education week: professional development

Education WEEk A Special Report on Teacher Learning www.edweek.org/go/pdreport

Sorting Through the Jumble To Achieve Success

A Supplement to the November 10, 2010 , Issue

Professional DeveloPment

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Formative Assessment that moves learning forwardThe Keeping Learning on Track® (KLT™) Program is a sustained, interactive professional development program that guides educators as they learn to use minute-to-minute and day-by-day strategies to integrate assessment into student learning.

Teachers use formative assessment techniques to identify where students are and then move them toward intended learning goals, making students more accountable for their own learning.

Copyright © 2010 by Educational Testing Service. All rights reserved. ETS, the ETS logo and LISTENING. LEARNING. LEADING. are registered trademarks of Educational Testing Service (ETS). 15596

To learn more, visit us at www.ets.org/klt

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POLICY & PRACTICE

S2 Professional Development at Crossroads

S4 No Proof-Positive for Training Approaches

S6 District Strives for ‘Learning System’

S8 Michigan District Adds Accountability Piece To Focus Training

buSiNeSS & FiNANce

S12 Providers eye New Opportunities

S14 cost of Teacher Training Lost in District budgets

S15 Questions Arise on credentials

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S17 content Seen Lacking Specificity

S20 Texas District Targets eLL Teaching

COVER PhOtO: Charles Borst

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TEAChER PD SOuRCEbOOk 21st-century TeachingThe Fall 2010 issue of Teacher PD Sourcebook examines the concept of “21st-century teaching.” The world has changed a great deal in the past two decades, particularly as a result of developments in information technology. This issue takes a look at how conscientious teachers and schools are integrating these changes into their classrooms, and how teachers’ own work is affected.www.teachersourcebook.org/go/fall

Teacher PD Source Directoryreview Sourcebook’s exclusive directory of K-12 professional-development products and services. Search by keyword, or browse resources on english/reading, Project-based Learning, classroom Management, Differentiated instruction, Professional Learning communities, School-Wide improvement, and more.www.teachersourcebook.org

TOPIC RESOuRCE PAgE education Week’s professional-development page provides the very latest news and resources on the topic. updated daily, it also includes archived stories, commentary, video, and special reports.www.edweek.org/go/profdev

click on the Digital editionRead digital editions of the professional-development report and forward copies of the online versions to your colleagues.

PrOFeSSiONAL DeVeLOPMeNT www.edweek.org/go/pdreport

JeSS RhoAdeS boniLLAhigh school teachernew York city

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GeeTikA d. kAw middle school teacher Lexington, mass.

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LAuRie hAhn GAnSeRhigh School teacher Austin, Texas

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Ann wALkeR kennedYelementary/middle school teacherbaltimore

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coReY R. SeLLelementary teacherArlington, va.

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PhOtOS fROm tOP: Emile Wamsteker, Erik Jacobs, Stephen Voss, Stephen Voss, Erich Schlegel

MultiMedia: to see teachers discuss their thoughts on professional development, go to www.edweek.org/go/pdprofiles.

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Professional Development At a Crossroads

by STePheN SAWchuK

Perhaps no other aspect of the teacher-quality system in the United States suffers from an identity crisis as severe as that of professional development.

Few in the education field discount the emi-nently logical idea that teachers should be supported in the continuous improvement of their craft. But as a term for describing ongo-ing training investments in the teaching force, “professional development” has become both

ubiquitous and all but meaningless. Though frequently invoked by lawmakers and consultants,

most recently in states’ applications for the federal Race to the Top competition, professional development plans generally in-corporate little context about who will provide the training and for what purpose. That this situation endures, despite a focus during the past decade on data analysis and research to im-prove instruction, is both a testament to the complexity of the professional-development enterprise, and its greatest problem: Mediocre, scattershot training, apart from doing little to help students, is a burden for teachers.

“At some point, you are in this meeting and feel you’ve been there two million times before, and it starts to grate,” said Jess Rhoades Bonilla, an 11th grade English teacher in New York City. “It can be a teacher-morale issue as well as not a good use of time.”

New developments in education policy portend a crossroads of sorts for the field of professional development. For one, the idea of “teacher effectiveness” is now front and center on the state and national policy agenda. In theory, the idea dovetails with the goal of professional development: to ensure that teachers have opportunities to improve their craft and are given tools with which to do so, and that school systems have a way of de-termining whether students learn more as a result.

Yet advocates acknowledge that professional development risks marginalization in the teacher-effectiveness conversation unless it is able to articulate clearly its place in producing bet-ter teachers.

“The hard truth is that, until recently, the field of profes-sional development has been underdeveloped and immature,” said M. Hayes Mizell, a distinguished senior fellow at Learn-ing Forward, a nonprofit group and membership organization that works to improve the quality of ongoing training. “It has tolerated a lot of sloppy thinking, practice, and results. It has not been willing to ‘call out’ ineffective practice and ineffective policy. ... It has not devoted attention to outcomes.”

In this special report, Education Week takes a detailed look at some of the critical issues faced by those charged with upgrad-ing the quality of post-preparation teacher training.

Among other topics, this package of stories attempts to offer new insights into some of the fundamental questions about such training’s research base, its cost and its implementation in districts, and the changing marketplace for professional-de-velopment providers. The report also aims to launch conversa-tions about changes in the field, including advancement in the

To influence policy, the field must be able to articulate both what it is and how it can help teachers improve student achievement.

The professional learning community of, from left, hillary berbeco, David Lawrence, Geetika D. Kaw, and Anne DeMallie discusses ways to help 8th grade science students at Jonas clarke Middle School in Lexington, Mass.

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curriculum of professional development and a new focus on serving an increasingly diverse student population.

Changing LandsCape

Teacher-quality policy has evolved dramatically since 1996, when Education Week last examined professional development in a special report.

At that time, teacher quality was still largely defined by teachers’ characteristics, such as the selectivity of teacher education program attended, credentials held, educational attainment, and state licensing status. But as analyses of longitudinal data linking teachers to student test scores have become common, researchers have discovered that such individual characteristics are by themselves only weakly predictive of student academic success.

In the past two years, policymaking has moved toward linking student outcomes to teacher performance. But as teacher tenure, hiring, seniority, and dismissal policies increasingly come under that microscope, comparatively little attention has been paid to ways to boost the effec-tiveness of the majority of educators who will remain in classrooms across the country.

From a policy standpoint, that could be partly because of the vast number of initiatives that purportedly invest in enhancing teachers’ knowledge and skills.

“We’ve recognized professional development as impor-tant, but we don’t have very clear standards for what we’re looking for and we don’t have much accountability for what teachers engage in,” said Jennifer King Rice, a professor of education policy at the University of Mary-land College Park. “It opens the floodgates for just about anything to be called professional development.”

Practices that fall under the broad heading conceivably include everything from teacher induction and contractu-ally set in-service days to content coaching, recertification credits, and participation in professional associations and networks.

OBsTaCLes aBOUnd

In addition, scholars point to problems with how the training is selected and provided.

“Every time the superintendent goes to a conference, the teachers get worried, because they know he’s going to come back with something he wants to try,” said Thomas R. Guskey, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Kentucky, in Lexington. “We should start where students’ weaknesses and shortcomings are and then seek strategies or techniques to help [teachers] un-derstand those shortcomings.”

A popular model for doing that is the “professional learning community,” or plc, in which school-level

“The hard truth is that, until recently, the field of professional development has been underdeveloped and immature.”m. hayES mizEllDistinguished Senior fellow, learning forward

SPECIAL REPORT 2010PrOFeSSiONAL DeVeLOPMeNT

PreSiDeNT & eDiTOr-iN-chieFVirginia b. edwards

ExECuTIvE EDITORGregory chronister

execuTiVe PrOJecT eDiTOrKaren Diegmueller

SeNiOr WriTerStephen Sawchuk covers teachers for Education Week.

cONTribuTiNG WriTerS

bess keller is a former teacher-beat writer for Education Week who is currently working on a master’s degree in public policy.

Mary Ann Zehr covers english-language learners and disadvantaged students for Education Week.

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ASSiSTANT DeSiGN DirecTOrvanessa Solis

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DIRECTOR Of PhOTOgRAPhYcharles borst

ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR Of PhOTOgRAPhYchristopher Powers

DirecTOr OF PrODucTiON Jo Arnone

ADVerTiSiNG PrODucTiON cOOrDiNATOr

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ADVerTiSiNG: For information about print and online advertising in future special reports, please contact Associate Publisher Sharon Makowka, at [email protected] or (815) 436-5149.

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No Proof-Positive for Training Approaches

RESEARCh

by STePheN SAWchuK

Anecdotes about districts’ suc-c e s s s t o r i e s with particular professional-development brands, services, and approaches

are common in today’s marketplace. But is there proof that any of them ac-tually work?

For the most part, the answer is no, according to scholars who have studied the link between postlicensure teacher training and student academic achieve-ment. Reasons for that dearth of evi-dence include a general lack of rigor in education research, as well as specific obstacles that make studying profes-sional development’s impact on student achievement a challenge.

Few studies of professional develop-ment employ scientifically rigorous methodologies. The research literature on the training, scholars say, is largely qualitative or descriptive, and there-fore not capable of answering nuanced

cause-and-effect questions. At the same time, there are many

problems with those programs and studies that do purport to tackle the student-achievement question.

“First, the intervention itself should be workable, and some are not sup-ported by theory or scientific action. Second, the program needs to be fully implemented if you want to see any ef-fects, and in many cases, fidelity is a real challenge,” said Kwang S. Yoon, an analyst at the Washington-based American Institutes of Research who studies in-service training. “And the third piece is the intervention research itself. It may be weak in design.”

For a 2007 review commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education, Mr. Yoon and colleagues pulled more than 1,300 potentially relevant research studies of professional development conducted between 1986 and 2006.

