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

The preparation of this report was supported by The George Gund Foundation, The Pew Charitable Trusts, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and The National Foundation for the Improvement of Education. NFIE wishes to acknowledge and thank the 2.2 million members of the National Education Association for their support of excellence in education.

Prepared by Judith Rényi
Executive Director

This report is dedicated to all who go to school to teach and to learn.

• Overview
• Summary
• Recommendations

Overview

To improve student achievement, public schools must weave continuous learning for teachers into the fabric of the teaching job. This work can and should be initiated by the teaching profession itself in partnership with other educators, communities, districts, and states.

Teachers' Primary Concern: Student Achievement

NFIE's national survey of more than 800 teachers found that their top reason for participating in professional development is to bolster their ability to help students learn. Almost three in four said they engage in professional growth to improve student achievement (73 percent) and a majority (55 percent) said they participate in professional development to improve their teaching skills.

Finding the Time to Build Professional Development
into the Life of Schools

Ask teachers what they need in order to do a better job, and the first response is always "more time." Teachers not only work while in front of a class, but also frequently need to prepare as many as five different lessons every day as well as correct papers and mark tests. Yet somehow they are expected to find their own time to develop and update their knowledge and skills to maximize student learning. Time must be made available so that professional development for teachers can become a seamless part of the daily and year-long job as it is in other countries. Many high-performing corporations also have built learning into the job for all of their workers. For American schools to become such learning enterprises, they must rearrange their schedules to make better use of existing time and make new time available for teachers to learn and keep abreast of change.

Helping Teachers to Assume Responsibility for
Their Own Professional Development

While teachers are trained professionals, they have been allowed little control in the past over their professional lives. NFIE has found that the most effective schools are those in which teachers make the important decisions about their teaching and the life of the school as a whole. In these schools, teachers' responsibilities have grown beyond their isolated classroom walls to embrace the success of all children and adults who work in the school. Helping students achieve high standards of learning entails continuous improvement in teaching and expanded leadership roles for all teachers, including providing peer assistance and review.

Finding Common Ground: Working with the Community
to Provide High-Quality Professional Development

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.

Finding the Revenues to Support High-Quality
Professional Development

Full information on how much states and districts currently spend on professional development is not available. Various studies recommend increasing expenditures by specific amounts or percentages, but the job of teaching envisioned and recommended by this report suggests a long-range goal of institutionalizing such expenditures and requiring all education funds to be supportive of teaching and learning. New expenditures may also be necessary to build high-quality professional development into the foundation of the teaching job. These can be calculated if states and districts will undertake an assessment of their current professional development expenditures, agree with teachers' organizations on appropriate measures of professional development effectiveness, and gain public support for new appropriations as needed.

Summary and Recommendations

Every profession has a system through which its members can hone skills, improve practice, and keep current with changes in knowledge, technology, and the society it serves. Doctors, lawyers, architects, accountants, and engineers regularly participate in workshops, seek advanced degrees or certification, and serve as or work with mentors. Professionals in most fields routinely network with fellow practitioners, conduct and review research, and talk to experts and colleagues about new trends, thorny issues, and plans for improvement.

These opportunities for professional growth and renewal often take place within the workplace and are integrated into the daily life of the practitioner. Opportunities to develop professionally not only benefit the individual in shaping and performing his or her craft but also help ensure that best practice is everyday practice and that the most effective approaches are used. In fact, the ability of practitioners to engage in ongoing, high-quality professional development is a hallmark of enterprises that are known for high performance and that, not surprisingly, enjoy sustained public confidence.

Unfortunately, the nation's schools fail to provide adequate professional development for teachers. Today's teachers are expected to keep abreast of new knowledge, individualize instruction for a diverse population of students, help all students achieve high standards, introduce new technologies into the classroom, become expert in student growth and development, help manage the school, and reach out to parents and the community. America's teachers are striving to do all this and more, but they find themselves pressed for time and opportunities to learn. Teachers should work collaboratively; yet all day they are isolated from other adults. Neither the time nor the telephones
are available to communicate with other professionals in or outside
the schoolhouse.

Improving the Bottom Line

As in other fields, the goal of professional development in schools must be to improve results, not simply to enhance practice. Teachers are clear about their priority: The goal of professional development for teachers is increased student learning.

Asian and European nations regularly invest in opportunities for teachers to upgrade their skills, observe exemplary teaching, plan lessons, and work collegially. Japanese teachers, for example, spend roughly 40 percent of their working day on professional development and collegial work, compared with only 14 percent for American teachers. American business recognizes that learning is part and parcel of every job in a learning organization. Business restructured in the 1980s and government in the 1990s to build professional learning into the workplace. Now is the time to do so in our public schools.

