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

IV. Emerging issues

The sheer complexity of the reform tasks being proposed, together with the relative absence of tested principles, policies, and practices; the contradictions across policies; and the propensity to seize upon early-stage experiments as "models."

The problem of "fit" between the task of reform and the prevailing models of professional development in particular, the dominance of a training paradigm built on "knowledge consumption," and the lesser support for an inquiry and problem- solving paradigm built around "knowledge production."

The relative inattention to teachers' "opportunity to learn" within the salaried work day and work year an issue in the social organization of teachers work in schools and their participation in a wider professional community.

The complexity and uneven pace of systemic reform

Limited grasp of possibilities. Asked to participate in the redesign of their work and work place, participants at first invent a narrow range of responses or solutions. Michelle Fine, who chronicles the progress of Philadelphia's reform effort, says simply: "The categories people have in their heads are the categories people have in their heads" (Fine, 1992, p. 20). Inertia prevails, undergirded by established ideologies that explain and defend massive student failure (see also Fine, 1991). Such explanations "block any sense of possibility (p. 22). Even among enthusiastic teachers, Fine observes, few could imagine a "sufficiently collective effort" to produce substantial improvements in student outcomes (p. 21).

Conventional forms of professional development and support grounded in "training" are poorly conceived to help people expand the possibilities for learning, teaching, and schooling. Rarely do they contend with fundamental debates and disagreements about the purposes of schooling, the relationships between teachers and students, and the obligations of teachers to a wider larger community. It seems unlikely that teachers' sense of possibility will be enlarged in the absence of expanded information, deeper discussion and debate, and a tolerance for public dispute over fundamental matters. After three years, Fine considers it progress in Philadelphia "that at least now people are fighting aloud" (p. 21).

Policy collisions and the legacy of past reforms. Most plans for systemic reform or restructuring underestimate the sustained impact of long-standing policy and practice. Teachers and administrators witness "policy collisions" between present reforms and their predecessors, many still reflected in statute, regulation, policy, and local habit. Darling- Hammond (1990) reminds us that "policies do not land in a vacuum; they land on top of other policies" (p. 240). She notes with respect to California's new curriculum frameworks: "...several previous policy initiatives stand out sharply as competing with the new reform" (p. 237). Among them she names the state's standardized testing system, "which values a type of mathematical knowledge and performance very different from the conceptions embodied in the new Framework." (p. 237). She goes on to argue: "In several respects, policy accretion is a more difficult problem than the older problem bemoaned by reformers (which has not left us) of ingrained tradition. ... This can create an Alice in Wonderland world in which people ultimately begin to nod blithely at the inevitability of incompatible events..." (p. 238). (See also Evertson and Murphy, in press).

Pressures for fast-paced implementation. Systemic change is also undermined when local and state leaders attempt to reduce conceptual and practical complexities in the interest of a fast- paced implementation. The California curriculum frameworks serve as one example of a complex policy instrument that is experienced in distilled form by classroom teachers. In her introduction to a series of case studies of the math framework implementation, Linda Darling-Hammond (1990) observes: "The cases suggest that, at least from the vantage point of the teachers interviewed, the mathematics curriculum framework consisted of a 'statement'...and its transmission to them occurred when they were handed new textbooks, selected by the local administration after being approved by the state as compatible with the framework" (p. 236; see also Peterson, 1992).

The magnitude of the task. Observers remind us of the sheer difficulty of the reform task, and the toll that it takes on people. The work of systemic reform is enormously difficult, frustrating, slow--and rewarding. Fine (1992) says once-discouraged teachers are "back" in droves but they must contend with powerful dilemmas. They experience the frustration of doing what is while envisioning what could be what Debbie Meier, principal at Central Park East (New York City), is famed for describing as changing the tire on a moving car. A certain amount of "institutional schizophrenia" is generated around specific institutional routines practices of student evaluation, for example. And the burden is felt especially by the "front runners," the ones that Schlechty would call the "trail-blazers" (Cole & Schlechty, 1992). They "offend almost every vested interest, at some point" (Fine, 1992, p. 24).