Only 132 specifically focused on K-12 in-service training in reading, math-ematics, or science. And of those, only nine studies met evidence standards set by the What Works Clearinghouse, the arm of the federal Institute of Edu-cation Sciences that reviews experi-mental research on program impact.

Time On Task

The review found that, across the nine studies, only the teachers who re-ceived a substantial amount of devel-opment boosted students’ scores. Three of the nine studies, those that exam-ined summer institutes or workshops between five and 14 hours in length, showed no effect on student achieve-ment. The studies that looked at teach-ers trained between 30 and 100 hours were correlated with positive student-achievement gains.

Advocates have seized on those find-ings as evidence that the amount of time currently spent on professional development is insufficient. But given the small sample sizes of most of those studies, Mr. Yoon said, they don’t pro-vide conclusive answers to the question of how much time spent in training matters.

Rather, he said, the effects of profes-sional development are likely functions of both the time and the quality of the specific training. “You can have many, many hours without much engage-ment,” he noted. “Any serious teacher change or teacher learning requires intensive treatment of some topic of significance.”

An added problem is that professional development is mediated through teachers’ own practices. A successful in-service-training program, therefore, must inculcate in teachers behaviors that improve outcomes for students.

“Even if professional development is effective and a teacher learned some-thing, what makes them really improve their practice in the classroom when they are so busy and so tired?” Mr. Yoon said. “I don’t think there is a huge external incentive for the teachers to practice their new learning. ... I think that’s a huge [research] gap that we do not think to pay much attention to.”

Some of the largest-scale studies have found that even when teachers have indeed changed practices in re-sponse to a professional-development intervention, those changes haven’t led to greater student learning.

A 2008 federally financed study used a randomized experiment to look at the impact of two early-reading interven-tion programs. It found that the inter-vention caused significant increases in teachers’ knowledge and changes in their teaching practices, but did not significantly enhance students’

teams of teachers meet peri-odically during school hours to examine student work from com-mon assignments, brainstorm ways to instruct students who haven’t yet mastered standards, and evaluate the results of re-teaching. Such efforts appeal to teachers like Ms. Bonilla.

“One ineffective way of doing PD is very top-down, giving little control to teachers and treating all departments and all teachers the same way,” she said.

As with all teacher training, the team-based approach can be done well or poorly. Supporters of the model stress that merely putting teachers in a conference room once a week doesn’t, by itself, yield bet-ter professional development.

“There’s probably not a district out there that doesn’t think it’s doing plcs,” said Judy Hapton-stall, the superintendent of the 5,000-student Roaring Fork dis-trict, in Colorado, which for eight years has set aside time each

month for teachers to work to-gether. “But the heart of it has to be about planning for good instruc-tion and evaluating teaching.”

Indeed, the relationship of pro-fessional development to teacher evaluation is among the murkier areas for educators to make sense of. Evaluation, the centerpiece of the Obama administration’s teacher-quality plans, ideally pro-vides teachers with specific feed-back about how to improve their craft.

Some educators, like officials at the Learning Forward group, for-merly the National Staff Develop-ment Council, worry that the focus on individual teacher evaluation will dominate discussions about professional development, causing it to be seen as a remediation tool rather than a process for collective, schoolwide improvement.

But Timothy Daly, the president of the New Teacher Project, a New York City-based training organiza-tion, argues that better alignment

between individual and schoolwide training is crucial for making pro-fessional development relevant.

“You cannot possibly have good professional development without a [formal] evaluation that tells you the skills that need to be developed and without a subsequent evalua-tion that lets you know whether they’ve been improved,” he said. “It helps set the curriculum for professional development.”

key shifTs

As such debates wind on, a va-riety of for-profit and nonprofit providers, both local and national, continue to populate a lucrative marketplace for professional de-velopment, and they are begin-ning to respond to the call to move training closer to schools.

Federal data suggest that a steady increase in teacher hiring during the past decade may have

been caused by the phenomenon of the instructional-coaching model for professional development. And federal data also document an increase in the number of teach-ers who report participating in a mentoring program.

What all the spending on per-sonnel, programming, and teacher release time actually buys re-mains hard to determine, because districts typically amalgamate federal, state, and local dollars for those purposes—and do little to track their impact on teacher and student learning.

Despite all the challenges in the field, there are signs of rejuvena-tion, too. Providers of all sorts are creating new programming to re-spond to new needs, such as help-ing general teachers work with special populations of students.

On the cutting edge is a way of thinking about professional devel-opment that focuses not just on content but also on the minute-by-minute ways teachers make peda-

gogical decisions in classrooms.And finally, there are teachers

in every building and every school who are dedicated to constant im-provement. They include teachers like Corey R. Sell, an 11-year vet-eran of the field who for years has grabbed bits and pieces of every-thing from academic journals to in-service workshops that he felt would make him a better teacher.

Now all that remains is figur-ing out how to get all teachers to share that degree of professional commitment. That is not an easy task, says the 5th grade teacher in Arlington, Va., when some teach-ers prefer to close their classroom doors and new ones come into a culture that’s not always commit-ted to ongoing learning.

“If I could find a way to get my own school to be innovative, to dis-rupt itself,” Mr. Sell said, “I’d do it in a moment.” n

Freelance writer Bess Keller contributed to this story.

Three OF The NiNe STuDieS, which examined summer institutes or workshops between five and 14 hours in length, showed no effect on student achievement. The studies that looked at teachers trained between 30 and 100 hours were correlated with positive student-achievement gains.

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reading achievement.Many professional-development

advocates say one way to ensure that teachers both have enough time for professional development and work to improve their own practice is through site-based professional learning communities. Such commu-nities are formed of teams of teach-ers who meet frequently to review student-achievement information and tailor instruction accordingly.

High-quality studies specifically focused on the effect of the plc for-mat of professional development remain sparse, despite the model’s common-sense appeal. The studies that do exist suggest that the suc-cess of such endeavors might hinge on having a formal, systematic ap-proach and possibly experts to help guide teachers.

A study published in 2009 in the Elementary School Journal found an achievement edge for schools whose learning teams relied on a set of formal protocols, a leadership structure that guided meetings, and a process for setting forth and solving problems. The study used a quasi-experimental methodol-ogy to compare students in nine Title I schools that used that spe-cific framework with students in six other schools using a variety of other school improvement models.

TOO siTe-Based?

Some scholars worry that the pendulum has already swung too far toward site-based development without proper attention to how the training is structured and led.

“For a long time, most profes-sional development was guided

or directed by a central office or a regional office, and those efforts lacked the contextual relevance that was really necessary,” said Thomas R. Guskey, a professor of educational psychology at the Uni-versity of Kentucky. “Now, we’ve swung the other way and said we have to be completely site-based. ... Solutions can’t always come from inside, and oftentimes the findings from research can be particularly instructive, but teachers need guid-ance and direction on what can be done to bring it to bear in their classrooms.”

Russell M. Gersten, a professor emeritus of education at the Uni-versity of Oregon, seconds the idea that researchers need to do more to investigate features that seem to yield the most effective site-based training. He and colleagues crafted and tested their own approach for building 1st grade teachers’ capacity to teach reading comprehension and vocabulary, through facilitated study groups that met to discuss empirical reading research and create aligned lesson plans and instruction.

A randomized study of the ap-proach conducted by Mr. Gersten and his team found that teachers aligned their practices with the research, pro-ducing modest but statistically signifi-cant progress on measures of oral-vo-cabulary development. Released this year, the study compared teachers in 19 schools receiving federal Reading First funding in three states.

Gains didn’t show up in other areas, but Mr. Gersten said his team is working on a larger-scale study with more statistical “power” to see if the results can be replicated. n

A link to the studies is provided at edweek.org/links.


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world, i’d make more time for english and history teachers to collaborate together.”

JeSS rhOADeS bONiLLAhigh School of Telecommunications Arts and Technology New york cityAge: 30 years of teaching: 8

Jess rhoades bonilla recalls that professional development in her first year or two of teaching seemed useful. but that changed as another half dozen passed.

“in the last two or three years, i can’t say i enjoyed the PD that was given,” said Ms. bonilla, who teaches at the high School of Telecommunications Arts and Technology in New york city. “it started to seem repetitive.”

She hadn’t lost her taste for learning. in those years, the 30-year-old Princeton university graduate earned a master’s degree in American studies and started work on an administrator’s license. She taught different grades and levels.

it wasn’t, as teachers often complain, that the central office was dictating content or making her trek across town for a silly workshop. Most of the professional development was homegrown.

Sometimes, she said, she learned a lot from her colleagues, importing techniques or materials to her own classroom almost right away. On other occasions, the sessions just weren’t what she needed—in the language of pedagogy, the instruction was “undifferentiated.”

Plus, bringing teachers together from across the school was easy to overdo. “if i ruled the world, i’d make more time for english and history teachers to collaborate together,” Ms. bonilla wrote in an e-mail.

This past summer, she got her wish for intensive and subject-specialized professional development.

One of a select group of teachers from across the city, she spent five, eight-hour days in a creative-writing workshop led by a novelist-in-residence at the New york Public Library. “it was definitely the best professional development i’ve ever had,” she said. “So much of what i learned this summer i hope to re-create for my students.”

Meanwhile, Ms. bonilla has hopes for the “inquiry groups” that will fill the two, 35-minute periods that her school devotes to professional development each week. her group of three teachers shares students; its members teach english, history, and art, respectively. The trio is going to zero in on some aspect of better helping the students who are struggling readers.

Teachers were able to chose their own teams and topics. That, Ms. bonilla said, was a good place to start. –beSS KeLLer


http://www.edweek.org/links

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http://www.edweek.org/go/pdprofiles

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District Strives for ‘Learning System’The goal for administrators and teachers is to convert typically scattershot teacher training into a coherent, cohesive endeavor.

by STePheN SAWchuKLexington, Mass.

