Powerful Professional Development

Building Expertise Within the Four Walls of Your School

Diane Yendol-Hoppey, Nancy Fichtman Dana, Diane Yendol-Hoppey, Nancy Fichtman Dana

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781412979757
• eBook ISBN: 9781452271279
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

"I love, love, love this book! This smorgasbord of professional development strategies maximizes time and on-site expertise. From the perspective of educators hungry for cost-effective, proven ways to promote ongoing, job-embedded professional learning, this is an à la carte menu for building healthy professional development ?meals? based on specific needs and available resources."
—Gail Ritchie, Instructional Coach
Fairfax County Public Schools, VA

"This book offers a menu of practical, integrated, research-based tools and processes that engage and empower teachers and administrators in co-constructing a powerful form of job-embedded professional development that is relevant, focused, and organic, and allows schools to transform themselves into a self-sustaining learning organization."
—Pedro R. Bermúdez, Professional Development Support
Ready Schools Miami, FL

Achieve effective, on-site teacher development without breaking the budget!

This essential guide to job-embedded staff development helps schools and districts move away from reliance on outside expertise, instead drawing on and developing the experience and skills of their own faculty. The authors provide a complete toolbox of school-based professional development (PD) strategies, with recommendations on which tools to use for different times and settings, guidelines for implementation, and extended examples of each tool in action for a full spectrum of proven, cost-effective PD models, including:

• Book study and lesson study
• Action research and professional learning communities
• Coaching and co-teaching 
• Webinars, podcasts, Open Space Technology, online communities, and much more

PART I

What Is Powerful Job-Embedded Professional Development, and How Can You Make It Happen?

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Drawing by Shawn Black.

Have you ever wondered

• Why is teacher professional development often ineffective?
• What would it take to improve teacher professional development and, subsequently, improve schools?
• What is job-embedded professional development, and what might it look like?

Have you ever heard a teacher say

• I just sat in a three-day workshop. I could have learned what they taught me in three hours!
• How did you do that?
• Can I have a copy of your …?
• I wish they would let us be involved with deciding what we should do next. We are the ones that can make it happen!
• That would be great but there just isn’t enough time in the school day!

Have you ever looked at an exemplary teacher and wondered why others didn’t know the same strategies?

Have you ever had anyone tell you that the problem with schools is that they forgot to build the back porch?

Our guess is that you are nodding yes, perhaps with the sole exception being the very last question about the back porch. In Chapter 2, we will more thoroughly explain this phrase, which we and others have used as a metaphor for the kind of conversational space and professional learning culture we would like to encourage in schools.

The purpose of Part I of this book is to address these and other age-old teacher professional development dilemmas by examining

1. what we know about teacher professional development in general and job-embedded professional development in particular (Chapter 1);
2. how and why we need to create a space in schools for job-embedded professional development (Chapter 2); and
3. how to find the time and resources to make job-embedded professional development a reality in your school (Chapter 3).

After reading Part I of this book, you will be able to

1. articulate the ways job-embedded professional development can lead to effective teaching and learning;
2. understand the roles of a teacher leader and principal within a school building and how these roles support job-embedded professional development; and
3. identify ways to create the necessary resources and time within the school day to make professional learning a part of the daily lives of teachers and administrators.

1

Cultivating Professional Development From Inside the Four Walls of Your School

Traditional professional development usually occurs away from the schools site, separate from classroom contexts and challenges in which teachers are expected to apply what they have learned, and often without the necessary support to facilitate transfer of learning.