Political will. The success of the trail-blazing individuals and institutions will rest ultimately on a crucial fund of political will. Whatever the shortcomings of the knowledge base on which reform stands, we can nonetheless assert that we have sufficient knowledge to move forward; we have "the knowledge, methods, assessment strategies to transform our classrooms into engaging, critical and creative sites of intellectual growth and personal development"(Fine, 1992, p. 30). What remains uncertain is whether we have the political will to employ our knowledge in the service of public (and particularly urban) education. Professional development, in this view, will prove fruitless if it fails to cultivate and sustain political will.

The available (though rare) accounts of large-scale restructuring efforts thus underscore the systemic character of reform and, correspondingly, the collective capacity needed to achieve and sustain it. But professional development practice remains, on the whole, highly individualistic. Rates of participation vary enormously, generating radically different profiles of professional development for teachers with comparable experience and teaching assignments" (Lanier and Little, 1986, p.548; also Arends, 1983). These differences appear to persist even in schools formally "committed" to reform initiatives.

A shift to "school-based" initiatives does not necessarily alter the variable pattern of individual practice. Schools associated with the Illinois Writing Project showed promising changes in language arts scores, but in the urban schools "typically less than half the teachers in each building attended the voluntary, after-school workshops" (Chicago Project on Teaching and Learning, 1992, p.1). What we do not learn is why. Were teachers opposed to the assumptions and practices of the Writing Project? Unimpressed with the quality of the workshops, or already expert in the practices ? Pressed by the demands of too many projects, or too burdensome a teaching load? Committed to other activities that required time, thought, and energy? Not persuaded that participation would make a difference to the students they taught? Discouraged by failures of administrative leadership? Truly discouraged about teaching?

Here we have a tension between institutional imperatives and individual prerogatives, between the conditions necessary to attempt systemic change and the conditions that engage individual teachers in their work. At best, these are in harmony; at the least, we must learn the sources of conflict between them. We will be better served by knowing the grounds on which teachers choose to participate or not. As a context for professional development, reform movements place a premium on institutional perspectives. They may absorb all of the resources available for teachers' professional development, leaving little in the way of subsidy for individually-inspired intellectual pursuits that may also, in quite different ways, make a difference to the character of schooling.

In any event, the complexities and tensions illustrated here are not resolved by any simplistic distinction between "voluntary" and "mandatory" occasions of professional development. More productive will be careful consideration of teachers' professional obligations and opportunities, of the balance and tension between individual latitude and collective endeavor, and of the resources and rewards devoted to each.

Problems of "fit:" Professional development models and the task of reform

Innovation on the margins. The training paradigm dominates the world of teachers' professional development. Short-term skill training workshops far outnumber teachers' study groups and well-conceived teacher research. But the training paradigm has also come under assault: Critics charge that most training places teachers in passive roles as consumers of knowledge produced elsewhere; that the "workshop menu" is fragmented in content, form, and continuity at precisely the time when teachers are confronted with the challenge of redesigning the way we do schooling (Moore and Hyde, 1981; Little, 1989).

Alternative approaches of the sort described above have gained the admiration of teachers, administrators, school boards, and state policy makers. Some, to be sure, have grown in stature and reach over the past decade. The history of the Bay Area Writing Project is a case in point; the BAWP model now guides a large number of local and regional projects in many states, and serves as the basis for comparable projects in math and science. It has attracted state and local district funding.

On the whole, however, innovative approaches to teachers' professional development those that correspond most closely to the principles outlined above remain small in scale and number. Most have been supported with private dollars (foundation and corporate funding) and have made relatively little impact on the configuration of publicly-supported professional development. Such partnerships have formed between individual activists in universities and schools or districts, or between individual consultants and schools, or between departments of education and local schools. In large institutions, multiple "partnerships" may operate in ignorance of one another's efforts, or in pursuit of quite different or even conflicting goals.

