Ordinary people have to extraordinary work to improve schools

Remarks of M. Hayes Mizell at the session "Framing the Discussion" at the Pre- Collegiate Education Group's 1994 Conference, "Re-Engineering Teaching: The Philanthropic Role." The conference was held on October 26-28, 1994 at the Peachtree Executive Conference Center in Peachtree City, Georgia. Mizell is Director of the Program for Student Achievement at the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation.

Ordinary People

The organizers of this conference have invited me to share my perspective on teachers and professional development, a perspective that stems from my particular experience at the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation. . . .

In 1988, we had a broad vision of the need for middle schools to provide a more challenging and engaging education for young adolescents. We used the mantra "high expectations, high content and high support" to describe the kind of education we hoped middle schools would provide. Several years later, we understood the need for schools and school systems to reform to increase student achievement. Now we are interested in supporting systemic middle school reforms that will result in students in all middle schools meeting high academic standards by the end of the eighth grade. . . .

We are primarily concerned with student learning. We believe that with effort and support, most students can perform at higher levels than they think possible, and, unfortunately, many of their schools and teachers think possible.

Ordinary people engaged in extraordinary work

The Foundation's experience during the past five years leads me to make the following observations about professional development. First, I have learned that teachers are ordinary people engaged in extraordinary work. People become teachers for all kinds of reasons: Because they like children, or because they like contributing to and witnessing the academic and personal growth of children, or because they did not know what else to do, or to provide another paycheck for their households, or to have a job that provides two or three months vacation, or increasingly, because in contrast to the private sector where corporate downsizing, layoffs, and greater use of temporary workers is the norm, teaching provides stable employment, good wages, and health benefits.

Teachers, in other words, like people in other professions, become teachers for "right" and "wrong" reasons, and for reasons that are neither right nor wrong. Teachers, like the rest of us, also get tired, bored, and angry. Some teachers are effective, some are less effective, and some are ineffective or incompetent. Teachers are ordinary people.

I know this is not remarkable insight, but I make this point because so many people, particularly critics of public education and education reformers, seem to think that teachers should combine the best qualities of Mother Teresa, Booker T. Washington, Carl Jung, Richard Friedman and Maria Montessori. We expect a lot of teachers but often forget they are ordinary people. They can be magicians for some students at specific points in time, but it is the rare teacher who can consistently work his or her magic on large numbers of students. We have all come into contact with such teachers, but they stand out in our memories because they were the exception and so much more effective than other teachers we knew.

It is appropriate for us to have high expectations of teachers -- just as we have high expectations of doctors and lawyers and certified public accountants -- but we need to be clear about who teachers are, who we want them to become, and what it takes for them to live up to our expectations.

Many of us want teachers to lead the charge to create schools that more effectively educate young people. Yet, teachers were not trained or hired to do these things.

Many of us want teachers to be reformers or change agents or collaborative decision-makers. We want them to lead the charge to create schools that more effectively educate young people. Yet, teachers were not trained or hired to do these things. No one prepared them to play these roles. It is not at all unusual to encounter teachers on a school leadership team who do not know how to develop an agenda, how to conduct a meeting, or how to reach consensus. At one middle school I know, the first meeting of the school's leadership team was spent deciding how the team members would refer to each other.

Few school boards, superintendents, or even unions expect teachers to stimulate school reform, nor do they provide incentives and supports for teachers to do so. Indeed, on the rare occasions when teachers assert themselves and seek to change significantly the organization or operation of their schools, they place themselves at risk.

What if our expectations were more modest?

Maybe expecting teachers to help reform their schools is just one more illusion, our denial that teachers are ordinary people. What if our expectations are more modest? What if we expect teachers to change not their schools, but their own behaviors, knowledge of the content they teach, and their pedagogy? This is what many reformers and critics of public education want. They say we need more effective teachers. The expectation seems to be that teachers should just get "better," perhaps by a self-induced metamorphosis that transforms them from a caterpillar to a butterfly, or from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde.

There is a lot of evidence that such change is needed. Just as we can all cite examples of magic teachers, we can also recount tales of those for whom personal reformation is very much in order. A friend of mine recently told me about her daughter who entered the sixth grade this year. The daughter has always liked school and been an achieving, relatively compliant student, but one day earlier this month she woke up crying, telling her mother she did not want to go to school. When the mother questioned her, the daughter said that one of her teachers -- a first year teacher -- was always yelling at the class. The daughter said she felt more trusted and respected in elementary school. Surely trust and respect, along with caring, are prerequisites for effective teaching and learning, but some teachers do not exhibit these behaviors. It is easy enough for us to say they should, but people have to learn how to be trustful, respectful, and caring.

