development, and the development of technology-based teaching and learning are accessible to all teachers in that state.

4. National Institute

The federal government should establish a national institute for teachers' professional development to support exemplary work that builds the profession. Teachers' organizations should join with specialized associations for educators, scholars, scientists, librarians, museums, and policymakers to develop the national institute.

5. Information Technologies

Local and national partnerships and entities should make information technologies an integral part of their planning and development and should help teachers use these technologies to maximum benefit.