Lord (1991) maintains that the subject matter collaboratives have "magnified the impact of local resources both human and financial," but provides no detail (p. 1). Meanwhile, the risks associated with moving from the margins to the center are well-known: teacher-centered programs such as the Bay Area Writing Project or the Los Angeles Educational Partnership's teacher networks risk "bureaucratization" when they are absorbed within district structures.

The limitations of packaged knowledge and standardized programs. Given the option, district and school administrators say they will opt for a "well-packaged program" of staff development (Little et al., 1987). Packaged programs have an understandable appeal. They are readily defended, managed, and evaluated. Most district-sponsored staff development is oriented toward the acquisition of specific knowledge and skill; assessing "impact," though it is rarely done, is relatively straightforward (especially if centered on changes in observable teacher behavior).

Alternative approaches, by comparison, are conceptually and pragmatically messier. The main benefits that participants derive from teacher networks, study groups, curriculum experiments, and the like may be more broadly intellectual, motivational, and attitudinal. By acknowledging the importance of teachers intellectual curiosities and capacities, and by crediting teachers contributions to knowledge and practice, such approaches may strengthen the enthusiasm teachers bring to their work and the intellectual bent they display in the classroom. Over the long run, teachers who participate in experiences of this sort might be expected to show higher rates of classroom innovation and to inspire greater enthusiasm for learning on the part of their students. Nonetheless, appropriate comparisons with conventional staff development are likely to prove very difficult. This is due in part to differences in program aims, content, and format, and due in part to the difficulty of tracing the crucial longer-term consequences for individual teachers.

The proliferation of classroom- and school-based studies over the past two decades has fed the organized professional development marketplace. "Research says" is a common preface to many workshop presentations and exercises, serving as a warrant for recommended practice. But "research says" has increasingly become a means for exercising institutional authority rather than for informing teachers' judgments or framing their own inquiries. Teachers are typically less well positioned than district specialists or outside consultants to invoke research (or challenge it) as a warrant for action they have less routine access to sources of research, less time to read and evaluate it, and less familiarity with its arcane language.

What is inevitably hidden in the effort to "translate" research are all the ways in which the research findings conflict, or are limited by design flaws, or reflect particular conceptions of the phenomena under study. What also is missing is an invitation to teachers to act not only as consumers of research but also as critics of research and producers of research to be participants in a more visible and consequential manner. An alternative to the formulation "research says," reads something like: "The way this question has been framed in most research is...." Or: "There are three main approaches to this problem in research so far. Here's what each has produced...." These formulations leave open the possibility that the available research knowledge is incomplete and that there is room for discovery. They neither romanticize teachers' knowledge nor unduly privilege researchers' claims.

The status of the "knowledge base" in support of systemic reform is uncertain. Some argue that the base is strong, others that it is more hortatory and ideological than it is theoretically coherent or empirically defensible. Advocates of reform argue that we know enough to make considerable difference in the ways that students experience school and the benefits they derive from schooling. Whatever the strength of that claim, it also seems certain none of the knowledge we assert will be adequate to account for the complexities of any specific context, and that there is no substitute for local invention and inquiry. These circumstances prompt various responses to the burgeoning "teacher research" movement (not the first such movement in this century). In recent symposia on the subject, debate revealed widely diverse and competing views teachers' preparation to engage in "research," the nature of research topics and methods, conventions associated with legitimation of research, and issues surrounding the political control of research agendas and products (see Hollingsworth and Sockett, in press).

Phillip Schlechty is fond of observing that we are still confined by unworkable conceptions of school and school improvement, much as if NASA had decided that we could get to the moon by funding improvements in the internal combustion engine. In the allocation of professional development resources, we find a tremendous reliance on "research-based" solutions, on being able to give assurances of certainty. Our own voyage to the moon may require that we abandon our reliance on the present base of "consumable" research and expand our support for arrangements for teachers' involvement in the explication, invention, and evaluation of local practice.

