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| Effective Professional Development Begins in the Classroom |
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| Author : Center on English Learning and Achievement
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Successful professional development in English language arts provides teachers with three kinds of opportunities. First, it encourages teachers to be reflective practitioners, engaging in a continuous process of questioning, planning, trying out, and evaluating their teaching and their students� learning. Second, it works toward establishing a professional community, in which teachers rely on the collective expertise and mutual support of colleagues to inform their day-to-day judgments. And third, it provides opportunities for teachers to strengthen both their knowledge of research and theory (conceptual tools) and their repertoire of classroom strategies and approaches (pedagogical tools). This article summarizes the research on each of these topics and presents a tentative set of criteria schools and districts might use to guide or evaluate their professional development programs.
Reflective Practice
The research on teacher thinking and teacher change1 presents a profile of the effective teacher as one who reflects upon her instructional plans and outcomes in order to discover or create those features of practice that best support student learning. If teachers are to change their practice, they need to have a sense of what is working and not working, and what alternatives are possible. Reflective practice enables such insights. Schon2 uses the terms �reflection in action� and �reflection on action� to refer to a sort of interactive experimentation and feedback loop that teachers engage in to assess the effectiveness of strategies used or actions taken. It is as if the teacher is seeking and receiving "back talk" from the situation and making next step decisions in light of that "talk."
Reflective practice has become a significant component in the teacher education literature, most likely because it contributes in several ways to a climate for change. First, reflection and analysis provide a way of handling the inevitable tensions that result when new knowledge and skills bump up against teachers� previous experiences, goals, and expectations about learning and teaching. Honest discussion of these tensions opens up the possibility of change3.
Second, reflective practice is fundamentally empowering4, providing teachers with a sense of agency and control as they define and confront problems. Such agency is an important component of effective change.
And third, reflective practice offers a context within which to address the "constructivist dilemma"5 � the fact that professional development activities seek to influence teachers in particular ways, while also giving them the ownership and agency that a constructivist view of teaching and learning requires.
Within the context of reflective practice, knowledge and strategies become something other than tools and techniques �delivered to� teachers. Rather, they are provided as frameworks for teachers to use in reflecting on current practices and for developing alternative approaches to curriculum, instruction, and assessment.
Professional Communities
Closely related to the notion of reflective practice is the concept of a professional community that provides an effective context for teachers to raise questions, share problems, and explore the effectiveness of their teaching; in other words, to learn and change as professionals. In her synthesis paper on approaches to educational reform, Little, 6 echoing others,7 notes that the dominant �training� model of teacher development . . . is not adequate to the ambitious visions of teaching and schooling embedded in present reform initiatives. . . . The test of teachers� professional development opportunities resides in their capacity to engage teachers in . . . study, investigation, and experimentation . . . embedded in the routine organization of teachers� work day and work year.
Interactions with others in the learning environment affect how we think about, express, and put ideas to use8. In comparison to training experiences, professional communities also offer greater opportunity for principled and well-informed dissent that strengthens both group decisions and individual choices9.
When teachers come together for a shared purpose they can draw upon each other�s expertise and also engage in activity involving new inquiry that will move them to become a discourse community of their own, with more closely shared goals, ways of understanding problems, and potential solutions. This happens in part through the creation of a new �culture.�10 This culture develops and is sustained by the emergence of common vocabularies, points of reference, and shared experiences that provide the cognitive tools through which individuals can examine and rethink individual practice.11
Pedagogical and Conceptual Tools
CELA�s research on professional development12 stresses the importance of both conceptual tools and pedagogical tools. Tracing the development of beginning English teachers, CELA researchers found a variety of levels of appropriation of the tools to which the beginning teachers had been introduced, ranging from rejection or complete lack of understanding through use of surface features to mastery. In order to reach mastery, teachers must develop both conceptual and pedagogical tools, as well as thoroughly explore the relationships between them.
Elmore, Peterson, and McCarthy13, studying teachers committed to teaching for thoughtfulness, reinforce the importance of both sets of tools. The most effective teachers in their study had a thorough understanding of the guiding theory combined with rich exposure to contexts in which the theory was put effectively into practice, either as an institutional norm or through modeling and guided reflection on their own practice. Similarly, Grossman14 contrasted the initial teaching experiences of English majors whose teacher education program emphasized pedagogical content knowledge with the experiences of beginning teachers who lacked such preparation. She found that those teachers with strong preparation in their subject and in the teaching of their subject were considerably more successful than those who only had a strong subject preparation.
Cohen and Ball,15 writing from the perspective of large-scale reform, offer another useful perspective on the knowledge that teachers need. They argue that improving instructional capacity involves an interaction among three equally important elements: the teachers, the students, and the materials. Thus, real change depends on teacher knowledge of ways of teaching, ways of using materials, and ways of understanding student learning.
Effective Professional Development
In short, effective professional development in English language arts calls for active learning contexts in which professionals interact in ways that will help them gain the pedagogical and content knowledge they need to improve student performance. (Some of the features that characterize such programs are listed in the sidebar.) But just as teachers may need to relearn their instructional approaches and practices, so too will experienced professional developers need to relearn their craft, which has traditionally been defined as providing courses, workshops, and seminars.16 Their challenge is to support the transformation of teachers, including learning how to work with groups of teachers on practice-based problems and moving beyond workshops to embrace collaborative professional community.
Findings from CELA researchers and others suggest that effective professional development programs are those in which teachers have frequent opportunities to engage in the following:
Discipline-based learning: Teachers explore the knowledge, issues, and processes central to the study of English language arts.
Learning-oriented activity: Teachers focus on student learning and achievement, developing and adjusting instruction and curriculum to attain those goals.
Practice-based inquiry: Teachers identify their own needs connected with student learning, using their colleagues and other resources to inform their day-to-day professional judgments.
Professional dialogue: Teachers rely on the collective expertise and mutual support of colleagues and others to debate issues, question assumptions, examine practice, and formulate possibilities for action.
Conceptual and pedagogical learning: Teachers enrich their knowledge of research-based teaching and learning while also expanding their repertoire of classroom strategies and materials.
Ongoing reflection: Teachers engage in a continuous process of growth, nourished by discussion, research findings, and access to a wide array of resources.
Continuous assessment of progress: Teachers work to strengthen their assessments and observations of student learning in order to monitor their own effectiveness and establish new goals and plans.
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1 E.g., Hillocks, 1999; Huberman, 1996; Lieberman & Miller, 1999.
2 1983
3 E.g., Fenstermacher, 1994.
4 E.g., Freedman, et.al, 1999.
5 Elmore, Peterson, & McCarthey, 1996
6 1993
7 E.g., Gamoran, Secada, & Marrett, in press; Lieberman & Grolnick, 1999; Darling-Hammond & McLaughlin, 1999
8 Resnick, 1991; Soltis, 1981
9 Richardson, 1994
10 Bruner, 1996
11 Putnam & Borko, 2000
12 E.g., Grossman, Smagorinsky, & Valencia, 1999
13 1996
14 1990
15 1999
16 Stein, Silver, & Silver, 1999
References
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The National Research Center on English Learning & Achievement
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