Oreo cookies, a veggie platter, and a lot of caffeinated bever-ages make up the afternoon re-inforcements for the educators gathered in the basement of a converted school here in this leafy Boston suburb.

Over the course of the meeting on this fall day, the 18-member professional-development com-

mittee for the Lexington school system will cover a wide swath of topics about the ongoing training—everything from practical concerns about teacher enrollment in a district-sponsored course to philosophical ones about how to improve teachers’ ability to modify instruction based on analyses of student work.

Formed in spring 2009 by the district, in partnership with the local teachers’ union, the work group has a specific mis-sion: to ensure that the pieces of the district’s continuing teacher training are congruent, of high quality, relevant to what teachers are doing in their classrooms, and widely ac-cessible.

In the words of Superintendent Paul B. Ash, the Lexington district is trying to become a “learning system”—one that fosters teacher learning beyond the individual school level.

As it does so, the district is grappling with some of the challenges inherent in upgrading typically scattershot train-ing into a seamless endeavor. Building teacher capacity to advance learning, after all, means moving from an individ-ual exercise to a collective one. It relies on skilled teams in each school working effectively, as well as the provision of additional support when necessary for teachers, and for the teams, to overcome roadblocks.

And that is exactly what this committee has set out to do.

Since coming to Lexington in 2005, Mr. Ash has made the provision of professional development the hallmark of his leadership in this 6,300-student district. Training is now provided in a variety of formats.

Educators in each school are expected to engage in the central component—a minimum of one planning period a week devoted to grade-level or content teams, known at some schools as professional learning communities, or plcs. Elementary teachers have some additional time on Thurs-days, while other teachers and principals supplement the meetings by using contractual after-school Monday meet-ing time and additional prep periods for the collaborative work.

The idea is for the teams to devise common benchmarks for student learning, discuss how students perform against those benchmarks, and intervene and reteach as needed.

At Jonas Clarke Middle School, for instance, the three members of the 8th grade U.S. history content team used their collaboration time to craft a unit on the 2008 presi-dential election, after realizing that many students didn’t

understand the distinction between a Republican and the political concept of “republicanism.”

This year, the team is working on ways to upgrade the history curriculum to include more primary sources, his-torical accounts, and materials beyond the scope of the textbook.

Ramille Romulus, a team member, said one of his group’s goals is to gradually raise expectations for students. As he puts it, “After a couple of years of getting things done, it’s time to move on to something higher.”

OverCOming resisTanCe

As simple as that concept of a school-based, inquiry-driven approach is in theory, it has not come to Lexington without some bumps in the road. For one, the culture of teacher au-tonomy at work in the United States is perhaps even stron-ger in a district that’s relatively wealthy and homogeneous than in one with myriad challenges.

“Because we are so high-performing, it’s difficult to excite people to thinking that they can do even better,” said Carol A. Pilarski, the assistant superintendent for curriculum, in-struction, and professional development.

Administrators and even teachers here like to refer to the

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District Strives for ‘Learning System’teaching corps as composed of “thoroughbreds”—confi-dent, trained practitioners who excel in their content areas but also happen to be a bit stubborn.

Mr. Ash began the transition to collaborative work by requiring, starting in the 2005-06 school year, that teams at each school engage in a yearlong “action re-search” project. Teachers initially resisted, partly out of anxiety about meetings in which elementary and middle schools would share results from those research projects.

“We went through a big implementation dip, and I went through a tremendous backlash,” Mr. Ash said. “The union was upset; it felt teachers were overbur-dened, that there wasn’t enough training. ... But I knew that we weren’t going to change the culture until enough people had experienced the collaboration and saw that it was better.”

Now, five years later, educators are involved in more-frequent cycles in which they look at student work and devise strategies for improving their teaching. Principals and teachers here say they are starting to notice changes in teacher behavior and student outcomes as a result of the teamwork.

Whitney Hagins, the chairwoman of the science depart-ment at Lexington High School, says she can’t imagine teaching without her plc. “It’s really opened teachers’ eyes to things that weren’t working,” she said. Her colleague Marie Murphy, the foreign-languages chair-woman, says that a once-static curriculum is now “alive and it’s always being challenged,” making it richer.

And Jeff Leonard jokes that he can hear the changes.The department chairman for performing arts, Mr. Leon-ard says the band’s rehearsal techniques have improved, and final performances now sound more cohesive.

The work isn’t always easy. It is still difficult for teachers to talk about those instances when their instruction needs help, which is one of the reasons the most effective teams meet more than once a week in order to establish trust. “For the formal meetings to be successful, those relation-ships have to be in place,” said Geetika D. Kaw, the science department chairwoman at Clarke Middle School.

Even then, according to Edward M. Davey, one of the teachers in the history content team at Clarke, a team can run into problems if it devises a test or plans a lesson without having a highly specific goal for what the teach-ers want to achieve through that activity. A conversation

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“ i knew that we weren’t going to change the culture until enough people had experienced the collaboration and saw that it was better.”Paul B. aShSuperintendent lexington Public Schools

FrOM TOP: edward M. Davey talks to his 8th grade social studies class about the burning of the british ship Gaspée, a harbinger of the American revolution. he uses strategies he picked up in his professional learning community.

Mr. Davey, right, works with his PLc colleagues, from left, Kathryn harper, ramille romulus, and David Vincent, to devise the best ways to teach students about reading and understanding historical texts.


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Mich. District Adds Accountability Piece To Focus Training

As more professional development shifts from centrally mandated activities for all teachers to training that is more responsive to the contexts and students in each school, what’s the best way to keep it focused and of high quality?

The Carman-Ainsworth dis-trict in Flint, Mich., recently

faced that dilemma. By working with its teachers’ union, the 4,600-student district has emphasized school-based professional development since 2004. Its bargaining agreement codifies a schedule that includes “late start” Wednesdays, when school is delayed by an hour and a half. Teachers have more than 20 such days a year to en-gage in working in grade-level or discipline-specific teams during that time.

Following a 2008 district-accreditation cycle, however, district leaders decided to see whether there were ways to improve the training. Teachers were given time to visit other schools and were interviewed in focus groups for their feedback. The information showed that teachers found value in the school teams, but also saw that the team work varied in quality from school to school.

That led to a predicament that Steve Tunnicliff, the district’s assistant superintendent, calls the “tight-loose” problem of school-based training—how much oversight administrators need to provide to school sites without being too prescriptive about their activities.

“It’s the total irony of [professional learning communi-ties] in general—they seem so simple, but the implemen-tation is extremely difficult,” Mr. Tunnicliff said. “When you’ve got these teachers, literally weekly, going off in their different areas, you need to develop some structure to make sure they’re following through with it.”

sTrUCTUre added

Last year, Carman-Ainsworth officials launched a system requiring teams to make presentations to other teams in their building. Three times a year, they must present the results of their inquiries in a “data cycle”: the problem they set out to solve, the data they looked at, the steps they took to respond, and the results in stu-dent learning. In addition to those protocols, central-office staff members now participate in some of the Wednesday meetings.

“It kind of was a healthy accountability,” Mr. Tunnicliff said. “A structure for how you’re going to spend that [pro-fessional-development] time is pretty important. [The teams] can fall apart because they lose focus about what they’re trying to accomplish.”

Fred A. Burger, the president of the local affiliate of the National Education Association, said the structure has helped teachers articulate goals across related subjects. The biology plc he belongs to, for instance, meets with the teams on chemistry and physical sciences in the school to make its presentations.

“What we see,” he said, “is that there are common themes we agree on—that every student should be able to write a lab report or apply the scientific method.” –STePhen SAwchuk

among team members, he said, is not the same thing as the focused problem-solving that will serve to advance student learning.

OUTside sUppOrTs

Getting the right system of checks and balances to keep site-based professional development from suffering from such mis-sion drift is highly dependent on building-level leadership.

In Lexington, the principals who have embraced that form of teacher training, like Steven H. Flynn of Clarke Middle School, go out of their way to make sure that time set aside for teacher teams is spent productively. Mr. Flynn’s schedule is organized so that he can spend 15 minutes apiece with the four teams meeting on a given day—or extra time with the groups that are struggling. And he keeps extensive records about what goals teams set out in every meeting and what they

accomplished that day. In addition to the school content

teams, other professional sup-ports abound, including at least one dedicated literacy and math specialist in each school and ac-cess to instructional-technology experts.

The most recent addition to the professional-development system was unveiled last spring: a series of free, voluntary after-school courses for teachers. The notion of such classes runs counter to the ideas of some professional-devel-opment advocates, who contend that most professional learning should be conducted on site.

But educators here stress that the district’s courses differ from the expansive menu that teach-ers typically select from to earn continuing education credits. In November of last year, Lexington officials conducted a survey of the district’s teaching corps and de-signed the courses in response to teachers’ top 10 priorities, which included expanding their reper-toires of instructional strategies,

analyzing student work, and inte-grating technology.

Crucially, the courses involve a follow-up coaching element based in schools, another feature teach-ers favored. A few weeks into a course, enrolled teachers have an opportunity to receive feedback on how well they’re implementing new strategies and techniques.

“Processing the information and coaching teachers on how to use it are vital, or else it sits in a bubble,” said Joanne Hennessy, the chairwoman of the profes-sional-development body, which coordinates the course offerings.

For his part, Superintendent Ash argues that it’s crucial to bring fresh ideas to the educators engaging in professional devel-opment. Early in his tenure, he recalled, “one of my union presi-dents said to me, ‘What happens if [the school teams] can’t fig-ure out what to do next?’ That’s why you have to have a learning school system, because teachers will run out of ideas,” he said. “I really think that the plc is quite

“ [in the past], there was a level of frustration with what was being provided because we didn’t have much selection in terms of courses.”