Parents and the public also know that teacher quality is crucial to student success. That is why parents go to great lengths to ensure that they have the best teachers for their children and why they protest so vehemently when they perceive that a teacher does not meet their standards. Research by The Public Agenda Foundation indicates that the public expects teachers to teach the basics and to elicit higher levels of achievement from students. Public Agenda's research for The National Foundation for the Improvement of Education (NFIE) further indicates that the public recognizes the need for better partnerships between teachers and parents and for schools to view information technologies as a new "basic" that all students must learn if they are to prosper in school and in life.

Teachers themselves recognize that the goal of their effort to reinforce their own teaching skills must be to improve student learning. Greenberg Research, Inc., and The Feldman Group, with support from NFIE and the National Education Association's (NEA) Research Department, conducted the first ever national survey of teachers' own views of what they value in professional development and what they think would be most effective in improving their ability to serve students. Nearly three-fourths of teachers surveyed identified helping students learn as the first priority for professional development. One respondent defined "professional growth" as "any course of action that [I] can work on to improve [my] teaching skills to better serve students." Most respondents used phrases such as "keeping up" to define professional growth--keeping up "with technology," "with [the] latest trends," "with my field," and so on. "Updating," "continuing," "becoming," "improving," and "increasing" abilities to serve students were at the heart of the responses. Other teachers said, "improving my own skills as a teacher, as a colleague"; "[to] teach better [and] help my students"; "we are all learners [and] must grow if children are to grow"; "learning cooperatively with students, teachers, parents"; "meeting the needs of the students"; "to be a better teacher"; "becoming a better teacher"; and the poignant "being better than
I was last year."

NFIE asked teachers to think "back over your professional life since you began teaching full-time, [and describe] the one formal or informal professional growth experience which has had the most profound effect on you as a teacher." Our survey respondents mentioned specific courses, seminars, workshops, and degree programs 30 percent of the time. They also ranged far beyond these formal, traditional means of learning, however, to name the day-to-day work of a teacher, including collegial interactions and the success of their students.

What made these experiences so profound and rewarding? Once again, students came first. Above all, survey respondents said that professional development helped them understand students better (Figure 1).

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

Research findings support the connection between teacher learning and student performance. For example, students' achievement in science and mathematics is linked directly to the extent to which their teachers have had substantial formal education in these fields. For the use of technology to enhance student learning in various fields, findings are beginning to emerge that show teacher competence directly linked to student learning. Professional preparation for teaching, formal certification, and formal induction programs are also linked strongly to student achievement. Research findings are emerging on the connection between school-based, peer-assisted learning and student achievement as well. The research base is clear for both beginning and experienced teachers: Sustained, in-depth teacher learning connects directly with student results. These links depend, however, on teachers' ability to apply their learning to their teaching assignment. When teachers' choices for learning connect closely with teaching assignments and school programs, students flourish. One-shot, district-determined, short-term programs have little effect on either teachers' or students' growth.

• has the goal of improving student learning at
  the heart of every school endeavor;
• helps teachers and other school staff meet the future needs of students who learn in different ways and who come from diverse cultural,
  linguistic, and socioeconomic backgrounds;
• provides adequate time for inquiry, reflection,
  and mentoring and is an important part of the normal working day of all public school educators;
• is rigorous, sustained, and adequate to the long-term change of practice;
• is directed toward teachers' intellectual development and leadership;
• fosters a deepening of subject-matter knowledge, a greater understanding of learning, and a greater appreciation of students' needs;
• is designed and directed by teachers, incorporates
  the best principles of adult learning, and involves shared decisions designed to improve the school;
• balances individual priorities with school and district needs and advances the profession as a whole;
• makes best use of new technologies;
• is site based and supportive of a clearly
  articulated vision for students.

New Demands for a New Era

Changing times require that schools become learning enterprises for teachers and for students. The way teachers currently learn on the job was designed for teachers of an earlier time before the public grew concerned with higher standards and improved performance for all students.

Today, teachers are no longer perceived as mere functionaries handing out and collecting materials prepared by commercial or bureaucratic sources outside the classroom. Modern teaching and learning are no longer packageable and require sophisticated approaches to teacher development and to the organization of the workplace where teachers spend their days.

Today, all students are expected not only to learn the basics but also to master new information technologies in order to enter a world of work where there are fewer and fewer routine jobs, where a career will span a number of different jobs of varying complexity, and where flexibility and teamwork are necessary to make the grade throughout life. Today, school faculties are taking on more responsibilities for student growth, tailoring curriculum and assessment to meet student and community needs, and even managing the school.

