Reform of and as professional development

Sykes, Gary

ProQuest document link

ABSTRACT (ABSTRACT)
Coping with the uncertainties of change is a big concern in efforts to reform professional development of teachers.
Educators are beginning to use their creativity to develop promising new practices.

FULL TEXT

TWO JUDGMENTS frame the contemporary concern for the professional development of teachers. The first reckons
that teacher learning must be the heart of any effort to improve education in our society. While other reforms may be
needed, better learning for more children ultimately relies on teachers. What lends urgency to professional
development is its connection to reform and to the ambitious new goals for education that are to be extended to all
students. Can professional development lead education reform?

The second judgment regards conventional professional development as sorely inadequate. The phrase "one-shot
workshop" has entered educational parlance as shorthand for superficial, faddish inservice education that supports a
mini-industry of consultants without having much effect on what goes on in schools and classrooms. The resources
devoted to professional development, this judgment charges, are too meager and their deployment too ineffective to
matter.

These twin observations form the most serious unsolved problem for policy and practice in American education
today. Reformers have launched efforts to set goals and standards of various kinds, to create school reform
networks, to decentralize governance and management, to restructure schools, to charter new schools, and so on.
But efforts to promote teacher learning that will lead to improved practice on a wide scale have yet to emerge. The
process of reform itself needs reforming to achieve better ongoing teacher learning.(1)

In addition to teachers, such "reform of reform" must involve many actors in the system. Teachers are frequently the
targets of reform, but they exert relatively little control over professional development. The system of professional
development is deeply institutionalized in patterns of organization, management, and resource allocation within
schools and school districts, as well as between districts and a range of providers that includes freelance
consultants, intermediate and state agencies, professional associations, and universities. Moreover, the system is
increasingly structured by means of federal, state, and district policies. This system is powerful, resistant to change,
and well adapted to the ecology of schooling. The system supplies jobs for many educators and operates as a series
of exchanges through which incentives and rewards are distributed. Hence, many interests are at stake in any
proposals for the reform of professional development.

At the same time, in the interstices and around the margins of the system, alternative practices flourish that may
hold promise for reform-oriented teacher learning. This Kappan special section explores such practices,
concentrating on underlying assumptions, descriptions, and emerging problems. The articles strike a balance
between advocacy for new approaches and honesty about the difficulties. The authors seem mindful of history's
lesson not to oversell reform lest the results disappoint. Yet they do propose new visions of professional

PDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COM Page 1 of 6

development that recast teacher learning in ways that parallel the teaching reforms themselves. The tenor of the
writing is at once refreshing and sobering. I am reminded of the tensions within my own teaching.

As I write this introduction, I am also reading student journals for a course I teach. My students are in the fifth year of
a five-year teacher education program. They serve as teaching interns in local schools while they take several
graduate courses. The course I teach concentrates on professional roles and responsibilities and introduces these
novice teachers to aspects of their work other than direct instruction.

Their journals are poignant. For example, they ask somewhat plaintively, "If I recommend action for a student that
parents reject, what then?" "If the school principal insists on certain policies and procedures that I disagree with,
what should I do?" "My school is devoted to assertive discipline, and I don't believe in it. What can I do?" "The
teachers in my school don't get along with one another and don't work together very well. What can a new teacher
do about this?" "The high school where I teach is filled with the threat of violence among students, sometimes
directed toward teachers. Students are openly abusive and rebellious. What are my rights in this situation? How
should I deal with fights among students? What should I do if a student tells me to f*** off?"

Put mildly, the discourse about professionalism at my university is not well-suited for dealing with these problems.
The students want -- desperately need -- concrete, practical advice. They tend to believe that an expert somewhere
can be immediately helpful to them, and they are very frustrated when their university professors appear not to
possess the requisite useful knowledge. With great and understandable emotional intensity, they are fixed on
questions of "what works" in relation to a host of difficulties they scarcely anticipated.

In response, I frequently note that such problems of practice may not have single, well-defined, best solutions.
Expert teachers handle these problems in a variety of ways, drawing on their own creativity, on the advice of
colleagues, and on the professional lore that is available. I write back to students that an invaluable resource for
teachers is a professional community that can serve as a source of insight and wisdom about problems of practice.

To model how such a community might work, I encourage students to share their problems and responses with one
another in what might be characterized as a reflective or inquiring mode. Such a stance favors proposals advanced
as conjectures to be scrutinized, challenged, modified, and ultimately tested through experience -- which leads to
more scrutiny and questioning. Through such interaction I hope to convey several lessons: that authoritative
decisions must be constructed out of a certain stance toward practice; that teachers must often look to themselves
and develop confidence in their own responses; that a community of peers serves as an important source of
support, ideas, and criticism; and that alternating experience with reflection is an indispensable impetus for
improving practice.

