A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

Designing Effective Development: Lessons from the Eisenhower Program - December 1999

Chapter 6

Summary and Conclusions

In this chapter, we identified the types of SAHE grantees that provide professional development through the Eisenhower program; described the structural and core features of the professional development activities; the alignment, coordination, and continuous-improvement efforts of SAHE grantees; and examined how these characteristics might be explained by the type of institution and the departmental affiliation of the project director. Several of these findings have implications for the Eisenhower program.

First, we find that while SAHE-sponsored IHE/NPOs tend to offer traditional types of professional development, the activities have many contact hours and span many months. Second, SAHE-sponsored IHE/NPOs generally provide activities with strong content focus and many opportunities for active learning. These characteristics all represent characteristics of high-quality professional development, as posited in the literature and supported by our data in Chapter 3. Although there is variation in the quality of SAHE-grantee projects, and they have few opportunities for teachers? collective participation, in general the activities they provide support Title II?s goal of providing "sustained and intensive" high-quality professional development activities. The SAHE competitive award process may foster high-quality projects through establishing criteria, requiring projects to have particular characteristics, and monitoring to ensure implementation; but we do not have sufficient data on these SAHE-sponsored competitions to examine the extent to which these factors affect project characteristics and operations.

Third, SAHE-grantee project directors report that they target teachers of special populations of students to participate in professional development activities, but our data from teachers, reported in Chapter 3, show that the actual participation of these groups of teachers in IHE activities is low when compared to participation levels in district-sponsored activities. Given Title II?s emphasis on targeting and recruiting teachers of diverse students, it may be desirable to work with IHE/NPOs to improve their methods for targeting and recruiting these teachers.

Fourth, SAHE grantees are less likely to co-fund and work with the Eisenhower coordinator than they are to communicate or work closely with other district staff. Coordination with the district, which includes both co-funding and working with the district in many other ways, is one of the most important variables in our model of quality professional development. Also, despite high levels of coordination in some areas, SAHE-grantee projects tend not to be aligned with district standards and assessments or use district indicators; they respond more to state standards and indicators. As we suggested earlier, this may be because SAHE grantees sometimes coordinate with districts in the implementation of activities, but not in their development and design. It would be helpful to understand the mechanisms through which coordination affects the quality of professional development, so that we could draw lessons about what types of interactions are useful for shaping high-quality professional development, and how they work. Perhaps it would be helpful to provide more specific guidelines, emphasis, and/or training for particular types of coordination that have been shown to be associated with the provision of high-quality professional development.

Fifth, as with districts, SAHE grantees tend to use teacher reports and surveys rather than classroom observation or student achievement measures to assess needs and evaluate outcomes. Given the complexity of using student achievement to measure the effects of professional development, it may be desirable to emphasize in the legislation the importance of evaluating the quality of professional development activities based on the activities? structural and core features, as described in the literature and in this evaluation.

Finally, our analyses of differences by institution type and departmental affiliation indicate that, while projects in mathematics/science departments have a high content focus, education departments do better than mathematics/science departments on several dimensions of quality and implementation. As our model illustrates, this is probably due in large part to the better coordination that education departments have with districts, and their superior continuous-improvement efforts. It would be informative to get a more in-depth sense of the process of coordination that take place between education departments and districts, and how continuous-improvement efforts are integrated into the design and implementation of their professional development activities. This would help us to identify the specific factors and processes that are most influential in shaping high-quality professional development activities. In addition, it might be useful for the law to give more emphasis to the desirability of having mathematics and science departments collaborate with education departments in the design and coordination of their Eisenhower project.

[The Relationship of SAHE-Grantee Management to Features of Professional Development ]

[Chapter 7 - Conclusions and Lessons for the Eisenhower Program]