Today's teachers must take on new roles within the school and be able to teach young people from diverse backgrounds by drawing on a large repertoire of subject matter and teaching skills. Teachers now must be sensitive to varying social demands and expectations; must be able to diagnose and address the individual learning and development needs of students, including special emotional, physical, social, and cognitive needs; must be able to use information technologies in all aspects of their work; must make important decisions about what and how much to teach of the overwhelming amount of new knowledge being created in every field; and must reach out more effectively to parents and the community than ever before.

Meeting Public Expectations

The public has made it clear that this is a time for improved results in American education. To help achieve those results, teachers need time to master new knowledge and to work with their colleagues and with partners to build on what they know. They need flexible scheduling and an extended year to integrate professional growth into the structure of the school day. Teachers need time to develop expertise in using information technologies to develop new pathways to knowledge for students. And they need opportunities to build meaningful partnerships with parents, businesses, and educational and cultural institutions to create exciting new learning experiences.

Other changes are needed as well. Teachers need opportunities to take on new roles within the school, serving as mentors, facilitators, community liaisons, curriculum development and assessment experts, and managers of change. In the words of Gerry House, superintendent of the Memphis City Schools and a member of the NFIE Board of Directors, "Conventional wisdom says that principals must be lead teachers. The fact is, teachers can take the lead. We need teachers to become leaders and principals to be leaders of leaders."

Because helping students achieve requires the collaborative work of many adults in each school and community who share responsibility for educating students, teachers must participate in the collective growth and development of other teachers in the school. A fundamental part of that work is the continuous improvement and growth that changing times, changing students, and a changing society necessitate. Expanded roles for teachers must include opportunities to provide peer assistance and review. For teachers to take charge of their learning, they and their organizations must play a role in enabling all teachers to become even better. If after sustained assistance by specially prepared peers some do not meet professional standards of practice, they should be counseled to leave the profession. Collective bargaining, where it exists, and advocacy can be major avenues for bringing about NFIE's recommendations. Teachers' organizations and partnering districts, states, and others can together make this vision a reality.

This report explores the conditions and policies needed to incorporate teachers' learning into the very fabric of their daily work in our schools. It identifies the incentives, processes, policies, and structures that support wise, shared decisions about teachers' own learning and that of their colleagues, the better to serve their students.

The report challenges principals and other school administrators, working with teachers and existing resources, to create workplaces that support teachers' ongoing professional development. It challenges educators and communities to find a way to measure accurately what resources are devoted to professional development and to ensure that sufficient resources are available and well spent. The report also challenges teachers and community leaders to create time for teachers' learning and partnerships with community institutions that will nurture teachers' growth and students' success.

Major Recommendations

Find Time to Build Professional Development into the Life of Schools

Teachers spend almost all of their school days and school year in direct contact with students. This time is precious and should not be reduced. Yet time for teachers to plan and review student work, mentor and observe other teachers, study, develop new programs and methods, hone leadership skills, and manage student learning and the work of the school is essential to good teaching in the classroom. Some of the ways to find time for this work include:

1. Flexible Scheduling

Reorganize time in the school day to enable teachers to work together as well as individually both daily and weekly and throughout the year.

2. Extended School Year for Teachers

Redefine the teaching job to include both direct student instructional time and blocks of extended time for teachers' professional development. Extend the length of the school year, allowing for up to four weeks for teachers' professional development while students are on vacation. Organize the teachers' year to include intensive, sustained study by staff as determined by school-based decisions directed toward increasing student learning. Intensive study should be supported by year-long follow-up.

Help Teachers to Assume Responsibility for Their Own Professional Development

In the past, teachers have been told what to do and given minimal tools with which to do it. Evaluating their performance was a matter of checking off a list of whether they did what they were told. In today's effective schools, however, teachers make important decisions about their own teaching and the school as a whole, know and understand child development and the children they teach, share responsibility for all the children in the school with their colleagues, and take part in building professional knowledge with their peers. Teachers' responsibilities have grown beyond the isolated classroom walls to embrace the success of all children and adults who work in the school. Expanded responsibilities entail teachers' assuming expanded roles.

To enhance student learning in modern schools means to practice high standards for teaching, to assist one's colleagues, and to be assisted in reaching and maintaining those standards. Some ways of achieving this level of professionalism include:

1. School-based Professional Development

Professional development in schools should be based on an
analysis of the needs of students in those schools and should be consistent with the district's mission and professional standards.