—Killion & Harrison, 2006

Over the past fifty years, educators have learned a great deal about what effective professional development does and does not look like. The research has clearly demonstrated that the popular and, unfortunately, still thriving “sit and get” model of professional development, when used in isolation, is not effective in changing classroom practice (Showers & Joyce, 1995). This traditional model, which relies solely on the sharing of external expertise, is expensive as well as ineffective. Typically, it has taken the form of workshops delivered during inservice days (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999; Fullan, 1991; Lieberman, 1995a, 1995b; Lieberman & Miller, 1990; Sparks & Hirsch, 1997). In these workshops, teachers often learn about new strategies, approaches, and pedagogy from an outside expert, and then they are expected to return to their classrooms and independently implement the new knowledge. Today, teachers and school leaders across the nation have been challenged to replace inefficient and less-effective models of professional development with job-embedded teacher professional development that relies on both honoring and cultivating the inside expertise that resides within a school and district.

SO WHAT IS JOB-EMBEDDED PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT?

The National Staff Development Council (NSDC) has led the way to sweeping changes by demanding that professional development be clearly tied to student learning. It envisions schools as places where “every educator engages in effective professional learning every day so every student achieves” (NSDC, 2009).

This focus on every educator learning every day really highlights the importance of shifting our efforts toward job-embedded professional development. According to NSDC, high-quality professional development is conducted among educators at the school and facilitated by well-prepared school principals and school-based professional development coaches, mentors, or other teacher leaders. Additionally, NSDC’s vision of job-embedded professional development is that it “occurs several times per week among established teams of teachers, principals, and other instructional staff members where the teams of educators engage in a continuous cycle of improvement” (NSDC, 2009). The emphasis is on systematic, planned, intentional, and regularly scheduled efforts to embed teacher learning within teachers’ daily lives. The importance of preparing school leaders across these roles for this work, as well as creating the structures, time, and resources for the school faculty to engage in it, is imperative to changing teaching practice to enhance student learning.

The changing roles of school leaders and the challenges of time and resources are explored in Chapters 2 and 3. In this chapter, we continue to develop the general concept of job-embedded professional development, which according to NSDC (2009), should

• evaluate student, teacher, and school learning needs through a thorough review of data on teacher and student performance;
• define a clear set of educator learning goals based on the rigorous analysis of the data;
• achieve the educator’s learning goals by implementing coherent, sustained, and evidenced-based learning strategies, such as lesson study and the development of formative assessments, that improve instructional effectiveness and student achievement;
• provide job-embedded coaching or other forms of assistance to support the transfer of new knowledge and skills to the classroom;
• regularly assess the effectiveness of the professional development in achieving identified learning goals, improving teaching, and assisting all students in meeting challenging state academic-achievement standards;
• inform ongoing improvements in teaching and student learning; and
• sometimes be supported by external assistance.

By attending to these criteria, you will be more likely to develop a viable and powerful plan that has the potential to positively shift the attitudes and confidence of educators toward accepting learning and creating, implementing, and studying their work within their school day and school walls.

WHAT ARE THE BUILDING BLOCKS FOR JOB-EMBEDDED PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT?

The wisdom of Confucius’s famous words about learning—“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand”—applies as much to our lives as teachers as it does to the education of our students. Although our professional learning often, but not always, begins by hearing about new innovations, the transfer of the innovation to our practice is often complicated due to myriad barriers. Teachers regularly lament, “If I only had the chance to see that idea in action or the time to try it myself, I would both remember and understand.”

The act of teaching is highly complex, and this complexity must not be underestimated. As Linda Darling-Hammond (1997b) wisely explains, “effective teaching is not routine, students are not passive, and questions of practice are not simple, predictable, or standardized” (p. 67). To illuminate the great complexity inherent in teaching and, subsequently, in teacher professional development, we explore four different types of building blocks that are necessary for effective job-embedded professional development: knowledge source, knowledge type, orientation, and learning needs. These building blocks draw upon classic discussions of teacher learning that have developed over the last few decades to provide the foundation for understanding the complexity of teacher knowledge.

Knowledge Source

One of the most significant frameworks for understanding the role that professional knowledge plays in educational change is put forth by Cochran-Smith and Lytle (2001, 2009). They offer a radically different view of the role that practitioners play in educational change. The complexity of teaching, as evidenced in a great deal of research, requires that educators interested in making changes in classroom practice must engage in multiple types of knowledge construction. Marilyn Cochran-Smith and Susan Lytle (1999) offered a useful framework to describe three different sources of knowledge teachers need to make lasting and effective changes to their practice.

