Reform of and as Professional Development

Abstract

Reform-minded professional development imposes the heavy burdens of coping with the uncertainties of change. The good news, according to Mr. Sykes, is that educators are beginning to turn their creativity toward teacher learning and to develop promising new practices. 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 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 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 itself needs reforming to achieve better ongoing teacher learning.(1) In addition to teachers, such 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 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 lest the results disappoint. Yet they do propose new visions of professional 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. …

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