Teachers, like the rest of us, are unlikely to simply will themselves to develop these behaviors. It is a process that is at least as hard as changing other behaviors we are all familiar with -- giving up smoking, losing ten pounds, or jogging two miles every day. If we think about our own struggles to change our behaviors in these ways, it may help us understand why it is so difficult for some teachers to develop the behaviors we believe are prerequisites for good teaching.

There are few incentives for teachers to deepen
their knowledge of content or to increase their understanding of how students learn, and
to modify their instruction accordingly.

Many of us also want teachers to improve their knowledge of content and their pedagogy. We believe that if teachers have a deeper knowledge of the subject matter they teach, they will be more secure and feel more confident to be creative in their teaching. If they understand more about the learners they are teaching, what motivates them and how they learn, teachers will be more productive and learners will be more successful.

Yet, there are few incentives for teachers to deepen their knowledge of content or to increase their understanding of how students learn, and to modify their instruction accordingly. The federal government, state legislatures, and foundations have tried to provide these incentives, but with limited success. The teachers who respond to the incentives are the ones least in need of them.

The truth is that changing our professional practice is very difficult. There may be a few people in this audience whose foundations are using computers, but you are still using pen and paper. Others of you might say you would like to get out more and work directly with grantees, but year after year the office-bound routine prevails. Still others may say you wish your foundation would take more risks in awarding grants, but you continue to respond to the culture and cues of the foundation and recommend low-risk grants. It is easier for all of us to yield to our preferences, inhibitions, and fears than to change our professional practice, and it is no different for teachers.

Demanding, exhausting work in a difficult environment

If teachers are ordinary people, and if that means that there are internal, human factors we have to take into account to determine how to spur their professional development, what other barriers must we recognize? Teaching is demanding, exhausting work, performed under difficult circumstances. There is a good reason most of us are here today rather than teaching in a public school. We have chosen not to be in a classroom with between 30 to 40 students of diverse levels of previous educational preparation, cultures, economic backgrounds, and languages spoken at home.

We have chosen not to be in environments where there is a pervasive disrespect for our work, manifest in constant interruptions by the loudspeaker in the classroom, changes in the daily schedule for any purpose other than student learning, and depressing, fortress-like schools. All this, and more, takes its toll on teachers, as it would on us. There is simply little energy or time in this context to focus on and benefit from professional development, at least as we commonly know it.

Last week, I was in a school that was beginning five minutes earlier each day so that once a month it could provide an additional hour-and-a-half of staff development for the faculty. The school was making a good-faith, desperate effort to create more time for professional development, but the effects are not likely to be deep. The faculty may communicate better with one another, and they may reflect on the school's operations and how to improve them, but I doubt teachers' classroom performance will change.

The misuse of staff development is a scandal

Another barrier to improving professional practice is that most school systems do not make effective use of the resources they allocate for this purpose. I doubt you will ever see a Frontline documentary on the misuse of staff development and its lack of effect at a time when there is so much public dissatisfaction with schools, but it is a scandal nevertheless. I would like to know what might be a reasonable estimate of total expenditures for staff development in the nation's public schools. Is it in the millions? Tens of millions? Hundreds of millions? Whatever the amount, it is large, and has little consequence for improving teachers' effectiveness in classrooms.

Most of the staff development school systems provide is unfocused, uncoordinated, and unevaluated. It is often unrelated to teachers' needs. Traditionally, central office staff have determined the subject of staff development, usually without consulting teachers, and selected a consultant to lead the staff development session. The consultant, who may be from outside the state or from another city within the state, comes to the school system and talks to a group of teachers.

How much is spent for staff development in the
nation's public schools? Whatever the amount, it is large, and it has little consequence for improving teachers' effectiveness in classrooms.

The length of the consultant's presentation can vary from an hour to several hours to one or more days. The number of teachers participating varies from a group of twenty to several hundred. At the end of the staff development, the teachers complete an "evaluation" that asks for their opinions about the structure and physical setting of the staff development and whether they liked the consultant. While this type of staff development is less prevalent than it once was, it is still the dominant form.

As central offices reduce the size of their staffs, as more schools adopt some form of site-based decision-making, and as staff development line items are decimated by school system budget cuts, staff development conceived and planned by the central office withers, or disappears altogether. Individual schools assume more responsibility for staff development, but in many cases the effect is little different than when it was managed by the central office. There are at least several reasons for this.