The dominance of "training" over problem solving. States and local school districts have learned in part, anyway the lesson of the "implementation problem" and the importance of adequate local support. In the late 1970s, one could reasonably charge that "many... education reform efforts fell short primarily because planners seriously underestimated teacher training needs" (McLaughlin and Marsh, 1979, p. 69). An adequate supply of well- conceived training opportunities seemed a major contributor to implementation success. More than a decade later, we boast a more sophisticated understanding of the implementation problem, casting it as a complex interaction between external policy variables (clear statutes, effective authority, and the like) and the micro-contexts shaped by individuals' and groups' commitments, histories, and politics (McLaughlin, 1987, 1990; see also Ball, 1987). Our conception of implementation has evolved "from early notions of implementation as transmission or as a problem of incentives or authority to conceptions of implementation as bargaining and transformation" (McLaughlin, 1987, p. 175). Looking back at the celebrated Rand Change Agent Study (1973-1978) from a vantage point of nearly fifteen years, McLaughlin (1990) expresses a certain skepticism about the power of policy mandates, especially those that take the form of special projects aimed at "discrete elements of the education policy system" instead of embracing the systemic nature of problems and the systemic character of local practice (pp. 14-15).

But districts' strategies for reform, at least with regard to teachers' professional development, do not appear to capitalize fully on what we have learned about the importance and variability of local contexts and about the transformational nature of reform. "Inservice" activities tend to be linked to special projects or to discrete components of "reform, " and to embody a relatively traditional conception of classroom experience. The most sophisticated of these make some provision for follow-up in the form of classroom consultation and coaching.

The training-and-coaching strategy that dominates local professional development has much to recommend it when considered as a balanced part of a larger configuration, and when linked to those aspects of teaching that are properly rendered as transferable skills. But the training model is problematic. The content of much training communicates a view of teaching and learning that is at odds with present reform initiatives. It is not at all clear, for example, that any form of training is adequate to develop the "substantive conversation" that Newmann (1990) envisions (see also Hargreaves and Dawe, 1990). Nor is the content of training set against the content of local belief, practice, and policy in any meaningful and detailed way. In addition, principles of "good training" are frequently compromised in practice. In particular, schools and districts demonstrate far less capacity for classroom consultation and support than is required by the training and coaching model. Those persons typically designated as "coaches" or "mentors" are far outnumbered by their clientele of regular classroom teachers. They are further constrained by school workplace cultures that perpetuate a norm of privacy and constrain advice-giving (Little, 1990b). Finally, to attain results from the training/coaching model requires a consistency of purpose and a coordination of effort that is not the norm in many districts. Rather, districts parade a litany of short-term goals in their response to various state mandates and incentives, local constituencies, or the individual enthusiasms of superintendents, school board members, or others.

Having launched such criticisms, I want to reiterate that the skill training and coaching model to which so many districts seem wedded has demonstrated consistent results in those cases where training content can be represented as a repertoire of discrete practices, and where classroom performance is oriented toward specified student outcomes. At their best, local activities incorporate the wealth of research on effective training and support that we can trace to the various "implementation of innovation" studies and to studies of specific professional development ventures (Guskey, 1986; Showers, Joyce, and Bennett, 1987; Romberg and Price, 1983; Sparks, 1986; Smylie, 1988; Sparks and Loucks-Horsley, 1990). Nor are these remarks in any way meant to impugn the knowledge, skill, thoughtfulness, or good intentions of those persons designated by local districts as staff development specialists, coaches, mentors, and the like. Rather, the aim is to record the dominance of the training model, the possibilities it offers, and the constraints on its effectiveness.
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[Professional Development Principles and Practices]

[Emerging Issues (Continued)]