The Professional Development Schools Handbook

Starting, Sustaining, and Assessing Partnerships That Improve Student Learning

Lee Teitel

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780761938354, 9780761938347
• eBook ISBN: 9781483360447
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

"This book will help PDS partners keep their focus on students? needs—the core of PDS work, as they take this journey together. It provides concrete suggestions for what PDS partners can do in developing, implementing, and assessing their partnerships, which are framed by the standards and grounded in core concepts."
—From the Foreword by Marsha Levine
Senior Consultant for Professional Development Schools
National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, Washington, DC

"Teitel?s insights are incredibly on target with the issues faced by school and university staff who are now deeply engaged in PDSs. They and others like them across the country will greatly benefit from the work of the author."
Virginia Pilato, Director of Teacher Quality
Maryland State Department of Education, Baltimore, MD

Start or improve a PDS with this step-by-step handbook!

As Professional Development Schools (PDS) become more prevalent, educators already involved with a PDS continually seek insight into how it can be improved, and those interested in starting a PDS are in need of specific guidance on how to get it right from the beginning. This manual is an invaluable resource to fulfill these goals and more.

Structured around the five Standards for Professional Development Schools that were developed by the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education, the easy-to-use book provides practical strategies for initializing, maximizing, and evaluating PDSs.

The five chapters dedicated to a particular standard comprehensively yet succinctly covers:

• A straightforward description with practical examples of what the standard looks like at various developmental stages
• Real-life issues, challenges, and resolutions associated with each standard, from the early stages of partnership development through implementation and sustainability
• "Quick-check" self-assessment models
• A hands-on toolkit, including specific examples, proven suggestions, worksheets, planning and discussion points
• Extensive resources, including web sites and other texts

In addition to these indispensable features, the book offers a how-to chapter on next steps for further refining and strengthening your PDS.

1

Introduction

History and Foundations of Professional Development Schools

Picture the following scenarios:

• A student teacher, fresh from the local university, comes into a school where she faces a whole chorus of experienced teachers who say, “You can forget everything you learned at the university. This is the real world; we’ll show you how to teach.”

• A university faculty member, faced with studies that show that most of the approaches he encourages his education students to use “wash off” during student teaching, complains about the schools and their readiness to support their graduates, sometimes calling them “hostile environments” and talking about how to “inoculate” his students against “bad practice.”

• A superintendent invests heavily in professional development in her school district, working hard to get the experienced teachers up and running on a new approach such as standards-based education, and then complains when she notices that new teachers coming out of neighboring colleges and universities don’t even know what standards-based education is.

• A university professor who is deeply committed to a particular pedagogical approach such as constructivism bemoans the back-to-basics movements and resurgence of direct instruction in her neighboring school district; committed to authentic assessment, she is horrified by the increased use of standardized tests in the district.

• A deputy superintendent for curriculum and instruction in a major urban area wonders why, with more than a dozen universities within five miles of his office, he feels like he gets no help from higher education in addressing any of what he sees as his district’s research needs.

The history of the cycles of improvement of teacher education and of schooling show, at best, a lack of coordination and often a complete disconnection, along with associated finger-pointing and blaming. At a basic level, colleges and universities produce teachers for schools; PreK–12 schools prepare students for college. Despite this critical interdependence (and ignoring for a moment the other possible symbiotic connections) between teacher preparation and schools, they have often been out of sync and at odds.

Professional development schools (PDSs) are innovative types of school–college partnerships designed to address this disconnection and finger-pointing and bring about the simultaneous renewal of schools and teacher education programs—restructuring schools for improved student learning and revitalizing the preparation and professional development of experienced educators at the same time. This chapter identifies the history and roots of the PDS movement and outlines the consensus that has evolved about what it means to be a PDS. If PDSs are tools—mechanisms to improve schools and universities—it helps to understand their history and the problems they are attempting to solve. Understanding PDS roots helps us look at the present and better plan for the future.

THE ROOTS AND CONTEXTS FOR PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT SCHOOLS

The PDS movement can be seen as growing out of several other strands of collaboration, reform, and renewal. Although some overlap, a few key areas (adapted from Teitel, 1998b) are outlined below:

School–University Collaboration. Professional development schools are special cases of school–university collaboration in which the experience in partnership formation provides a rich background for the efforts to “grow” PDSs. PDSs can be seen as places in which to resolve the tensions historically existing between schools and universities. For example, new approaches to teaching that develop from research conducted by universities (such as the constructivist learning mentioned above) often have had little impact on classrooms, especially when presented to classroom teachers in non-constructivist ways. PDSs can be creative ways to bridge the gap and avoid the theory–practice dichotomy (Stoddard, 1993).