Teachers are unlikely to critique their own practice

If you ask teachers, as I sometimes do, how they would use undesignated resources to affect student performance, their responses do not relate to their need to improve their knowledge of subject matter, their effectiveness in teaching it, or their understanding of the students they teach. Instead, they say, if their schools had undesignated money, depending on the amount, they would reduce class size, extend the school day, provide enrichment programs for students, or increase counseling or social services.

About the closest teachers come to acknowledging their need for self-improvement is to say that perhaps they could strengthen their classroom management skills. This is not to deny that "somewhere the sun is shining," but in most cases, teachers, like the rest of us, are not likely to critique their own practice and seek ways to improve it. There is a notable exception to this scenario. In schools and school systems where reform is a priority, and where there is an expectation that teachers should improve their classroom practices, teachers are more likely to fashion or seek staff development experiences that can help them teach better. In other words, what school systems expect and support is what they get.

Still, much staff development is crude and rudimentary. It is preceded by little thoughtful reflection about the purpose of staff development and how to achieve it.

Four questions can improve planning for staff development

In my view, a discussion of four questions should precede planning for staff development:

Purpose: To enhance student performance, what new attitudes/behaviors/knowledge/skills do teachers need to develop?

Method: What are the most effective means for teachers to develop new attitudes/behaviors/ knowledge/skills to enhance student performance?

Implementation: What supports do teachers need to apply their new attitudes/behaviors/ knowledge/skills to enhance student performance?

Results: How will we know whether and how teachers' new attitudes/behaviors/knowledge/skills enhance student performance?

However, it is extremely rare for school systems or individual schools to consider these questions and apply them to professional development. The result is that staff development is often hit-or-miss. Even if someone wanted to trace the link between staff development and improvements in student performance, it would be nearly impossible to do so, not only because the link is weak or non existent, but because enhancing student performance was never a serious goal of staff development.

Unfortunately, even impressive staff development initiatives at the local level do not ensure impressive results. I have in mind a highly-praised professional development center in an urban school system. I do not know what this well-financed center started out to be, but I do have a sense of what it became. Teachers in the school system were required to earn at least 18 hours of professional development credits each year. The professional development center obliged by creating a thick course catalog of three, six, and nine hour staff development opportunities.

Some of the courses were important and substantive while others were marginal to improving teachers' classroom practices. As far as I know, there was no systematic effort to encourage teachers to take courses they needed to improve their classroom performance, nor was there a process to assess whether the teachers learned anything, or whether they applied what they learned, or whether the professional development benefitted students.

Even impressive staff development initiatives
at the local level do not ensure impressive results.

In this same school system, our Foundation was supporting whole-school reform in three middle schools that the central office and other middle schools considered to be at the bottom of the barrel among all middle level schools in the system. It was interesting to me that the district's highly acclaimed professional development center was never deployed by the central office, before we arrived on the scene or after, to assist teachers or help them improve. While I understand that the school system did strategically use the professional development center for other purposes, and to assist other schools, I never got over the fact that the schools, teachers, and students who needed the center's help the most benefitted least. On the other hand, this is more often the case than not in urban education.

What we've learned about professional development for teachers

This brings me to share what we have learned about professional development as a result of our support of middle school reform. I should explain that our support of school systems is not accompanied by prescriptions about how they should reform. We believe school systems and schools have to find their own way to reform. While we are not reluctant to introduce them to whole-school reform models and to programs and projects to improve teachers' skills, it is entirely up to the school systems to decide whether and to what extent they use these. Our goal is not to reform professional development. Whatever we have learned has been because of actions taken by school systems and schools and other grantees.

To increase the utility of the lessons we have learned, I will cast them as recommendations for foundations that want to foster school reform through professional development.

First, develop a vision you believe in and share it with school systems and schools. This is not to suggest that school systems and schools should not develop their own visions, but your broad vision may be the catalyst, inspiration, or challenge local educators need to begin to raise their sights. In our case, the vision of a middle school education of high expectations, high content, and high support was different from the traditional focus and rhetoric of the middle school movement.

Because we linked everything we did to this vision, teachers began to think about what it meant and construct their own meaning out of these few words. Though I did not realize it at the time, the vision also had the effect of reminding some teachers why they had entered the profession in the first place. They liked and believed in kids, and they wanted to rekindle the hope that they could make a difference in the lives of their students.

