Professional Development

What Works

Sally J. Zepeda

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781315386720
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This comprehensive and authoritative book serves as the road map to your school's professional development journey. Written for principals, professional development directors, other district leaders, and teacher leaders, Professional Development: What Works shows you how to plan and implement programs that promote teacher growth. Full of helpful case studies, useful resources, and templates, this book guides you in creating an effective, job-embedded professional development program that moves ideas to action.

Special Features in this Revised Edition:

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• Revised discussion on supporting and providing learning opportunities for adults

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• New "Cases from the Field" and "Notes from the Field" amplify best practices and serve to narrow the gap between research and practice

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• Updated and expanded coverage of professional job-embedded learning help leaders keep pace with advancements

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• Suggested readings support digging deeper into topical areas found within the chapters

Part 1

Foundations of Job-embedded Professional Learning

The first five chapters of the book focuses attention on the Foundations of Professional Learning. These foundations support a deeper understanding of the overall context for professional development including internal and external influences such as federal and state legislation and policy including teacher evaluation systems that now include professional learning as a target to measure teacher growth. The construct of professional job-embedded learning is examined to support a learning culture so that teachers and leaders can create the synergy needed to bring focus to learning for the adults who have answered the call to teach and lead in very complex systems—schools.

The foundational chapters provide insights about framing professional development, creating the conditions for teachers to learn from their work, and exploring the unique nature of adult learning and the necessity to differentiate professional development to meet the needs of teachers so they emerge as leaders in their classrooms. This section of the book ends with a chapter on assessment focusing on transfer of learning, begging the question “Did Things Stick?” from what teachers are learning based on what is occurring in their classrooms. This chapter jump-starts the conversation on the types of supports teachers need to help them focus energy and attention on making incremental changes in their classroom practices in the primary work of educating students.

Where appropriate Cases from the Field and Notes from the Field written by teachers, school leaders, and other professionals serve to amplify best practices and current thinking about the foundations of job-embedded learning.

1 Championing Professional Learning

In This Chapter …

• Shifting Language: From Professional Development to Job-embedded Professional Learning
• Why the Urgency?
• Federal Legislation and Professional Development
• Bringing Out the Best in Teachers
• Supporting Student and Teacher Learning
• Lessons Learned from the Research on Professional Development

This chapter examines the underlying urgency needed to focus attention on key variables such as the complexities of teacher retention and how professional development could help to offset teacher attrition—from beginning to veteran teachers. Professional learning does not exist in a vacuum, however. Federal legislation, national standards, and the new arrangement of professional learning now embedded in teacher evaluation systems certainly have refocused attention to go beyond teacher quality to teacher effectiveness. At the center of all professional development is the belief that “efforts to improve student achievement can succeed only by building the capacity of teachers to improve their instructional practice and the capacity of school systems to promote teacher learning” (Darling-Hammond, Wei, Andree, Richardson, & Orphanos, 2009, p. 7).

Shifting Language: From Professional Development to Job-embedded Professional Learning

Historically, the terms—training, in-service education, professional development, professional learning, job-embedded learning—have all signaled over time what schools and their systems have used to call what happens when teachers learn. Sparks and Hirsch’s early work (1997) underscored the beginning of the paradigm shifts in staff development from:

• individual development to individual development and organizational development;
• fragmented, piecemeal improvement efforts to staff development driven by a clear, coherent strategic plan for the school district, each school, and the departments that serve schools;
• district-focused to school-focused approaches to staff development;
• a focus on adult needs and satisfaction to a focus on student needs and learning outcomes, and changes in on-the-job training;
• training conducted away from the job as the primary delivery system for staff development to multiple forms of job-embedded learning;
• an orientation toward the transmission of knowledge and skills to teachers by “experts” to the study by teachers of the teaching and learning processes;
• focus on generic instructional skills to a combination of generic and content-specific skills;
• staff developers who function primarily as trainers to those who provide consultation, planning, and facilitation services as well as training;
• staff development provided by one or two departments to staff development as a critical function and major responsibility performed by all administrators and teacher leaders;
• staff development directed toward teachers as the primary recipients to continuous improvement in performance for everyone who affects student learning; and,
• staff development as a “frill” that can be cut during difficult financial times to staff development as an indispensable process without which schools cannot hope to prepare young people for citizenship and productive employment. (pp. 12–16)

The term, professional development, is often used interchangeably with “teacher training” (Lambert, 2003, p. 22).