School Reform. The work of John Dewey and the progressive movement shaped Abraham Flexner’s advocacy of the teaching hospital in the reform of medical education; this has come full circle with the use of the teaching hospital as a model for designing professional development schools (Levine, 1992). A look at the historical roots of school reform in the past four decades identifies PDSs as evolutionary responses to reform reports such as A Nation at Risk of the early 1980s (Klaumeier, 1990). Sewall, Shapiro, Ducett, and Sanford (1995) describe the PDS approach as logical coalition-building between schools and universities—in part as a defensive reaction to the perception of low public esteem experienced by schools and teacher preparation institutions. Others see an eroding public support for university budgets contributing to their willingness to link themselves to school reform issues that taxpayers care about more (Frazier, 1994).

Foundation Support for School Reform. Many professional development schools got their start through the support of corporations such as Exxon and Ford, so in a sense the PDS movement can be seen as rooted in this subarea of school reform. PDSs have made sense to funders because they bring multiple players to the table at the same time and provide a structure and a mechanism for bringing about change in both sets of institutions.

Teacher Education. For teacher education, PDSs provide an opportunity to create a venue for literal praxis, the development of teaching skill and practice in context. PDSs provide an opportunity to bridge the gap between the abstract and the authentic in the preparation and development of teachers and other educators. Professional development schools can also be seen as growing out of, or in response to, the alternative certification movement (Dixon & Ishler, 1992a). They represent a response that involves universities but also tries to put some credibility back into teacher preparation in the face of the public lack of confidence that has led almost every state to provide some kind of alternative certification route (Frazier, 1994). PDSs represent a proactive response that teacher preparation programs can take to avoid a reactive response to increased regulation from legislatures (Williams, 1993). Finally, PDSs can be seen as the successors to a variety of previous forms of collaboration such as the teacher centers of the 1970s.

Evolution of the Field Experience and Its Supervision. PDS formation can be stimulated by dissatisfaction with the loose connection between the university and what is generally seen as the most important part of the teacher education experience—student teaching. The history of the distrustful, often adversarial relationship between supervisors and classroom teachers serves as an important backdrop to the role changes and reconfigurations of PDSs (Ellsworth & Albers, 1995). Evidence that the student-teaching experience has a more powerful effect than university coursework on prospective teachers makes this even more important to university educators.

Inquiry. Central to the notion of the PDS is the concept of inquiry as part of professional development and as part of the definition of teaching. Schaefer’s (1967) notion of the school as a center of inquiry articulates the expectation that teachers should conduct inquiry routinely as a mechanism to understand and assess the teaching–learning process. More recent notions of action research applied to school settings are ways of improving schools and supporting the growth and development of educators.

Professionalization of Teaching. PDSs are important in the development of a knowledge base for teachers (Pugach, 1991), for thinking about the roles of teacher leaders (Collinson, 1994), for thinking about the continued professional development of experienced educators, and for developing new notions of professional accountability. In addition, PDSs can play a critical socializing role if they become the gateway by which all new professionals enter education (Darling-Hammond, 1994).

Teacher Leadership. Although in past school–university collaborations and reform efforts, teachers’ roles were to “silently and blithely … carry out programs developed by the educational elite” (Navarro, 1992, p. 1), PDSs ask classroom teachers to take on significant new leadership roles (Little & McLaughlin, 1993). These roles are rooted in—and a departure from—earlier models in which teacher leadership was an add-on position involving a handful of individuals who were “appointed” and “anointed” (Smylie & Denny, 1990).

Standards Movement. The simultaneous renewal approach of the PDS makes it compatible with the standards and assessment approach advocated by the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, and others, providing a framework for the concurrent development and refinement of assessment and standards. PDSs are suited to serve as sites for standards-based education, for the integration of the various standards being produced by groups such as the National Board, and for content area standards such as those of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (Sykes, 1997).

Teacher Quality. The report of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (1996) made a compelling case that good teaching matters and is the essential key to improved student learning. One of the commission’s major recommendations calls for reinventing teacher preparation and professional development, with a central element being the recommendation for yearlong internships in PDSs.

Two more recent trends have given a boost to PDS and also provided some redirection.