Knowledge for Practice

The first knowledge source, referred to as knowledge for practice, helps educators become informed about new educational-research-based practices that have legitimized their worth. Many times, this source of knowledge comes to teachers in the form of workshops, book studies, speakers, Weblogs, and research articles. Although important to setting the stage for improving practice, the professional development approaches that focus on knowledge for practice provide only limited support for the integration of that new knowledge into the teacher’s practice. As Confucius notes, this kind of knowledge can be heard but forgotten and never make its way to classroom practice.

Knowledge in Practice

Given that the knowledge for practice model of professional development offers no mechanism to help teachers understand and address these dilemmas during implementation, educators involved with the professional development of teachers have recognized the importance of a second knowledge source—knowledge in practice. Knowledge in practice recognizes the importance of practical knowledge and its role in improving teaching practice. Often, this type of knowledge is generated as teachers begin testing out the knowledge for practice gained from attending an inservice workshop, reading a book, listening to a speaker, or reading a research article. As teachers apply this new knowledge within their classrooms and schools, they construct knowledge in practice. Knowledge in practice is strengthened as teachers deliberatively engage in specific teaching episodes, crafting and articulating the tacit or often unarticulated knowledge that emerges from their experiences applying the knowledge for practice. Knowledge in practice is strengthened through collaboration with peers (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999). For example, professional development vehicles including mentoring and peer coaching rely on collaboration and dialogue that can generate reflection, improve implementation, as well as make public the new knowledge being created. Knowledge in practice can result in the teacher being able to both see a research-based practice in action and do a research-based practice, facilitating transfer to practice.

Knowledge of Practice

A third source of knowledge that is gaining attention from professional developers today is knowledge of practice. Knowledge of practice stresses that through systematic inquiry “teachers make problematic their own knowledge and practice as well as the knowledge and practice of others” (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999, p. 273). Teachers create this kind of knowledge as they focus on raising questions about and systematically study their own classroom teaching. Cochran-Smith and Lytle suggest, “what goes on inside the classroom is profoundly altered and ultimately transformed when teachers’ frameworks for practice foreground the intellectual, social, and cultural contexts of teaching” (p. 276). What this means is that as teachers engage in this third type of knowledge construction, they move beyond the nuts and bolts of classroom practice to examine how these nuts and bolts might reflect larger issues, such as equity that could potentially inhibit student learning. Teachers interested in constructing knowledge of practice receive support as they collaboratively inquire with colleagues using a wide variety of data sources (e.g., assessments, student work, anecdotal records) about how their own teaching practices might inhibit the learning that takes place for all children in their schools and classrooms. In combination, these three sources of knowledge lead to powerful professional learning.

Reflection

As teachers tap into all three sources of knowledge (for, in, and of), the process of reflection plays a critical role in their learning. Reflection has historically been recognized as a hallmark of educator professional learning; in 1933, educational philosopher John Dewey argued that reflection on our experiences strengthens teacher learning since we learn from those experiences that we ponder, explore, review, and question. Reflection allows teachers to deepen their professional knowledge construction, but the process is more than “just thinking hard about what you do” (Bullough & Gitlin, 1995, p. 35).

Standing on the shoulders of John Dewey, Donald Schön (1983) contributes to our understanding of teacher learning in his discussion of reflection in action and reflection on action. Reflection in action, sometimes referred to a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• PART I. WHAT IS POWERFUL JOB-EMBEDDED PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT, AND HOW CAN YOU MAKE IT HAPPEN?
• PART II. THE PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT TOOLBOX: STRATEGIES TO ACTUALIZE POWERFUL PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
• PART III. USING YOUR TOOLBOX: TIPS FOR DEVELOPING A SUCCESSFUL JOB-EMBEDDED, PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM
• References and Additional Reading
• Index