However consonant these lessons may be with current thinking in the field, they are not enthusiastically embraced
by all the students. Many still hunger for something more direct, immediate, and definitive. And in many of their other
courses, they receive it. They are introduced to principles of classroom management. They acquire six practical tips
on how to teach children with "attention deficit disorder." They learn and practice techniques of cooperative learning.
They are taught ways of integrating phonics instruction into whole-language approaches to literacy. And they learn
many other things. There appears to be a sound base of firm knowledge and skill with regard to teaching that may
be conveyed in a straightforward training mode. The skills may be difficult to master and to implement without
mishap, but little doubt exists about their worth, relevance, or practicality.

The professional terrain, as Donald Schoen has noted, seems to contain both a high, hard ground of technical
knowledge -- conveyed as discrete practices, methods, techniques, and tips -- and a low-lying swamp of messy

PDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COM Page 2 of 6

problems, persistent dilemmas, and perennial perplexities for which no evident technical knowledge exists.(2) The
expert professional learns to navigate this territory, extending his other technical repertoire while cultivating the
resources of community, inquiry, and reflection. Novices insecure in their command of technical repertoire often find
forays into the professional lowlands to be disconcerting. They prefer continued instruction in the certainties even as
they begin encountering the swampy issues.

This tension in the character and content of teacher education has its counterpart in professional development. A
great deal of "inservice training" (note the term) is profitably devoted to transmitting knowledge and skills of various
kinds. When this is done well, teachers are appreciative. But the uncertainties of teaching are scarcely less for
experienced teachers than for novices, although the sources are somewhat different. Reform in particular is a great
source of uncertainty.

As the articles in this section reveal, reform magnifies the "endemic uncertainties" of teaching.(3) For one thing,
schools and classrooms are the vessels into which a torrent of new ideas pour. Schools and teachers must sift
through and select among the many competing ideas for change. They must figure out how to respond to often
conflicting ideas about reform, most of which ignore the constraints under which teachers work. (At a meeting I
attended on standards, a commentator noted that the new content standards for the elementary subjects would
require 120% of available instructional time. I suspect that this figure is an underestimate.)

For another thing, reform visions are inevitably vague on just how to implement such new ideas as inclusion,
detracking, site-based management, process writing, authentic assessment, teaching for conceptual understanding,
or (as in the cases in this special section) particular approaches to mathematics education. Reform typically
launches teachers on a voyage of discovery and invention. The more radical reforms alter the root metaphor of
teacher learning from addition to transformation, from evolution to revolution. Schoen's image of hard and soft
ground gives way to a kind of virtual reality simulation in which the entire landscape shifts under the gaze and
beneath the feet of the practitioner. Ironically, too, participation in such reform degrades competence and
confidence, at least initially, as the practitioner struggles to deconstruct and then reconstruct his or her practice.

By contrast, the more familiar inservice training offers to enhance prevailing competence through increments to a
teacher's existing repertoire. This feature of reform alone might tilt teachers' preferences toward the training mode
that assumes a base of familiar practice.

Yet another feature of far-reaching reform is its uncertain warrant. Significant departures from the tried and true
enjoy no firm support from tradition, scientific evidence, democratic assent, or other sources. Instead, reform ideas
are amalgams formed out of critiques of current practice, implications derived from social science, and the creative
inspiration of inventors. As ideas or arguments, such reforms often work well in the ongoing rhetorical battle over
American education. As guides to practice, however, they are susceptible to the "implementation dip,"(4) to quick
challenge, and to the charge of unproved merit.

Finally, the uncertainties of reform are multiplied by the lack of supporting resources. When a teacher leaves the
well-worn track of familiar practice, such reinforcements as curricular materials, assessment instruments,
administrative oversight, collegial approval, student understanding, and parent/community expectations may be lost.
New practices cut against the grain and bring to the surface all the supporting connections that link the social,
organizational, and technical systems of schooling. Professional development that tugs hard on any one thread of
the tapestry soon begins to unravel the whole; reform inevitably ramifies.

Such a depiction of reform-minded professional development exaggerates its differences from other forms, for all

PDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COM Page 3 of 6

meaningful learning involves some degree of discomfort and discontinuity. Today's concern for professional
development, however, is linked to reform, often of a far-reaching sort. The articles assembled here explore the
teaching and learning of mathematics as a case in point. Spurred by the visionary standards of the National Council
of Teachers of Mathematics, mathematics educators across the country have been working to transform
mathematics teaching. The new work is beginning to reinvent teachers' professional development to better
accommodate the character of these new teaching reforms.