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GeeTiKA D. KAWJonas clarke Middle SchoolLexington, Mass.Age: 30s years of teaching: 10

Geetika D. Kaw’s tenure as a teacher in the same district for more than 10 years gives her a clarity of perspective on the waning and waxing of initiatives in Lexington, Mass.

before the arrival of the current superintendent, Paul b. Ash, in 2005, she’d outlasted a “revolving door” of school leaders—and a corresponding number of professional-development initiatives.

“Some years we had a focus on technology, some years on differentiated instruction,” she said. “There was a level of frustration with what was being provided because we didn’t have much selection in terms of courses.”

Now, though, having a superintendent who has a clear vision about focusing on raising academic standards for students and on classroom strategies for improving instruction has helped give a more cohesive theme to professional development, Ms. Kaw says.

The professional learning community—or content team, as it’s known in her school—is the district’s core professional-development strategy. in her view, it has gone a long way to encourage the development of a common language and assessments for gauging the quality of instruction, while still allowing teachers to seek individual help if they need it.

There’s still room for growth in the system, Ms. Kaw says. For instance, she’d like to attend the 6th and 7th grade science-content-team meetings, in addition to the 8th grade one she now goes to, but the current school schedule doesn’t allow for that.

Still, Ms. Kaw has discovered ways in which she can build on the structure at the school. One of her goals as department chairwoman this year: take over other teachers’ classes on testing days, so that those teachers are free to observe how peers are leading their lessons.

“The key,” she said, “is to let people know i’m available if they need help.” –STePheN SAWchuK






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self-limiting. It’s limited to the capacity of the three or four peo-ple in the room.”

COnsTanT Tweaking

It’s largely the work of the pro-fessional-development committee to make sure that all the profes-sional-development layers come together. At a late-September meet-ing, committee members discussed suggestions for how to integrate the courses better with the other teacher supports.

One member suggested supple-menting the courses with webi-nars so that teachers could easily access a refresher. Another teacher suggested there might be a way to encourage all members of a school team to attend a course together and so continue the work at their weekly meetings. A third teacher had a practical concern about group-based rather than one-on-

one coaching: Would it require el-ementary teachers to be away from their own classrooms too often?

Debate of that nature may seem academic, but the leaders here stress that systems of support for teachers cannot afford to be static. They must undergo constant super-vision and tweaking to meet teach-ers’ needs.

Still more challenges are on the horizon, because the shift has re-quired Lexington teachers to take greater ownership of student suc-cess. That’s starting to raise deli-cate questions about teacher per-formance. In the words of Gary Simon, who chairs the high school math department, the team work has given birth to the idea that if students are underperforming, “it’s not that my students didn’t do well, it’s that I didn’t do well.”

But there is no question that the conversations will continue. Ongoing training is no longer con-sidered an option in Lexington; it is a professional responsibility.

“We’ve passed the point of no return,” Natalie K. Cohen, the dis-trict’s high school principal, said about that shift. “If you’re a teacher here and you are not on board with this approach, then maybe this isn’t the district for you.” n

Coverage of policy efforts to improve the teaching profession is supported by a grant from the Joyce Foundation, at www.joycefdn.org/Programs/Education.

“They were nice people, but a little bit out of touch with what the school system wanted from teachers at that point.”

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ANN WALKer KeNNeDyLois T. Murray elementary/Middle School (previously taught at harford heights elementary)baltimore Age: 50years of teaching: 3

in her first three years of teaching, Ann Walker Kennedy saw both lows and highs of teacher professional development. but by the end of her third year in the baltimore schools, the highs were beginning to predominate.

Segueing into teaching from a career in advocacy and casework for people with disabilities, Ms. Kennedy started work as a special education teacher after five weeks of intensive training and a short stint in a summer school classroom.

A last-minute change of assignment put her in charge of her own classroom of 2nd graders with disabilities at harford heights elementary School, and she had never taught reading on her own.

“i did feel like, ‘Oh my gosh, i don’t know what i’m doing,’ ” said Ms. Kennedy, who since this past summer has been teaching at a special education school run for the district by the Kennedy Krieger institute.

back in her first year, a specialist in the reading curriculum stopped in to model a lesson for 15 minutes or so, but it wasn’t until the first districtwide professional-development day that Ms. Kennedy got her first big dose of the approach. That was helpful, she said, but somehow in the next two years, she was sent to virtually the same workshop two more times.

in another case of redundancy, all special education teachers were required to retake a workshop on using a new online form, even though Ms. Kennedy had mastered the form the first time.

Mentors, provided to teachers in their first and second years, were not as much help as they might have been. retired special education teachers, they knew Ms. Kennedy’s field but not her school, her curriculum, or the new stress points. “They were nice people,” Ms. Kennedy recalled, “but a little bit out of touch with what the school system wanted from teachers at that point.”

by her third year—also chief executive Officer Andrés A. Alonso’s third year leading the district—Ms. Kennedy had noticed marked improvements in professional development. For one, the district was making use of online professional-development schedules and learning modules. The latter meant that some required learning and testing for teachers—such as mastery of the use of a new report card—could be completed anytime, anywhere online.

At least as good, the in-person workshops seemed different. “The people teaching the workshops i went to were crisper, the content was more relevant to my classroom, and i came back with resources, such as a cD, that helped me use the content,” Ms. Kennedy said.

At the same time, harford heights elementary, which had not been meeting federal and state standards, got money for collaborative planning some afternoons and Saturdays for grade-level teams of teachers.

“if it’s Thursday, i’d know what’s going on in Ms. Nelson’s room, and i could check with her at the end of the day to see how it went,” Ms. Kennedy said, explaining that the common planning magnified the teachers’ ability to learn from one another’s experience.

“being with my peers and getting information and being able to synthesize it with minds i know: if i could combine those things,” she mulled, “that would be the best PD.” –bESS kELLER


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© 2010 SMART Technologies. All rights reserved. The SMART logo, all SMART taglines and smarttech are trademarks or registered trademarks of SMART Technologies in the U.S. and/or other countries. 10_0146

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business & finance

Providers Eye New Opportunities Still, the industry will have to compete for market share with districts as school systems shift ever more professional development in-house.

name Examples of services offered Headquarters

PrOFeSSiONAL ASSOciATiONSAScD (formerly Association for Supervision and curriculum Development)

conferences, publications, “tools kits” such as educating the Whole child Alexandria, Va.

Learning Forward (formerly National Staff Development council)

publications, conferences, 5-week e-learning programs Dallas

National council of Teachers of Mathematics e-seminars and workshops, conferences, reflection Guides reston, Va.

National education Association publications, Web learning Washington

NATiONALLy AcTiVe cONSuLTANTSLucy caulkins elementary-level reading and writing instruction for teachers New york city

richard DuFour professional learning community strategies bloominton, ind. (Solution Tree)

ruby K. Payne education and poverty materials and workshops highlands, Texas

Grant Wiggins curriculum-reform workshops and materials hopewell, N.J.

FOr-PrOFiT cOMPANieS

houghton Mifflin harcourt training for california K-6 english teachers using company reading materials in partnership with Pivot Learning Partners boston

Knowledge Delivery Systems online professional development New york city

Laureate education canter courses, including Assertive Discipline baltimore

Leadership and Learning center publications, courses, customized professional development Denver

Pearson Pearson Learning Teams, Assessment Training institute, online teacher collaboration and courses Saddle river, N.J.

School improvement Network Video Journal of education, PD 360, TeachStream Midvale, utah

Teachscape online professional-development support and dialogue, classroom walk-throughs with mobile devices San Francisco

Solution Tree publications, customized professional-development consulting, conferences, Marzano institute partnership bloomington, ind.

PriVATe, NONPrOFiT, reSeArch & DeVeLOPMeNT cOMPANieSAeD (Academy for educational Development) after-school science-program training Washington

edvantia in-person and online professional development, development of teacher leaders charleston, W.Va.; Nashville, Tenn.

McreL (Mid-continent research for education and Learning)

Scaffolding early Literacy program Denver

Wested Quality Teaching for english Learners program San Francisco

PubLic, NONPrOFiT cOMPANieSPublic broadcasting Service PbS Teacherline Arlington, Va.

bY bESS kELLER

P eople on the lookout for business opportunities have not often seen the glint of gold in helping teachers improve their craft. But the glint is brightening.

A potent combination of new federal money, a consensus around the importance of teacher effectiveness, and digital innovations has supercharged professional-development pro-viders. Veterans are being joined as never be-fore by new or expanded businesses.

In the late 1990s, venture capitalists and fund managers ex-amined the education industry, with some even glancing in the direction of teacher professional development. But enthusiasm among advance-guard investors waned as businesses that man-aged K-12 schools struggled and as computerized lessons failed to narrow achievement gaps. The disappointments underscored that most of precollegiate education remains labor-intensive and change-averse—conditions that don’t promise much growth potential.

Still, engineers and entrepreneurs continued to pull digital wonders from their hats, and to a degree, the school market responded with demand. Then came the No Child Left Behind Act, meting out consequences to schools and districts that failed to raise student achievement.

With some 5,000 schools identified as wanting, the Obama ad-ministration has allocated nearly $17 billion for fixes. The nclb law also requires that districts in trouble with its accountability

provisions use 10 percent of their federal anti-poverty Title I money for professional development. On top of that, two federal programs that spotlight teachers, the Teacher Incentive Fund and the Race to the Top program, raised the ante on teacher effectiveness by billions more.

prOfiTs pOssiBLe?

As a result, the lure is there, but are the profits? Responding to the recession, some school districts have been

keeping more of their professional development in-house, an ap-proach that helps save jobs by creating positions for coaches and professional developers. Plus, many districts are used to get-ting their professional development locally or regionally, often from former employees, universities, and smaller outfits whose people they know.

Rough estimates made three years ago by officials at the in-dustry giant Pearson showed that about half of professional development then was provided internally or by regional educa-tion service agencies, a quarter by nonprofits such as universi-ties, 15 percent by individuals from outside the district, and just 10 percent by for-profit organizations.