Second, target groups of teachers in particular schools so that over time nearly everyone in a school is engaged in some type of staff development. During a period of several years, we found that schools changed because large numbers of teachers were changing. The traditional mode of professional development is for one teacher or several teachers from a school to go to a workshop, return to their school and try to apply what they learned, or perhaps do nothing. If they try, they will almost certainly experience problems and often they do not try again. At some future date they may say, "Oh, I tried that but it did not work."

We found, however, that when there was consistent encouragement and incentive for groups of teachers from a school to participate in professional development, the results were different. It was harder for teachers to not apply what they had learned, and when they experienced problems there was a support group to keep them going. Other teachers saw the group returning with a spirit of camaraderie and hope and this became infectious. Professional development was no longer seen as an irrelevant and burdensome obligation, but as an energizing opportunity that could make a difference in teachers' classrooms.

Successful leaders of professional development have high expectations

Third, find experts to lead staff development who will work with teachers as colleagues, not treat them as subjects. There are many gurus and hucksters peddling nostrums they claim will cure every educational ill. Few of these people are willing to cast their lot with teachers. They crack their jokes, present their step-by-step plan for classroom success, sell their book and video, and are never seen again.

In contrast, our most successful leader of professional development was a former National Teacher of the Year who had developed an approach to teaching writing across the curriculum. She was secure in her values that all students could learn to write well, and that all teachers could help them do so. She had high expectations of the teachers and their students. Teachers not only knew this person was "one of their own," but that she really wanted and expected teachers to become more able and self-confident in the classroom. There were intensive, hard workshops during which teachers learned by developing curriculum materials they would use in their classrooms.

There are many gurus and hucksters peddling nostrums they claim will cure every educational ill. Few of these people are willing to cast their lot with teachers.

There were also pizza dinners and laughter and forging personal as well as professional relationships after the workshops. When the consultant returned home, she wrote the teachers a memo praising them for their hard work, thanking them for the good times, and providing pointed reminders that she would return in several months and was looking forward to observing their progress.
She did return, spending a half day observing and working along side teachers in their classrooms. In the afternoon, she met with the teachers as a group, giving them specific feedback based on what she had seen in their classrooms. When the consultant returned home, she wrote a memo to each teacher, praising the teacher's progress, suggesting improvements the teacher could make, and once again reminding the teacher she would return in a few months.

This process was repeated over and over for several years, and it is no wonder that teachers blossomed, that their students began to write more frequently and better, and that some of the teachers are now able to lead the professional development of other teachers. Perhaps it is also no surprise that the consultant has finally withdrawn from these sites, confident that she did her job and looking for new challenges. One thing I learned from this experience is to query potential grantees who want to work with our sites. Will they cast their lot with the teachers and administrators who do the real work? Are they prepared to accept some accountability for what teachers do or do not do as a result of their work with the teachers? Are they prepared for the school's success to be their success, and for the school's failure to be their failure?

Use summer weeks,
and light small professional development "brush fires"

Fourth, use summer weeks for staff development with periodic in-school follow-up and support throughout the school year. After school workshops and professional development opportunities may be useful for planning and site-based decision making but I question whether they will result in more effective pedagogy. If teachers are going to learn how to teach better, they need intensive, sustained opportunities to learn and practice what they learn. It would be wonderful if this could happen in their classrooms, but this seems unlikely for most teachers in the near future.

While we need to encourage and document job-embedded professional development to enhance student performance, we would be a long way beyond where we are now if the majority of teachers participated in high quality professional development during the summer, with appropriate follow-up support. However, even if school systems and schools make greater use of summer weeks for professional development, it will have little effect without a support system that encourages teachers to apply what they learned and helps them over the hurdles they will encounter.

Fifth, light small brush fires of professional development. We are all familiar with mini-grants for individual teachers to carry out special projects. While they have demonstrated support for teachers, I am not aware they have enhanced systemic reform. We have taken a different approach in an effort to do just that. About mid-way into our middle school initiative, I became concerned that teachers did not seem to believe they could do anything without getting the permission of the principal or the school system, or getting paid for it. I wanted to see if we could encourage groups of teachers to take charge of their own professional development.

We worked with a grantee to develop a small program of what we call "collegial planning activity grants." We developed a competition with simple guidelines. A group of no fewer than six and no more than twelve teachers could apply for a grant of $500. The teachers had to commit to meet at least five times during a school year to work on an issue they chose related to enhancing student performance. The teachers have to volunteer their time, but the $500 can be used for practically anything else. Teachers sometimes use it for transportation or materials, but most often they use it for food and that is fine with us.