In 2010, the National Staff Development Council (NSDC) formally changed its name to Learning Forward. All references to the National Staff Development Council will be retained in this book unless it makes sense to reference Learning Forward.

Learning Forward (2011) qualifies the reason for the change:

By making learning the focus, those who are responsible for professional learning will concentrate their efforts on assuring that learning for educators leads to learning for students. For too long, practices associated with professional development have treated educators as individual, passive recipients of information, and school systems have expected little or no change in practice. (p. 13)

In this model of learning, adults are engaged in the work of learning how to teach, refine their methods, and they do so through collaborative efforts. Darling-Hammond et al. (2009) emphasizes that professional development is recognized as an activity that takes place and professional learning recognizes learning as a complex process.

Professional learning is “a complex array of interrelated learning opportunities” (Desimone, 2011, p. 69). The complexities of professional learning are summarized by Avalos (2011):

Teacher professional learning is a complex process, which requires cognitive and emotional involvement of teachers individually and collectively, the capacity and willingness to examine where each one stands in terms of convictions and beliefs and the perusal and enactment of appropriate alternatives for improvement or change. All this occurs in particular educational policy environments or school cultures, some of which are more appropriate and conducive to learning than others. (p. 10)

Shifting to a comprehensive learning model for adults allows teachers to purposefully connect their learning to their practices. Job-embedded learning is “teacher learning that is grounded in day-to-day teaching practice and is designed to enhance teachers’ content-specific instructional practices with the intent of improving student learning” (Croft, Coggshall, Dolan, Powers, and Killion, 2010, p. 2).

Why the Urgency?

Teachers are central to student learning. When teachers learn from their work, students benefit from these efforts. The world of schools is complex. The variables in one school might not be the same in another school—context matters. School leaders must be able to provide professional learning to be responsive to the needs of their teachers. Some of the most prevalent issues that schools face related to the needs of teachers are examined.

Workplace Conditions

Workplace conditions either motivate or demotivate teachers. Motivated teachers are more satisfied with their work and working relations with teachers, leaders, and community members (Johnson, Kraft, & Papay, 2012; National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, 2016; Rosenholtz, 1989). Podolsky, Kini, Bishop, and Darling-Hammond (2016) indicate that “teaching conditions … are a strong predictor of teachers’ decisions about where to teach and whether to stay,” and that there are four factors:

1. School leadership and administrative support. Administrative support is often the top reason teachers identify for leaving or staying in the profession, or in a given school, outweighing even salary considerations for some teachers.
2. Opportunities for professional collaboration and shared decision-making. Teachers’ career decisions are shaped by their connectedness to a team working with a shared purpose. Opportunities for teacher collaboration and input are key factors.
3. Accountability systems. Approximately 25% of public-school teachers who left the profession in 2012 reported that dissatisfaction with the influence of school assessment and accountability measures on their teaching or curriculum was extremely or very important in their decision to leave.
4. Resources for teaching and learning. Schools with sufficient instructional materials and supplies, safe and clean facilities, reasonable student-to-teacher ratios, and adequate support personnel can positively affect teacher retention rates and influence the kind of teaching and learning that can occur. (p. vii, emphasis added)

Many of these factors are significant, but they are “difficult to observe and measure;” however, they are important and encompass “… the quality of relationships and collaboration among staff, the responsiveness of school administrators, and the academic and behavioral expectations for students” (Papay & Kraft, 2015, para. 4).

Teacher Attrition

Consistently, it is estimated that between 30 and 60% of the teachers who enter their first year of teaching leave by the fifth year (Ingersoll & Strong, 2011; Pogodzinski, 2012; Pogodzinski, Youngs, Frank, & Belman, 2012). Put another way, Gray and Taie (2015) estimate that approximately one out of five teachers leave teaching during the first three years. However, teachers in their first years in the professional only account for a small slice of teachers who leave. Darling-Hammond (2010) is resolute that retaining quality teachers must become ...