Capacity Building in Systemic Reform

Abstract

The authors hope that the framework outlined and illustrated here will help those shaping reform policies to think about expanding their strategies for enhancing teacher capacity. Further analysis is also needed to understand the role of organizational capacity and its connections to reform and to teacher learning. Seeking to help all students meet more challenging expectations for learning, many states have moved toward systemic reform. To date, systemic reform has focused on articulating high standards for students and aligning other policies with these learning goals.[1] Although some may believe that a combination of standards and assessment will yield the desired results, most reformers recognize that other changes are needed to meet new achievement standards. Researchers and policy makers alike have therefore begun to advocate capacity building as a crucial component of reform. It is not clear, however, just what is being recommended. Capacity is a general term, referring to the power or ability to do some particular thing, such as reach the goals of systemic reform. Hence those calling for capacity building are saying that the current education system lacks the power to achieve reform. This statement leaves many questions unanswered. What power or ability is lacking? Is it the ability of individual teachers that needs to be enhanced or that of education organizations such as schools? These ambiguities impede the effective development of policy. If those involved in systemic reform had a better sense of what capacities were needed and how they might be built - if they had a road map of possibilities - they would have a better basis for deciding what they need and how reform strategies could address those needs. In this article, we begin to sketch such a map. When talking about capacity building, policy makers engaged in systemic reform often focus on teachers' professional development. In keeping with this perspective, we will concentrate our analysis on building the capacities of individual teachers. It is clear, however, that organizational capacity, especially the capacity of schools, is also critical to supporting and sustaining reform. In talking about what is needed to carry out reform, for example, teachers often mention a school's ability to make time available for discussion, observation, and reflection or a district's ability to allocate resources for curriculum materials, for professional travel, and for released time. Although policy makers often support the idea of devoting additional funds to professional development, their conception of professional development sometimes seems confined to a traditional workshop model. Our framework will cast capacity building as more complex and differentiated. In developing this framework, we will draw on interview data from an exploratory study we conducted to inform the development of new capacity-building strategies. We collected information in selected schools in California, Michigan, and Vermont. We interviewed prominent figures at the state level and talked with teachers, administrators, and school board members in two school districts in each state. Because we hoped to learn about successful strategies, we selected school districts that had reputations for being active in reform. To provide a sharper focus, we centered our collection of data on two subject areas in each state - mathematics and either reading or writing. Consistent with national movements, the content reforms in these states were in line with the mathematics standards proposed by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, stressed a process view of writing, and highlighted comprehension in reading. In order to develop an effective framework for professional development, it is important to consider both the dimensions of teachers' capacities and the strategies for building these capacities. For teachers, the dimensions of capacity include knowledge, skill, disposition, and sense of self. …

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