Teacher Content Knowledge. The push in the late 1990s for enhanced teacher content knowledge has helped propel PDSs, and at the same time it has nudged them to include arts and science faculty from the university. The Federal Title II legislation for Teacher Quality Enhancement required arts and science faculty involvement in teacher education, even as it called for stronger collaborative relationships with schools—relationships like those of professional development schools.

Equity. The increase in interest in the achievement gap that shows up in schools between students of different race and class backgrounds has given a boost to PDSs as a vehicle to improve equitable outcomes in student learning. For example, the Boston public school system has provided over a quarter of a million dollars annually to fund PDS intern stipends, and has pressed for evidence that the PDS preparation will make the interns more effective in reducing the achievement gap among Boston students. The current high interest in equity has also has led to significant criticisms of PDSs for not living up to their potential. Although many PDS planning documents such as the Holmes Group’s Tomorrow’s Schools (1990) and the PDS Vision Statement of the National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools, and Teaching (NCREST, 1993) call for an unflagging commitment to use PDSs to increase equity in U.S. society, observers and critics have noted that much of this has not been realized (Valli, Cooper, & Frankes, 1997). Others have taken the argument further and suggested that without involvement of parents and community members, the PDS model could actually make things worse by strengthening the connection between school and university partners to the exclusion of others (Murrell, 1998).

PRINCIPLES, BELIEFS, AND GOALS: THE COALESCENCE OF A MOVEMENT

The PDS movement has been promoted by a range of organizations: the Holmes Group, the Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy, the National Network for Education Renewal, the American Federation of Teachers, the National Educational Association, and initiatives sponsored by Ford and other foundations. The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education and the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education have supported the concept, with NCATE sponsoring the PDS Standards Project. For more than a decade, the National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools, and Teaching as well as a variety of statewide groups such as the Massachusetts PDS Network have funded research, offered conferences, and tried to shape policy in support of PDSs. The National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future and its partner states have advocated for PDSs, and some of the partner states, such as Maryland, have woven requirements for PDS into regulation. Federal grants such as Eisenhower, GOALS 2000, and Title II have been used by states and grant recipients to support the work of the PDS collaborations.

Although the wording differs and there are differences in emphasis and focus among different PDS advocates, a strong convergence around the following four goals has emerged over the past 15 years:

• Improvement of student learning

• Preparation of educators

• Professional development of educators

• Research and inquiry into improving practice

This consensus was examined, field-tested, and codified by the PDS Standards Project of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. Through a careful nomination process, staff of the project identified 28 highly developed PDS sites which participated in a survey describing their practices, goals, organizational structures, funding sources, and so forth. These data were combined with other attempts to assess the state of thinking about PDSs (a literature review and other commissioned papers are published in Levine, 1998). They were used to develop a set of draft standards for PDSs, widely circulated in the late 1990s and field-tested in 16 partnership sites, and released in final form in September 2001.

While not everyone in the PDS community embraces the Standards with the same enthusiasm, they are widely seen as the best representation of the consensus of what it means to be a PDS. Even those who are critical of various segments of the Standards will likely see value in the thorough job the Standards Project did in researching, applying, and codifying. And I hope that even critics will recognize the potential of using them as they are used in this book—to establish a foundation, provide a framework, and help us maintain a focus on student learning.

CHAPTER RESOURCES

This section provides brief annotated references for further reading and Web site locations. Full text citations can be found in the reference section at the end of the book.

For a fuller history of the roots of PDSs, see Teitel (1998b, 1999); for more on general school–university collaboration, see Clark (1988, 1999) and Mitchell and Torres (1998).

For an excellent, balanced article on the notion of PDS Standards, see Sykes (1997).

Look at the Standards themselves (NCATE, 2001b; or go to http://ncate.org/newsbrfs/pds_f01.htm)

For a thoughtful review of “The Nature of Professionalism in the Context of School Reform,” see Dempsey (1997).

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Toolkit Entries
• Foreword
• Preface
• About the Author
• 1. Introduction: History and Foundations of Professional Development Schools
• 2. Collaboration: Developing Joint Ownership of Student Learning
• 3. Structures, Resources, and Roles: Supporting Changes in the Learning Environment
• 4. Learning Community: Improving Approaches to Teaching, Learning, and Leadership
• 5. Diversity and Equity: Preparing a Diverse Group of Educators to Teach All Students
• 6. Accountability and Quality Assurance: Assessing the Partnership and Its Outcomes
• 7. Next Steps for Strengthening Your Professional Development School
• Appendix A: Applying the Framework to Multiple School PDS Partnerships
• Appendix B: Using Cases to Facilitate Discussion of Partnership Issues
• References
• Index