The descriptions contain outwardly familiar elements, such as summer institutes, one- or two-day retreats, and after-
school meetings. Some of the principles are time-honored as well. For example, teachers need assistance in trying
out new practices in their classrooms, along with the opportunity for feedback and dialogue. The widely
disseminated coaching model and its extension to cognitive coaching(5) rely on similar processes.

But beneath the similarities with other practices are significant differences. The approaches often engage teachers
in learning about their own learning, in studying their own teaching, and in sustaining relationships with other
teachers, both near and far away. However, the key difference lies in what Deborah Ball in her article in this section
identifies as "stance." Coaching, with its overtones of training, is replaced by a professional development stance of
inquiry that is better suited to the uncertainties of changing practice. Within this stance, teachers engage in
invention, trial, exploration, and discovery. Professional development resources that embrace the uncertainties
include dialogue and critique within professional communities; experiments with new materials, such as the
"replacement units" described by Kris Acquarelli and Judith Mumme in their article in this Kappan; practices of
writing, videotaping, and peer observation; and opportunities for interaction across such roles as teacher,
administrator, and policy maker.

The larger structures needed to generate these resources and to support these practices are beginning to emerge.
Skills acquisition and the training model will continue to enjoy a solid place within the professional development mix.
But if the many reforms under way are to realize their potential and to spread to many schools, then new
approaches to teacher learning will be needed. Reform-minded professional development imposes the heavy
burdens of coping with the uncertainties of change. The good news is that educators are beginning to turn their
creativity toward teacher-learning and to develop promising new practices. The challenges ahead are significant, but
good starts are under way. Reform of professional development and reform as professional development are the
dual generative themes of the future.

1. A number of analyses explore the prospects for innovative professional development. See, for example, Judith
Warren Little, "Teachers' Professional Development in a Climate of Educational Reform," Educational Evaluation
and Policy Analysis, Summer 1993, pp. 129-52; Ann Lieberman, "Practices That Support Teacher Development:
Transforming Conceptions of Professional Learning," Phi Delta Kappan, April 1995, pp. 591-96; and Linda Darling-
Hammond and Milbrey W. McLaughlin, "Policies That Support Professional Development in an Era of Reform," Phi
Delta Kappan, April 1995, pp. 597-604.

2. Donald Schoen, The Reflective Practitioner (New York: Basic Books, 1983).

3. The phrase "endemic uncertainties" is from Dan Lortie, Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1975).

4. The "implementation dip" refers to the emergence of problems and confusion early in the process of innovation,
followed in successful instances by problem solving and gradual improvement. See Michael Fullan, Change Forces:
Probing the Depths of Educational Reform (Bristol, Pa.: Falmer Press, 1993).

PDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COM Page 4 of 6

5. Arthur Costa and Robert Garmston, Cognitive Coaching (Norwood, Mass.: Christopher-Gordon Publishers, 1994).

GARY SYKES is a professor in the Department of Educational Administration and Teacher Education at Michigan
State University, East Lansing.

DETAILS

ERIC Subject: Teaching Methods; Educational Change; Beginning Teachers

Subject: Teacher education; Creativity; Teachers; Professional development

Business indexing term: Subject: Professional development

Location: Chicago Illinois; United States--US

Company / organization: Name: Phi Delta Kappan; NAICS: 513120

Identifier / keyword: Reform; Professional; Development; Professional development; Teacher; Teacher

education; Creativity

Publication title: Phi Delta Kappan; Bloomington

Volume: 77

Issue: 7

Pages: 464

Number of pages: 4

Publication year: 1996

Publication date: Mar 1996

Publisher: Phi Delta Kappa

Place of publication: Bloomington

Country of publication: United States, Bloomington

Publication subject: Children And Youth - For, Education, College And Alumni

ISSN: 00317217

e-ISSN: 19406487

Source type: Scholarly Journal

PDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COM Page 5 of 6

 Language of publication: English

Document type: Journal Article

Accession number: 02746984

ProQuest document ID: 218473711

Document URL: https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/reform-as-professional-

development/docview/218473711/se-2?accountid=39753

Copyright: Copyright Phi Delta Kappa Mar 1996

Last updated: 2024-04-18

Database: ProQuest Central

Database copyright  2024 ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved.

Terms and Conditions Contact ProQuest

PDF GENERATED BY PROQUEST.COM Page 6 of 6