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CPRE Policy Brief: Building Capacity for Education Reform - December 1995

Dimensions of Capacity

Within the context of systemic reform, capacity is the ability of the education system to help all students meet more challenging standards. If the capacity of the education system--or any system--is insufficient for accomplishing a desired goal, capacity may be increased by improving performance of workers (e.g., individual teachers); by adding such resources as personnel, materials, or technology; by restructuring how work is organized; and/or by restructuring how services are delivered.

Most capacity-building strategies in education today target individual teachers. Our findings and those of other researchers suggest that the traditional model of professional development that focuses primarily on expanding a teacher's repertoire of well-defined classroom practice reflects a limited conception of the dimensions of teacher capacity. And it ignores the other parts of the education system that directly impact a teacher's ability to teach. A broader view, derived from our research, incorporates three themes.

Teacher Capacity Is Multidimensional and Evolving

Discussions of teacher capacity often focus on their procedural knowledge and skills. While many types of knowledge are vital to teachers' roles, other areas of capacity are important as well. We consider four main dimensions of teacher capacity here.

Knowledge. Teachers need knowledge of subject matter, curriculum, students, and general and subject-specific pedagogy in order to help students learn (Carpenter et al., 1989; Shulman, 1986; Wilson & Wineberg, 1988). New student standards call for learners to acquire deeper thinking and problem-solving abilities. Recent studies show that to help students reach these new standards, teachers must have a deeper and more flexible knowledge base than is needed for basic skills approaches or than is developed in traditional preservice or inservice education programs (Ball & McDiarmid, 1990; McDiarmid, Ball & Anderson, 1989).

Skills. While skills and knowledge interact and develop together, researchers have demonstrated a considerable gap between teachers' beliefs about how they should be teaching to satisfy new reforms and their abilities to actually do so (e.g., EEPA, 1990). Educators in our study also noted this gap, whether it was in curriculum development (like developing open-ended problems in mathematics), instructional strategies (like expanding their repertoire of grouping strategies), or assessment.

Dispositions. Enacting reform also requires a disposition to meet new standards for student learning and to make necessary changes in practice (Katz & Raths, 1986; National Center for Research on Teacher Education, 1988). One important disposition involves teachers' attitudes toward subject matter. Attitudes toward students, expectations for student achievement, and beliefs about sources of student success are also critical components of teacher dispositions, particularly in view of reform goals of high performance for all students. But the dispositions most often mentioned as key in our interviews were teachers' attitudes toward change and commitment to student learning.

Views of Self. Studies suggest that the capacity to teach in different ways is connected to views of self, to teachers' beliefs about their role in classroom activity, and to the personas they adopt in the classroom (Floden, in preparation). Also critical are teachers' views of themselves as learners, including what, where, and how they will learn.

These four dimensions of capacity are interdependent and interactive. For example, a strong commitment to improve student learning may lead teachers to seek out the new knowledge and skills they need, thus increasing their capacity. Changes along one dimension of capacity may produce unexpected changes in another. One teacher in our study illustrated this point vividly. While this teacher had joined a workshop to develop her knowledge and skills about teaching writing, the experience also had a dramatic impact on her view of herself as a writer and on her overall development as a professional.


Methodology

This brief is drawn from Studies of Education Reform: Systemic Reform, by Margaret E. Goetz, Robert E. Floden, and Jennifer O'Day. Work on this project was supported by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education, and the Carnegie Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and are not necessarily shared by CPRE or its funding institutions.

The study findings are based on case studies of 12 reforming schools located in six school districts with reputations as being active in education reform and in three states that are taking somewhat different approaches to standards-based reform--California, Michigan and Vermont. We conducted structured interviews in 1993-94 with state policymakers, teacher educators, and other providers of professional development, and district and school administrators in each of our study sites. We also interviewed five teachers in each of the twelve schools. These teachers also completed a content coverage/instructional strategy questionnaire for the content areas that were the focus of the study--K-8 mathematics and language arts.

Teacher Capacity Interacts with Organizational Capacity

An individual's ability to accomplish the goals set out by the new standards depends not only on personal capacity but also on the capabilities of his or her colleagues. Among the factors influencing an individual teacher's abilities to teach are the formal and informal networks to which they belong, and the teaching context--or culture-- of a school. These dimensions of teacher capacity, in turn, are interdependent with those of the department, school, and district.