2. Standards and Accountability

Professional development goals and plans should be decided locally by the school community of teachers, administrators, and parents. Standards for student learning and standards for professional practice should guide the design, conduct, and evaluation of professional development, and these standards should recognize and measure teachers' expanded roles.

3. Balancing Individual Teachers' and School Needs for Learning

Individual teachers should design their professional development plans to fulfill their schools' needs for expertise. Schools should recognize teachers' individual as well as whole faculty interests in pursuing professional development.

4. Peer Assistance and Review

Teachers should assume responsibility for their continued growth and effectiveness. Teachers and administrators should collaborate in each district to create peer assistance and review to nurture the practice of all teachers and to counsel out of teaching those who, after sustained assistance by their specially prepared peers, do not meet professional standards of practice.

5. Expanded Roles for Teachers

Teachers should study new instructional approaches, subject matter, and skills that enhance instruction, such as the use of information technologies, interpersonal and management skills, and skills for reaching out and including parents, business, and community resources in children's learning. Teachers who have gained such expertise should have multiple opportunities and time to fulfill expanded roles and to exercise leadership. Principals and other administrators should recognize, honor, and support teachers in these expanded roles.

6. Induction of Teachers

The induction of novices into teaching is dealt with in a report issued by the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future. In addition to the induction of novices, every school should organize a substantial, year-long program through which its faculty will introduce new colleagues who are experienced teachers into the philosophy and operation of the particular school and help them refine their practice.

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

To enhance teachers' knowledge and skill so as to serve students more effectively, teachers need partners. Their primary partners are the students' parents. Community, state, and national resources for high-quality professional development are also integral to improving student achievement through teachers' ongoing learning.

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 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 conduit through which advances in knowledge are transmitted to the public.

Higher education institutions' central mission--to discover and to educate--should include teachers' professional development in all fields and all branches of learning. Teachers and districts should invite higher education institutions to become substantial partners in teachers' professional development in a variety of locally determined ways, and higher education institutions should acknowledge this work as essential to their mission.

In addition, most communities and regions have an array of other resource institutions that are 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 high- quality professional development partnerships. Few of the programs, however, have survived without grants. Partnerships with academic and cultural institutions need to be more strongly linked both to effective professional development and to changed practice and content in the schools.

To promote high-quality, 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 can create new knowledge and skill that partake both of the world outside the school and build on school-based peer assistance. These two forms of learning and growth are essential to the expanded roles of teachers in modern schools. The recommendations that follow seek to establish new, long-term, and vital partnerships among teachers, schools, and other educational and cultural agencies for high-quality professional development.

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.

Find the Revenues to Support High-Quality Professional Development

The work ahead must begin with finding out reliably what is already being spent on teachers' professional development, whether it is being spent efficiently, and whether it is adequate to keeping up with change and enabling students to flourish. States and districts should work with community partners and teachers to reallocate existing and appropriate new revenues sufficient to guarantee standards-referenced, quality teaching and learning in every public school. The long-range goal over a period of ten to twenty years should be to rebuild the education system so as to dedicate all work in schools, all management, and all district, state, and federal K­12 education expenditures and activities to improving teaching and learning as measured by suitable standards for student achievement and teaching practice. Interim steps toward this reconception of the teaching job and school organization would include:

1. Identifying Existing Expenditures

States and districts should work with teacher and community organizations to identify current expenditures specifically dedicated to teachers' professional development, reallocate existing expenditures as appropriate to realizing expanded teachers' roles, and determine the needed level of expenditure for professional development to accomplish student success. New or enhanced entities for local partnerships should allocate district and community funds for supporting teachers' professional development.

2. Establishing Appropriate Measures of the Effectiveness of Expenditures

Districts, states, teachers' organizations, and specialized associations should agree on appropriate standards for measuring the effectiveness of public expenditures on professional development.

NFIE will commence at once to support the implementation of these recommendations in model sites throughout the country and invites the profession and the public to join in support of their success.

Sources of the Report

Teachers Take Charge of Their Learning is based on two years of observations, consultations, surveys, and other studies. NFIE research staff conducted extensive site visits and interviewed teachers across the country. Research was conducted in collaboration with other national education research organizations. NFIE led a series of discussions and workshops with teacher leaders, reviewed accounts of exemplary professional development experiences written by teachers, interviewed teachers, and commissioned public focus groups. A national survey of teachers was conducted for NFIE by Washington-based Greenberg Research, Inc., and The Feldman Group with support from the NEA Research Department and NFIE.