“So much of the PD market is local,” observed Stephanie Hirsh, the executive director of Learning Forward (formerly the National Staff Development Council), the membership or-ganization for educators concerned with professional develop-ment. “It’s about hiring the [retired] principal or teacher who had expertise in the area.”

A SAMPLe OF PrOFeSSiONAL-DeVeLOPMeNT SuPPLierS

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Jim McVety, a Bucks County, Pa.-based consultant to K-12 busi-nesses, points out that state or dis-trict rules often make teachers put in “seat time” to get credits toward recertification or pay increases, and that such rules get in the way of on-line learning—one route to valuable economies of scale.

Schools are also leery about work-ing with for-profit firms, several business executives said. “Unneces-sarily phobic,” offered Scott C. Noon, the vice president for marketing of Teachscape, which focuses on high-tech professional development. That’s unfortunate, he continued, because nonprofits “typically don’t have the kinds of capitalization that for-profits do to invest in new technology.“

Whether the sector will offer sig-nificant new opportunity or just a tidy living for existing players is hard to say, according to Mr. McVety. At present, he concluded, “I’d retain a healthy degree of skepticism.”

TexTBOOk gianTs

Some education industry leaders are betting on opportunity. The big three of U.S. textbook publish-

ing—Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill, and Pearson—have all “aggressively pursued” the professional-development market, according to a 2006 report from Simba Information, which tracks publishing and media businesses.

That pursuit has entailed both new partnerships and acquisitions. In a bold move this fall, for instance, Pearson bought the America’s Choice comprehensive-school-improvement program. It will operate alongside Pearson’s K12 Solutions business, the company’s existing effort to capture the market of schools that must make drastic changes under the nclb law.

In 2005, Pearson bought the model the company now uses for its Learning Teams operation. Two of the three California research-ers who developed the program, in which teachers are grouped for collaboration around meeting student learning needs, came to the company as well. The model is Pearson’s take on the wildly popu-lar “professional learning commu-nity” approach to providing pro-fessional development and raising student achievement. Learning Teams aims itself at schools that are “in need of improvement”

rather than those obligated under the federal law to make wholesale changes.

Beth Wray, the president of Pear-son Learning Teams, said that pro-grams for improving teaching and turning around schools were a “per-fect complement to Pearson’s capac-ity in assessment and curriculum.”

Pearson trains district employees in the detailed model and gradually reduces its presence.

That flow can work as a business model, Ms. Wray explained, because currently “we’re only scratching the surface of schools failing to make ayp,” or adequate yearly progress, the bar states set for schools under the nclb law.

Pearson’s global education sales in 2009 amounted to $8.8 billion, according to Susan Aspey, a com-pany spokeswoman.

Like publishers that had years ago expanded into digital com-munications, companies that sell Web-based innovations for schools—online learning, for exam-

ple, or software for staff management—can see a relatively short step into professional development. Truenorthlogic, a Sandy, Utah-based provider of digital systems for track-ing teacher licensing and professional development, formed a partnership this year with New York City-based Knowledge Delivery Systems, which creates online training programs. As a re-sult, Truenorthlogic now offers its clients “anytime, anywhere” video lectures from gurus like Charlotte Danielson, the creator of a nation-ally known framework for evaluat-ing teaching.

venTUre CapiTaL

For entrepreneurs jazzed by new learning technologies, the NewSchools Venture Fund has

been the place to go. Founded in 1998 by L. John Doerr, a leading Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and others, the nonprofit fund helps new education companies.

So far, most money has gone to charter school networks, but that is starting to change, said Julie Mikuta, the San Francisco-based fund’s partner for human capital. Still, in early rounds of investing, only one teacher-professional-devel-opment company—Teachscape—re-ceived substantial money from the philanthropy.

Teachscape, also based in San

“ Sadly, i really think it’s an individualistic process for me. ... it’s usually me finding someone else to talk to or seeking out support.”

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cOrey r. SeLLJamestown elementary SchoolArlington county, Va.Age: 33years of teaching: 10

Like any elementary teacher worth his salt, corey r. Sell is outgoing by nature—thoughtful, articulate, and inquisitive.

you wouldn’t expect someone with those attributes to have difficulty engaging in dialogues about the craft of teaching. but Mr. Sell, a 5th grade teacher, says his most rewarding professional-development experiences have tended to be those he’s gone in search of on his own.

“Sadly, i really think it’s an individualistic process for me,” said Mr. Sell, who is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in education at George Mason university, in Virginia. “i don’t think it should be that way. but ... it’s usually me finding someone else to talk to or seeking out support.”

That pattern developed early in his career. At a former school, Mr. Sell eschewed the glossy, activity-filled publications for teachers, and instead, borrowed copies of journals from his principal that discussed empirical education research and its potential implications for classrooms.

Sometimes, he’s found talented colleagues who have been willing to talk about such developments, but there hasn’t always been a structure in place in his schools to guide conversations about practice.

As for formal in-service training, Mr. Sell, like many other teachers, can recount both good and bad professional development. Over the course of his career, he’s identified two common trouble areas in such training. One is practical—that such programs, while adding tools to his instructional repertoire, don’t focus as much attention on how to deploy them in a classroom.

The other problem is philosophical, in that most such training requires teachers to buy in to a certain model, program, or philosophy, while discouraging modification. “i think it’s a cultural thing about teaching,” Mr. Sell said about that anti-intellectual subtext. “i don’t think we really want teachers to think that much or that critically.”

he is considering a permanent move to higher education. “i really think it’s the system that’s pushing me out,” said Mr. Sell. “it’s

not the workload; it’s not the money; it’s that the system [for teacher learning] really isn’t bottom-up.”

–STePheN SAWchuK



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by STePheN SAWchuK

Cost. That would seem to be the most fundamental aspect of crafting a professional-development pro-gram. But as a number of researchers have discov-ered, school districts rarely have a good fix on how much they actually spend on such training—or on what that spending buys in the way of teacher or student learning.

Because districts tend to characterize profes-sional development as programming, they typi-cally underestimate other investments in teachers’

knowledge and skills—such as how much they spend on salaries during hours teachers attend in-service workshops, according to experts who study district budgeting on professional development.

What’s more, few professional-development activities are linked to out-come measures of whether a teacher has increased his or her capacity to instruct students, they say.

“There’s a sense that teacher effectiveness matters, and we’ve got to help teachers improve in effectiveness, but we don’t necessarily know how,” said Marguerite Roza, a scholar at the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington, in Bothell. “But districts are operating as though they do know how.”

Finer-grained analyses of the costs of training and what it leverages are criti-cal for districts to use such funding productively, she and other scholars assert.

“What we can safely say is that most urban districts are spending a lot more than they realize, between $6,000 to $8,000 a year per teacher, on the in-service days and on training,” said Allan R. Odden, a professor of educa-tional leadership and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied the issue of professional-development spending. “But it’s a mile wide and an inch thick. And until recently, districts were spending it on anything rather than on how to teach reading and how to teach math.”

COmpLex aCCOUnTing

No national data exist on how much districts spend to support teacher training, partly because there is no national definition of the term “profes-

Francisco, is pioneering the use of “immersion” video from a panoramic camera to capture what’s going on in classrooms. It is also pairing the video with Web-based tools that “frame” the action for measurement of the quality of teachers’ practice. The paired product, which allows teacher assessment in addition to teacher coaching, is expected out in January. The work is to be underwritten by the Bill & Me-linda Gates Foundation, which will use the new technology in a study of teacher effectiveness.

The company’s annual revenue is about $30 million, according to Mr. Noon of Teachscape. He said the company believes it will hit profitability this year.

TwO-day wOrkshOps

Not every professional-de-velopment company has tried to power its success with tech-nological innovation, although that remains the most-talked-about path to growing impact and profits.

Some businesses have spe-cialized in the seminars and conferences where educators have traditionally heard about new ideas. Similar to their more technologically driven counter-parts, those companies have branched out into school- or district-tailored programs, some of them abroad. They have had to adapt to other market condi-tions, too, such as the demand for “sustained” professional de-velopment. Sometimes, a twinge of conscience might be involved.

For example, Douglas B. Reeves, who founded the Lead-ership and Learning Center in Denver 15 years ago, no longer accepts offers to give one-shot “inspirational” speeches. “There’s no evidence,” the author of more than 20 books on teaching and school leadership observed drily, “that inspiration improves stu-dent achievement.”

Mr. Reeves, whose company brings in $14 million annually, said he gives such speeches when they are part of the cen-ter’s ongoing work in a district.

Solution Tree, another “tradi-tional” contender with a track record going back 25 years, started under another name with the goal of providing one-stop professional development: publishing, live events such as conferences, and workshops and institutes around the country. In the past 10 years, though, the Bloomington, Ind.-based com-pany has revamped its business model to focus on its authors and experts.

The reasoning was that the right authors, both well known and emerging, would help the

business “have the best shot at helping schools and growing our business,” said Paul Kuhne, Solution Tree’s chief marketing officer.

The company’s stable of pro-fessional developers includes Robert J. Marzano and Rich-ard DuFour. With that strategy in place, the company is now working to get more of its pro-fessional development online. Company officials declined to provide revenue figures.

In addition, like the Leader-ship and Learning Center and many other professional-devel-opment organizations, Solution Tree has dropped almost all its one-day seminars in favor of those that last two days. The nclb law defines acceptable professional development as ac-tivities that are “not one-day or short-term workshops or confer-ences.”

Mr. Kuhne wouldn’t say that the near-demise of one-day workshops was related to the federal law, but in an e-mail, he acknowledged that Solution Tree pays attention to funding mandates. “We … work with schools and districts to iden-tify funding streams as needed,” Mr. Kuhne wrote, “so that they can benefit from our products and services.” n

What constitutes professional development is so vague that school systems have a difficult time figuring out just how much they spend to help improve instruction.