Communities of Practice. Teachers' practice is shaped in part by the contexts in which they work and learn, including the communities formed by their relationships with other professionals inside and outside the school. These professional communities may be institutionalized, as in California's League of Middle Schools, or more fluid, as in groups that collaborate on short-term projects, like scoring assessments in Vermont (Darling-Hammond & McLaughlin, 1995). Some important communities of practice exist outside the school, or even outside the school system. Many teachers we spoke to, for example, cited inter-school, cross-district, or national subject matter networks as critical avenues for their development and support.

Teacher Capacity and the School Context. Our data and those of other researchers suggest that it may be teachers' immediate daily context--the school or sub-unit of the school--that has the greatest influence on their capacity and practice. The vast majority of teachers in our study, for example, reported that they turn primarily to school colleagues for assistance and support. Several pointed out that the ability of individual teachers to use their knowledge and skills is affected by the receptivity and support of colleagues in the school. While some teachers spoke of support from a "critical mass" of colleagues, many others noted that a single inspirational and knowledgeable leader may be instrumental in eventually creating support for change.

Dimensions of Organizational Capacity. Interdependence of organizational and individual capacity implies that reform strategies should seek to build organizational capacity of schools and other educational organizations in addition to promoting professional development of individual teachers. Analysis of data from our reforming schools suggests five dimensions of organizational capacity.

  1. Vision and Leadership. Researchers since the 1970s have identified the school or departmental vision, or collective sense of purpose, as an important aspect of successful and improving schools (Edmonds, 1979; Purkey & Smith, 1983; and McLaughlin, 1993). The importance of the school mission--and of leadership in articulating and mobilizing support for it--were recurring themes in our study. The visions focused on curriculum and instruction, improved achievement for all students, and teacher responsibility for student learning.

  2. Collective Commitment and Cultural Norms. The most actively reforming schools in our sample displayed a sense of collective commitment and responsibility for students and a set of cultural norms that stressed on-going reflection and improvement. They were also developing and using specific tools and processes to help them evaluate progress toward the learning goals, with the intention that these processes would become institutionalized.

  3. Knowledge or Access to Knowledge. Just as individual teachers need knowledge, the collection of teachers at the school or other educators in other units of the system need knowledge to implement a shared vision of reform. Where knowledge does not exist within the organization, it is important for members to know where else to look for what they need.

  4. Organizational Structures and Management. Over the last decade, reformers have given considerable attention to "school restructuring" as a way to overcome barriers to educational improvement. But there is disagreement among researchers about how structural changes in schools actually affect what happens in the classroom (Darling-Hammond, 1996; Elmore, 1990; Mohrman & Lawler, 1996; Peterson, McCarthey, & Elmore, 1995; Szabo, forthcoming). Educators in our study did link organizational structure and reform, but they did not see structural changes, in and of themselves, as a goal. Instead, they felt that changes in structure should be explicitly linked to learning goals and any new structures should be changed if they did not improve teaching and learning.

  5. Resources. Our interviewees saw time as the most essential resource. Because of fiscal constraints, additional time usually derived from some form of restructuring rather than from additional monies. For example, some schools in our study used block scheduling and electives to create common planning periods for staff; some schools restructured the school week to free one-half day a week for school-wide planning and professional development. Personnel was another key resource, especially in schools with highly diverse student bodies and large numbers of students with special needs. Teachers also expressed need for material resources, especially instructional materials that reflect emerging standards. For some of our schools, needs included basic materials that many schools take for granted, as well as access to social and health services for students.

Organizational Capacity Can Be Boosted By Outside Ideas

Schools need external input and assistance to move significantly beyond current practice. As McLaughlin (1993) points out, "Strong professional communities, by themselves, are not always a good thing. Shared beliefs can support shared delusions about the merit or function of instructional orthodoxies or entrenched routines."

In each of our reforming sites, we found a rich infusion of ideas from outside the immediate organizational context, ideas that provided inspiration, insights, and alternatives. In some cases, outside ideas focused on process and structure or on generic philosophies about instruction, like the use of portfolios and performance-based assessment or the concept of teacher as coach. In other cases, imported ideas related directly to content and content-based instruction--use of NCTM standards in mathematics, for example, or literature-based reading instruction.

In each site, an individual or group of individuals had served as a conduit for reform ideas, bringing them into the system and linking them to a specific context. In the most actively reforming organizations, this support was on-going, systematic, and focused on improving student achievement.
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