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Seven standards for effective professional development
Conference presenter Stephanie Hirsch says collaborative teamwork among teachers is a key to 21st-century student achievement
According to Hirsch, these collaborative teams were inspired by some of the same characteristics found in the educational systems of higher-performing countries. For example, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), high-performing countries provide ample time for teacher professional development that is structured into teachers’ work lives. Also, beginning teachers receive extensive mentoring and induction supports, teachers are widely encouraged to participate in school decision-making, and governments provide significant levels of support for additional PD.
These methods are also supported by numerous studies, which can be found here.
Before schools can adopt these new 21st-century standards for teacher professional development, Hirsch said there are some prerequisites: (1) Educators must commit to ensuring that all students succeed. (2) Educators must be ready to learn continually. (3) School district leaders must understand that professional learning involves collaborative inquiry and learning. (4) School district leaders must understand that educators learn in different ways and at different rates.
Learning Forward’s seven standards for professional learning that increase teacher effectiveness and results for all students are:
- Learning Communities: Groups of teachers who are committed to continuous improvement, shared responsibility, and collective goal alignment.
- Leadership: Skillful leaders who develop capacity, advocate, and create support systems for professional learning.
- Resources: Prioritizing, monitoring, and coordinating resources for professional learning.
- Data: Using a variety of sources and types of student, educator, and school system data to plan, assess, and evaluate professional learning.
- Learning Designs: Integrating theories, research, and models of human learning to achieve intended outcomes.
- Implementation: Applying research and sustained support for implementation of professional learning to foster long-term change.
- Outcomes: Aligning outcomes with educator performance and student curriculum standards.
To illustrate how these standards should be implemented, Hirsch showed a video of the math department of Ford Middle School in Allen, Texas, where the teachers meet to share their expertise. (To watch the video, click here, then scroll down the page to “Ford Middle School: PD in Action” on the right-hand side.)
In the video, Teacher A tells the group that she’s noticed students are having difficulty relating word problems to their equations. Teacher A then takes an example of student work and shows the group, explaining where in the problem trouble occurs. Teacher A then tells the group what she’s been doing to try to solve this problem.
3 Responses to Seven standards for effective professional development
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mnewhouse
February 21, 2012 at 9:13 am
Teachers are people, too. We have lives: husbands (or wives), children, aging parents, groceries to buy on the way home, dinner to cook and laundry to do.
Just exactly WHEN are these relaxed interactive meetings to take place? after school? before school? during our lunch hour?
Other industries have on-the-job training sessions during paid work time. Schools just can not turn off their production line (and neither do most industries).
I like the idea. Time must be integrated into the calendar for multiple opportunities for this kind of interaction to take place. Subject teams, rather than age related grade level teams are best gathered at a school wide seminar day (or half day) With lots of parental previous notice so other child care arrangements can be made.
Recorded or taped Webinar type programming might be useful so travel time to discipline association meetings can be saved. These shoud be accompanied with short hard copy summaries of the topics or ideas discussed.
An email-in collection of questions to be addressed in such seminars team meetings – like a blog – might be helpful to pin point the issues. A feeling of isolation is a big concern but so are feelings of inadequacy in new teachers. We older, wiser(?) teachers are wanting to be helpful but do not want to make our coworkers feel bad. Besides, we are busy with our own set of problems. It takes time and effort and planning how to present our helpful hints. My best time is 2:30 AM!
As a former sixth grade science and developmental math teacher, I am eager to see how school districts can make this work.
Blessings
Marlyn Newhouse
Union University
Jackson TN
mnewhous@uu.edu
Azutavern
February 21, 2012 at 4:07 pm
Our district has attempted to apply these 21st Century skills through our PLCs. However, the focii has been on AYP, development of tests (such as DDC, DQA, & Short Cyle Assessments. After 30 years in education, these 7 standards are not unique, but few accept their importance. In order to truly be successful in applying these, the system needs to be fundamentally turned on its head. Perhaps if we got “politics” out of education…..
Kelly
February 21, 2012 at 7:54 pm
I concur with the comment that one-off seminars are not the most efficient means of professional development, with a caveat: when they are mandatory and not based on the individual teacher’s experience, knowledge, or interests. I have attended many useful and informative stand-alone seminars of my choice, and almost none that were required. When my supervisors choose training for me, it’s a one-size-fits-all approach that does not take into consideration my skills (as in, could I teach the training, rather than having to sit through it?) The irony here is that we are expected to individualize for our students, but mandatory trainings never individualize for teachers.
I also agree with the need for collaboration and time. A room full of engaged and motivated teachers working to improve their teaching is a thing of beauty to behold. I just have to wonder where Ms. Hirsch thinks this time is going to come from. At my school, we already have cut so deeply into instructional time to create PLC time that it’s debatable whether the gains outweigh the losses in terms of time. Even so, the sessions are too few and too far apart. Which takes me to the comment about “this new definition of teacher professional development . . . Conducted several times per week”.
We’re talking a whole new reality and mind set for public schools if we’re going to make room for multiple meetings each week. And just what will that do to the instructional practice, routine, and momentum in the classroom? A full five-day week is already an anomaly. Is the goal to eliminate it altogether? Creating time for this much PLC meeting would require, and this is a quick ball park estimate, 30% more staff assuming staggered meeting times for groups of teachers to meet.
So given the national movement to reduce education funding, just where will the money come from for all this, or will it become one more thing teachers are expected to do on our own time and at our own expense? Why do you suppose it is that teachers “plateau” after four years due to lack of access to new research? We teach a full day (with somewhere between 30 and 55 minutes of prep time), we teach the equivalent of 150 students a day, and after school and many weekends we grade papers. We have to feel the stagnation and at the same time have the resources to combat it, which many teachers do not if they’re raising families. I feel very fortunate to have felt the flatness, to have experienced my own boredom and understood that if I were bored, so were my students; and to have had the ability to seek out training on my own to combat that. Not all teachers are so lucky.
To expand teacher professional development as described, we will have to alter the cultural mind-set (among the public and the teachers) of the 180 day school year, with the two-week winter holiday and the one week spring break. Otherwise, you’re simply shoe-horning in yet another unfunded mandate that we simply don’t have the time to fulfill, or that will take away from our primary duty of instruction. What sort of plan is there to implement these ideas, other than asking Congress to include them as expectations, without any funding support?
It’s the lack of any kind of backward design to show how such ideas would be implemented that leads to their becoming only the most recent of the ‘solutions’ to our education ‘problems.’