Cost of Teacher Training Lost in District Budgets

39%

Estimated Salary Increments for Coursework

$63.4 million

36%PD Initiatives

$57.9 million

in 2007-08, Philadelphia spent a total of $162 million on all professional development.

noTe: figures predate change in leadership.

SouRce: education Resource Strategies

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They are politically tough to eliminate, not correlated with teacher effectiveness outside the math and science fields, and generally unaligned with districts’ pri-orities for professional development.

Nevertheless, salary differentials for teachers who earn additional course credits or hold advanced degrees—oth-erwise known as “lane” increases or the “master’s degree bump”—are among the

costliest aspects of teacher development.“It is so depressing, I have to say,” Paul B. Ash, the super-

intendent of the 6,300-student Lexington, Mass., school sys-tem, said of the cost. “You have to pay teachers what they’re worth, ... but the issue for me is whether that’s the best way to spend money to increase teacher capacity to increase learning. Is it? I don’t think so.”

An analysis released by the Center on Reinventing Public Education, located at the University of Washington, in Both-ell, found that states spend millions of dollars paying teach-ers for earning extra credentials, even in fields like education or leadership that research does not associate with improved student learning.

As professional-development spending comes under the spotlight, a conceptual challenge awaits: Should those costs be considered and budgeted as part of spending on teacher professional development, or be reserved for a larger conver-sation on teacher pay?

Karen Hawley Miles, the president of Education Resource Strategies, a nonprofit organization that conducts analyses of district spending patterns, argues that such costs should be included in reviews of district spending on professional development, since they represent an investment in teachers’ knowledge and skills. In Philadelphia, her Newton, Mass.-based group found, the increments made up nearly 40 per-cent of total dollars invested in teacher training in 2007-08, outpacing even the amount spent on teacher coaching and in-service workshops.

Other finance experts aren’t convinced those costs should be budgeted as professional development. Allan R. Odden, a professor of educational leadership and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, points out that private in-dustries often compensate their employees more for earning degrees like M.B.A.s and for advanced certification.

“No private-sector company would consider increased salary for knowledge and skills in their training bud-get; that would be in their salary budget,” he argued. A more productive goal for districts would be to revamp the entire pay schedule, rather than tinker with just lane in-creases, Mr. Odden added.

Despite a resurgence of interest in alternative-pay plans, most districts have only gone so far as to offer bonuses on top of the salary schedule. Just a few have ever attempted to put in totally new compensation systems.

That’s the primary reason that Mr. Ash, in Massachusetts, hasn’t attempted to tackle the issue.

“It’s hard in every way—it’s intellectually hard, it’s po-litically hard, it requires an enormous amount of persis-tence,” he said about changing the tradition of lane salary boosts. “You’re trying to overcome 80 years of history, … and in the meantime, you’re paying for those courses forever.” –STePhen SAwchuk

Questions Arise On Credentials


sional development. Analyses of specific urban districts’ budget-ing practices, in the meantime, show that activities financed as part of professional development tended to be fragmented rather than supportive of learning goals, according to Karen Hawley Miles of Education Resource Strategies, which contracts with districts to analyze their expenses.

“Districts spend a lot more than they actively manage or that they think strategically about organiz-ing,” said Ms. Miles, the president of the Newton, Mass.-based non-profit organization. “You get lots of departments trying to do little pieces of professional develop-ment, but most of them are too shallow and spread apart to make a big difference.”

As just one example, her group documented that the Philadel-phia district, in the 2007-08 school year, spent nearly $58 mil-lion on professional-development initiatives, primarily for teacher coaches and release time for lead teachers to work with peers in schools.

But those investments were being overseen by as many as nine separate offices or enti-ties. And the analysis revealed a number of weaknesses in how that time was spent. For instance, activities that coaches and lead teachers were permitted to en-gage in were broadly defined and not audited for quality, the Ers report found.

Since the report was issued, Su-perintendent Arlene Ackerman has made changes to the district’s training system. But district of-ficials did not respond to several requests seeking comment.

In addition, Ms. Miles’ group found that Philadelphia spent an additional $41 million when counting the time set aside in the district calendar for mandated professional learning. As the Ers analyses show, in-service days are a significant professional-devel-

opment cost, equal to the propor-tion of salary paid to teachers on those days.

Those costs can vary widely by district: Of the 100 largest school districts’ most recent calendars, the number of days teachers were expected to be at school for reasons other than instructing students ranged from no days in Albuquerque, N.M., to 17 in Little Rock, Ark., according to a data-base maintained by the Wash-ington-based National Council on Teacher Quality.

sChedULing Time

The issue of teacher time and its cost is only now starting to attract attention from districts, researchers, and practitioners.

“We just don’t recognize time as a resource, just as we didn’t use to recognize teachers as a resource,” said Jennifer King Rice, a profes-sor of education policy at the Uni-versity of Maryland College Park who has studied professional-development spending. “We are locked into traditions of how we use time, and we allocate it across districts in ways that may be un-productive.”

For instance, the traditional mode of scheduling scatters teach-ers’ daily preparation at different times from colleagues’ in the same subject or grade level, making it much harder for them to work to-gether to improve practice.

Timothy Knowles, a former deputy superintendent of teach-ing and learning for the Boston school district, recalled a visit to the district by a British school-inspectorate team in 2002.

“It came home to me when Her Majesty’s Inspectorate said to us, ‘You have more time [for teacher learning] built into the fabric of the day than any schools we’ve ever seen anywhere, and you’re not using it,’ ” he said.

The situation, Mr. Knowles sur-mised, reflects the cultural norms

of teaching in the United States. American education continues to prize teacher autonomy above the notion of teaching as a col-laborative enterprise, in contrast to practices in higher-performing countries.

In fact, according to a study com-missioned in 2009 by Learning Forward, a Dallas-based member-ship organization formerly known as the National Staff Develop-ment Council, teachers in Asian and European countries generally spent fewer minutes instructing students and more time working on their lessons with other teach-ers, compared with teachers in the United States.

Lesson planning in the United States averages between three and five hours a week, but in most European and Asian coun-tries, teachers spend 15 to 20 hours a week on those activities and generally perform them in collaboration with their peers, the study found.

And such work is considered part and parcel of a teacher’s professional expectations, noted Thomas R. Guskey, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Kentucky, in Lex-ington.

“There is this perception [in the United States] that if a teacher isn’t in front of kids teaching, then it’s a waste of their time,” Mr. Guskey said. “In China, teachers are basically in school from 8 to 5 every day, they have a significantly longer day than our teachers do, but ... a portion of the day is spent lesson-planning with other teachers, writing extensive comments on student work, and those things are built into their schedule.”

reaLLOCaTiOns

Have case studies been able to determine whether districts invest enough in their current teacher corps when all the costs of professional development are accurately accounted for? Some scholars say yes.

“For most big districts, it’s not that they need more money for professional development. It’s capturing what they spend and refocusing the whole professional-development system,” Mr. Odden

25%Contracted PD Days

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of the University of Wisconsin contended. But similar analyses of rural and suburban districts’ spend-ing are sparse, making it more diffi-cult to talk about their investments, he acknowledged.

Ms. Miles of Education Resource Strategies isn’t convinced districts now spend enough on professional development. She points out that, among districts studied by the Ers, money spent on initiatives and programming amounted to only 2 percent of Philadelphia’s total op-erating budget in the year studied, compared with a high of about 5.5 percent in another district, Roches-ter, N.Y. (Those figures don’t take into account salary costs for dis-trict-mandated in-service days.)

“We felt they plain weren’t spend-ing enough,” Ms. Miles said about Philadelphia.

The bottom line, experts say, is that truly focusing professional de-velopment requires administrators to figure out where their dollars are spent, whether those patterns align to strategic goals for teacher improvement, and if not, institute changes to the spending.

The UniOn faCTOr

Such changes generally require delicate union-management part-nerships. Collective bargaining con-tracts, for instance, specify whether some of the daily preparation hours teachers are entitled to could be appropriated by building admin-istrators for collaborative teacher learning.

Breaking those logjams can be tricky, but the number of districts that have done it shows it is not impossible. Beginning in 2004, ad-ministrators and union officials in Flint, Mich., for instance, used the collective bargaining process to in-stitute a different school calendar, resulting in more than 20 late-start Wednesdays freeing up 75 minutes for teacher collaboration. The trade-off: slightly longer school days and a reduction of several half-days formerly spent on district-directed professional development.

Mr. Odden favors a more radical restructuring of school schedules that gives teachers time for col-laboration in the regular school day and doesn’t detract from other in-service opportunities.

The 38,000-student Beaverton, Ore., district is now using such a model in several of its eight middle schools.

Cedar Park Middle School, for in-stance, uses a schedule that adds collaboration time for teachers in the same grade without lengthen-ing the school day or taking away from instructional minutes.

Eighth grade-level content teach-ers have a period that’s used on alternate days for small-group student interventions or for col-laborative teacher learning. Their

students take electives, like physi-cal education or foreign language, during that time. Then, in the af-ternoons, the core-content teachers instruct in double-length classes.

The schedule comes with its own trade-off: somewhat larger class sizes.

aCCOUnTaBiLiTy QUesTiOn

The final task for school districts is to better tie their professional-development spending to student outcomes and other measures of teacher improvement, something that has been lacking in nearly all the extant literature on the topic.

That isn’t an easy task, especially because the culture of professional-development funding hasn’t em-phasized accountability—a prob-lem that starts at the top. The U.S. Department of Education contin-ues to give out nearly $3 billion a year in federal aid for professional development under Title II-A, its largest teacher-quality program by far, even though it has never fully studied the effects of that spend-ing.

Even as new forms of teacher training, such as collaborative teacher teams, have grown popular, districts have done little to prove their efficacy.

“Educators have yet to demon-strate that, across many different contexts, they are using [profes-sional learning communities] to improve their performance or that of their students,” said M. Hayes Mizell, a distinguished senior fel-low at Learning Forward. “School systems have yet to demonstrate that they can or will collect data necessary to demonstrate that plcs are achieving such results.”

The group supports proposed new language in federal law that would require recipients of federal professional-development fund-ing to evaluate the effectiveness of school-based teacher-learning activities.

Ms. Rice of the University of Maryland cautions that it will en-tail painstaking work to make sure such measures are accurate.

“I worry a lot about ‘gaming,’ that there are ways to overgeneralize the effects of a particular initiative, or that we’ll demonstrate impact on outcomes that are too narrowly defined,” she said.

“From an ideal perspective, I think that’s the right direction,” she said of greater accountability for professional development’s ef-fectiveness. “From a realistic per-spective, I worry that districts just don’t have the capacity.” n

Coverage of leadership, human-capital development, extended and expanded learning time, and arts learning is supported in part by a grant from The Wallace Foundation, at www.wallacefoundation.org.

Learning Forward is the new name of the National Staff Development Council

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cLick foR moRe infoRmATion AbouT TheSe AdveRTiSeR S S16 | eDucATiON WeeK: PrOFeSSiONAL DeVeLOPMeNT > www.edweek.org/go/pdreport | NOVeMber 10, 2010




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eDucATiON WeeK: rePOrT TiTLe TK > www.edweek.org/go/reporturl | NOVeMber 10, 2010 | S17 eDucATiON WeeK: PrOFeSSiONAL DeVeLOPMeNT > www.edweek.org/go/pdreport | NOVeMber 10, 2010 | S17

Content Seen Lacking Specificity researchers are trying to identify the most beneficial information to give teachers to help them in their professional growth.

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In the video clip, the middle school teacher stops in mid-step to fix her eyes on two students in the second row who have just exchanged mock jabs. In exactly the same tone that she has just used to tell the class she is pass-ing out papers, the pony-tailed teacher pronounces the word “boys,” and the two combatants straighten up and fade into conformity.

The episode takes about four seconds. The goofing-off is nearly invisible to the untrained eye. But in the course of a few years, the teacher could save precious

hours with such acuity. “You did not lose any instructional time,” her teaching coach

wrote approvingly after viewing the video of the lesson. “Good work.”

The program that includes that teacher and her coach, Sha-ron Deal, who taught for more than 25 years before joining the University of Virginia’s MyTeachingPartner, represents a new wave of teacher professional development. However many other shortcomings have kept professional development from boost-ing teaching quality, proponents of the approach argue, the lack of specific and concrete content may be the most serious.

What should teachers be learning? One answer stressed in the past decade is the how and why of student assessment. An-other favorite topic is lesson planning. There’s general agree-ment that those skills are important, and yet both research and intuition suggest they are not enough. Nor will a merely broad-brush picture of effective teaching do the job.

For instance, many educators, researchers, and professional-de-velopment providers call for a positive climate in the classroom. While identifying such an aim is useful, teachers need to know the patterns of specific behavior, often interactions with students,

that build and maintain a positive climate over time, according to Robert C. Pianta, the dean of the education school at U.Va. and the head of the research team behind MyTeachingPartner.

For some 15 years, Mr. Pianta has been delving into the qual-ity of teacher interactions with students and testing those for effects on increased student learning. The MyTeachingPartner professional-development program is one result. It uses the Pianta framework to pinpoint strengths and weaknesses in teachers’ ability to, as one example, engage students.

Interested in those same interactions as a practitioner, Doug Lemov turned for enlightenment to master teachers he knows from his experience as an administrator for Uncommon Schools, a network of charter schools in New Jersey and New York. Mr. Lemov traveled to classrooms with a videographer to capture and classify the specific ways that accomplished teach-ers engage students, keep them on task, and get them through the rough spots of thinking hard. The result is the book Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College, published this year.

He says he learned that technique is often the missing link in superior teaching. “The thing that gets in the way of imple-menting strategies is technique,” Mr. Lemov said. “When our principals want to make our teachers better, they spend a lot of time working on technique.”

fOUndaTiOn inTeresT

Cheap and easy-to-use video technology is responsible for some of the burgeoning interest in teaching methods writ small, but video is not the only possible tool for either the re-search or the professional-development side of this work. Deb-orah Loewenberg Ball, one of the pioneers of looking in close

A member of the university of Virginia’s MyTeachingPartner team, Sharon Deal works one-on-one with teachers to guide their practice.


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detail at a teacher’s classroom performance and now the dean of the University of Michigan educa-tion school, uses a special class-room where educators and others observe a teacher and struggling math students from bleachers on the sidelines.

Ms. Ball, a former elementary teacher, focuses on math instruc-tion, as does her former student Heather C. Hill, now a co-direc-tor of the National Center for Teacher Effectiveness at the Har-vard Graduate School of Educa-tion. Ms. Hill is one of five “ob-servational” researchers who are part of the Measures of Effective Teaching project financed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The others are Mr. Pianta, Pa-mela L. Grossman and Raymond Pecheone at Stanford University’s education school, and Charlotte Danielson, a consultant based in Princeton, N.J.

Gates officials hope the $45 mil-lion project involving 4,000 teach-ers will show how instructional performance can best be mea-sured, evaluated, and improved. In addition to observation, Gates is putting money into three other approaches: “value added,” in which learning gains are linked to teachers by sophisticated ma-nipulations of student test scores; tests of teachers’ knowledge; and student reporting on teacher effec-tiveness. (The Seattle-based foun-dation also provides grant support to Editorial Projects in Education, the publisher of Education Week.)

But classroom observation has an edge on at least teacher tests and student evaluations because it translates so readily into “cur-riculum” for professional develop-ment. That’s especially true when video allows teachers to watch masters of their craft and them-selves over and over again.

But have researchers been able to tag the true levers of student learning? The Gates-supported observational scholars say yes, pointing to studies that show teachers who routinely practice at higher levels as identified by the observational-assessment systems have students who do better on achievement tests.

COnCreTe feedBaCk

In the case of the Pianta group, the comparisons extend over years and have involved about 5,000 classrooms, though the work on secondary-level teaching is just yielding its first results. One of Mr. Pianta’s findings drawn from sev-eral thousand pre-K-3 classrooms across the county is that teachers on average provide good emotional support and keep students orga-nized for work fairly well, but do little to promote learning beyond the rote level. Many observers have suspected exactly that.

More recently, Mr. Pianta and his team have begun investigat-ing whether the professional-de-velopment program based on their system pays off in student learn-ing. Early results are positive be-cause, the researchers conjecture, the system provides a framework for highly structured and specific feedback that is focused on behav-iors with proven links to student learning. More general approaches to videotaped lessons, such as “re-flection,” Mr. Pianta has written, don’t work.

Classroom observers tend to turn one of two ways in their work.

Mr. Lemov, Mr. Pianta, and oth-ers take the position that many of the core elements of effective teaching transcend the subjects taught. Ms. Ball, Ms. Hill, and the

Stanford researchers use a more subject-specific approach.

Ms. Grossman, an education professor at Stanford, has devised a classroom observational system for language arts, for instance. It includes both skills that cut across subjects and those that wouldn’t be found in every subject, such as guiding discussions in which stu-dents frequently refer to evidence from the text under study.

Not that proponents of the two approaches necessarily see them-selves in disagreement.

“I really do think there are parts of practice that are more gen-eral—relationship-building, ways to relate to different age groups, use of time—but other aspects of teacher practice are inherently subject-specific,” said Ms. Gross-man, a former English teacher. So observers using her system give high marks to teachers who build students’ understanding of different types of writing or show them how to move from sounded-out spelling to the conventional kind.

pedagOgy vs. COnTenT

In the jargon of education, the first approach is more focused on “pedagogical knowledge” and the second on “pedagogical content knowledge.” The latter represents the particular knowledge educa-tors need to make a subject un-derstandable to students.

Mathematics educators have put the strongest emphasis on content knowledge. Math builds on itself more than other subjects do, the thinking goes, so students are more likely to end up stranded if teachers can’t help them grasp a concept or catch up with it later.

Any math professional devel-

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“ When i asked about differentiation or scaffolding for students who didn’t come to the table with ‘average’ grade-level background knowledge, everyone looked at me like a crazy person.”

LAurie hAhN GANSerLanier high School Austin, TexasAge: 28years of teaching: 4

Laurie hahn Ganser, an english teacher for 9th and 10th graders, recalls a teacher-training session that was a disaster.

The teacher works in a school where 600 of the 1,470 students are english-language learners.

She remembers that the leaders of that professional-development session had no experience working with reluctant learners or ells.

“When i asked about differentiation or scaffolding for students who didn’t come to the table with ‘average’ grade-level background knowledge, everyone looked at me like a crazy person,” she wrote in an e-mail. She said it was frustrating not to receive any suggestions for working with high-needs students.

Ms. Ganser has had a positive experience, however, with Quality Teaching for english-Learners, or qtel, a professional-development program created by Wested. She has attended two weeklong sessions with the program and been part of a leadership team for the three school years it has been implemented at Lanier high.

Qtel aims to train regular content teachers and ell specialists in how to better engage english-learners in schooling. it focuses on preparing teachers to provide scaffolding, or supports for such students in the classroom. The philosophy behind the program is that language is learned best in a social context.

Ms. Ganser says she appreciates how qtel taught her concrete strategies based on research.

“i loved the qtel professional development because i left feeling like i had specific scaffolding exercises that i could apply in my classroom immediately,” she said, “and i believed in the sociocultural theory behind the training.”

—MAry ANN Zehr


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opment that “is not designed to transmit mathematical under-standing” is bound to fall short of what teachers and students need, said Julie Greenberg, the senior policy director at the Na-tional Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington-based research and advocacy group.

Andrew Chen, the president of EduTron, a for-profit group that has provided professional devel-opment for more than 1,000 Mas-sachusetts mathematics teach-ers, agrees. In the United States, given inadequate student and teacher performance in math, content knowledge must take priority, he said.

So Mr. Chen, a physicist, doesn’t observe lessons, he gives them. Teachers become students, pushed out of their comfort zones by “seri-ous” math problems a few grades beyond where they teach.

Pedagogical content knowledge “is very relevant, but it doesn’t address the deeper issue of weak content knowledge,” Mr. Chen said, adding that it is harder to address sheer mathematical con-tent than pedagogical content.

At the pedagogical-knowledge end of the spectrum, MyTeach-

ingPartner at the University of Virginia follows the dictum that to some degree “good teaching is good teaching.” The program looks for patterns of observable behav-iors that show teachers providing emotional support, organizing classroom interactions for effi-ciency and productivity, and pro-moting deep learning—the three “domains” of the system.

Now in the second round of pi-loting its system for secondary classrooms, MyTeachingPartner has recruited about 100 teachers in a Virginia school district. The volunteers videotape a classroom lesson and post it on a secure web-site. A master teacher like Sharon Deal reviews the video and clips out several segments as starting points for discussion of teaching technique. She draws the teach-er’s attention in writing to class-room moments done well and, later, as trust builds, not so well. The teacher and the coach discuss the clips by phone or Internet chat, and the teacher responds in writing. Then the cycle begins again with the two deciding what next to work on, continuing for the length of a school year.

The basis for all that is an ex-

haustive catalog of putatively ef-fective teacher behaviors, especially interactions between teachers and students, running the gamut from using a warm, calm voice to produc-ing varied examples.

praCTiCe makes perfeCT

Ms. Grossman welcomes the dif-ferent ways of parsing what teach-ers do and say in the classroom. Research should provide more and better clues about how fine-grained the picture of an effective teacher should be and how much it needs to include subject-specific detail, ac-cording to the Stanford professor.

“No one has the answer to the right grain size yet, nor subject specificity,” Ms. Grossman said. “With the variety of these different tools, we’ll be able to study it.” And by studying it, the researchers will improve professional development based on it, she believes.

Still, she is concerned about a cornerstone of changing teacher behavior. In addition to needing ways to represent the best teaching approaches and deconstruct them so they can be better understood,

teachers have to practice. “They need lots of opportunities to try something out and get feedback, and preferably not in a high-stakes environment,” Ms. Grossman said.

Classroom-management guru Lee Canter has perfected coach-ing in real time, for instance, with the coach giving feedback as the teacher works in the classroom. Mr. Lemov’s work with teachers routinely includes role-playing, with the staff acting the parts of students and teacher. One teacher might play a child with his head down on the desk, while other teachers take turns handling the situation until there’s a teacher “who nails it,” Mr. Lemov said.

“If you are a high-ranking tennis player on the eve of a big match, it’s not so helpful for a coach to tell you, ‘You can win this thing if you charge the net,’ ” he said. Instead, “a great coach would have had you practice your backhand and forehand over and over in the weeks before.” n

Coverage of leadership, human-capital development, extended and expanded learning time, and arts learning is supported in part by a grant from The Wallace Foundation at www.wallacefoundation.org.

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“ i really do think there are parts of practice that are more general—relationship-building, ways to relate to different age groups, use of time—but other aspects ... are inherently subject-specific.”PamEla l. GROSSmanEducation Professor Stanford university



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by MAry ANN ZehrAustin, Texas

Not a school day goes by that Lau-rie Hahn Ganser doesn’t use some-thing she’s learned in a professional-development pro-gram designed to help regular class-room teachers reach

English-language learners.The English teacher at Lanier High School

has received extensive training and coaching from Quality Teaching for English Learners, or qtEl, during the three years the Austin district has implemented the program. Ms. Ganser is poised to become a coach herself as part of the 85,000-student district’s efforts to sustain the training without the consul-tants it hired to launch it here.

Enough administrators and teachers at Lanier High have bought in to the program and carried out its strategies that district officials credit it for some positive academic outcomes for Ells at the school.

For example, the achievement gap between English-learners and other students nar-rowed during the first two years of qtEl im-plementation for 10th grade English, math-ematics, and science, and for social studies in all grades. An evaluation conducted by the district of the first two years of the program concludes that it was “moderately effective.”

The professional development is intended to be a high school reform effort taken up by a whole school, not just the English-lan-guage-learners department. Aida Walqui, the director of the teacher-professional-de-velopment program for WestEd, and other researchers at the San Francisco-based re-search and development nonprofit organiza-tion developed the program. The Austin dis-trict hired her and other WestEd consultants to carry out the training at two demonstra-tion schools: Lanier High, a regular compre-hensive high school, and International High School, for 9th and 10th graders who are newcomers to the United States. All of In-ternational High’s 200 students are Ells.

QtEl is what Ana Pedroza, the district’s executive director for special programs, ac-knowledges is a “deluxe program” because it’s intensive and expensive. Many teachers at Lanier and International have received 20 days of professional development tailored to their content areas annually.

The district paid WestEd $694,000 for each of the first two years of implementation and $450,000 for the third, according to Melissa Hutchins, the administrative supervisor of the district’s office of redesign. Most of that cost was covered by a grant from the Bill & Me-linda Gates Foundation. (The foundation also provides grant money to Editorial Projects in Education, which publishes Education Week.)

“If you add up all the dissonant programs brought to schools, I assure you, it would be two times what qtEl costs,” Ms. Walqui said. “Most schools do not have coherent programs for professional development.”

The whole-school aspect of qtEl is impor-tant, she said. “It helps to build a culture of excellence in a school and allow for profes-sional conversations among teachers. They share the same language and many of the same practices.”

Districts in New York City and San Diego have also implemented the program.

preparing fOr independenCe

How to teach secondary-level content and English at the same time is a huge chal-lenge for comprehensive high schools that have many English-learners. Nearly 600 of Lanier’s 1,470 students are Ells. The philos-ophy behind qtEl is that language is learned best in a social context, so lessons should be planned to engage students in structured so-cial interactions about the academic concepts they’re learning. In other words, students are not learning and practicing English if teachers are doing most of the talking.

For each of the first two years of qtEl implementation, all teachers and adminis-trators received at least six days of profes-sional development. And many teachers got substantial additional training or coaching in their content areas. First, the WestEd consultants provided the coaching. Then, they trained a small group of teachers to be coaches. Next year, they’ll be on their own.

A key part of the training is for teachers to

learn how to provide scaffolding, or supports for Ells in the classroom, with the goal of in-creasing student engagement in the subject matter.

Tapping CreaTiviTy

A unit on poetry that Ms. Ganser recently taught to a mix of English-learners, former English-learners, and native English-speak-ers illustrates how scaffolding works.One of the unit’s learning goals was for the sopho-mores to write a poem about their own iden-tity. Ms. Ganser gave them the first line, “I am what I am.” But before she asked them to write a poem, she guided them in prelimi-nary steps. They practiced the use of such literary elements as alliteration, metaphor, and diction, and filled out a chart about themselves focused on such topics as per-sonality, appearance, culture, and music.

So when it came time to sit down and draft their poetry, they already had acquired skills and material to work with.

The supports were helpful even for stu-dents who aren’t Ells.

At first, 15-year-old Pedro Juarez, who had missed the lesson about charting his ideas, sat with writer’s block. “I don’t know what to write about,” he finally said when his teacher checked in with him. The youth’s first lan-guage is Spanish, but he’s not an Ell.

The teacher gave him a copy of the chart that the other students had filled out. For the personality topic, he wrote “real calm.” For appearance, he wrote “white T’s.” Soon he was on his way in writing a poem: “I am what I am. A calm person who just likes to kick back. The old school Texas boy with the white T’s, J’s [Michael Jordan tennis shoes], and fresh fade [a haircut style].”

Checking back in with Mr. Juarez, Ms. Ganser was pleased to see his creative juices starting to flow. “QtEl,” she said in a later in-terview, “is about tapping in to prior knowl-

edge before you set students loose.”Meanwhile, Lanier High’s coaches are

working to help other teachers get to the same place that Ms. Ganser is.

Jennifer Smith, the social studies and Eng-lish coach, spends half her time in that role and half as a teacher. Lanier has another half-time coach for math and science.

On a recent day, Ms. Smith observed Guillermo Tabasco, a third-year world geog-raphy teacher, deliver a lesson. Mr. Tabasco and Ms. Smith had met in advance to dis-cuss the lesson. He hadn’t participated in qtEl coaching before.

Mr. Tabasco runs a tight ship. During the lesson, his 30 freshmen were quiet and seemed to follow his PowerPoint presenta-tion about different kinds of maps and how to read them. He used a lot of visuals, which are helpful to Ells. After introducing each concept, he asked students to answer a ques-tion or two on their own.

After observing for about half an hour, Ms. Smith filled out a template with feedback for the teacher. In the final stage of the coach-ing cycle, Mr. Tabasco and Ms. Smith met to reflect on the lesson.

Ms. Smith noted that only a half-dozen students had regularly responded to the teacher’s questions.

“Have you thought about how the students could be a little more engaged—with each other or with you?” she asked.

Mr. Tabasco suggested that he call on stu-dents by name.

As they later wrapped up, Ms. Smith urged Mr. Tabasco to “slide” more interaction into his lessons and offered to set up an opportu-nity for him to observe other teachers.

“Maybe they are doing something that I see helping a kid,” he said. “Maybe I can steal something from them.” n

Special coverage of district and high school reform and its impact on student opportunities for success is supported in part by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Jennifer Smith’s world history students prepare for a class presentation. The teacher, center, coaches regular classroom educators to be more effective with english-learners.

Texas District Targets ELL TeachingTraining is designed to help regular educators.

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