Last year, 30 teacher teams applied and our grantee awarded 18 grants. One group of 12 teachers created the authentic/performance-based assessment team, a district wide study group to develop ways to introduce authentic assessment into the middle school curriculum. Another group of 20 teachers met to develop and implement strategies to produce greater student success in math. Another group of six teachers developed an inter-disciplinary unit on expeditions, traveling to a site of the Lewis and Clark expedition to conduct research. These grants have spurred teacher initiative, fostered collegiality and produced results worth far more than the amount of the grants.

Use professional conferences or develop your own

Sixth, use national professional conferences, or create your own. At one time, perhaps when I was a school board member, I probably thought that spending money to send teachers to national conferences was a waste of both time and money. It is easy to conjure up images of teachers "living it up" in some distant city, skipping conference sessions and returning home with bulging shopping bags but little of value to themselves or their schools. This can and does occur, but I now look at national conferences differently.

Last year, I was with a group of people visiting an Atlanta middle school, and during a conversation with a very good math teacher, a veteran of 23 years, we learned that she had never been to a national conference. She shared this information with a wistfulness that was somewhere between "I Never Saw Paris" and "Someday I Will Cross the River Jordan." I have learned through the years that this teacher's isolation is not as unusual as one might think. It translates into decades of the same old grind, never getting the opportunity to hear about different ways of teaching or simply benefitting from some external stimulation.

When teams of teachers and administrators attend a national conference together, particularly if they are doing so as participants in a reforming school or system, the effect can be quite useful.

I have also learned that when teams of teachers and administrators attend a national conference together, particularly if they are doing so as participants in a reforming school system or school, the effect can be quite useful. The trip and conference provides an opportunity for bonding and esprit, as well as for gaining new information and insights. More importantly, it can stimulate reflection and planning. I know that a significant portion of our grants have gone to support travel, lodging, meals, and registration at national conferences, but I consider it money well spent. Many teachers have told me that previously they never had opportunities to relate to administrators as peers, or a chance back home to gain perspective on their school system or school, or even to talk with one another.

We have not, however, supported teachers to attend just any conference. Most of the national conferences have been ones we convened for very specific purposes. Five years ago, we wanted to encourage teams from our sites to attend the annual meeting of the National Middle School Association. We thought the teams might be able to learn something that would be helpful. At the same time, we encouraged teachers and administrators from our sites to apply to make presentations at the NMSA conference. We wanted them to share their project experiences with others, and, frankly, to infuse their urban perspective into NMSA.

I did not realize at the time that teachers' self-esteem was so low that they questioned whether they were competent to present at a national conference, or whether they had anything to share. After attending just one conference, however, they got over that problem. As they began to make presentations at national conferences, it further reinforced their commitment to reform back home, and to their belief that their action could make a difference.

We soon decided that because groups of our grantees were attending the National Middle School Association conference anyway, we would hold a one-day grantees' meeting immediately before the NMSA conference. This evolved from year to year until teachers became more enthusiastic about our meeting than the NMSA conference. This was because the meeting was democratic in its orientation -- teachers, principals, and superintendents are treated as peers -- and because the emphasis is on teachers and administrators sharing their experiences, successes, and failures with one another. There are no pundits, professors, or personalities as speakers. Indeed, there is only one speaker and the remainder of the day is spent in small group workshops.

Last year, we gave this meeting a name, "The Reform Connection," and opened it to kindred grantees supported by other foundations. This year, we expect 325 people at this conference which has begun to develop a reputation for its substantive and revivalistic character. An interesting spinoff is that some of our sites began to organize a similar day in their own school systems. The result is that, with no prodding from us, there are now annual, district-wide middle school conferences in at least three cities.

Identify good professional development
and use teachers to solve problems

Seventh, know what good professional development looks like, or create your own standards. At some point during the past several years, I realized that no one had delineated what constitutes good professional development for middle school educators. There was nothing I could cite as an authoritative source either to indicate what school systems and schools should be doing, or to assess their current professional development practices.

We recommend that the Foundation award a grant to the National Staff Development Council to develop standards for middle level staff development. Our Trustees awarded the grant and earlier this year NSDC published the standards. About half of the publication includes generic standards that could inform professional development at any level. You may or may not agree with these standards, but perhaps they can stimulate and inform your thinking, or that of your grantees, about the characteristics of high quality professional development.

We have to be careful not to make professional development so professional that it is no longer
of use to teachers.

Eighth, use teachers to solve problems related to advancing school reform. Like students, teachers learn more and take their development more seriously when someone -- a principal, or superintendent, or foundation -- expects them to work in groups to address real problems, and supports their efforts to do so. This is an approach that is significantly different from simply "involving" teachers, or "running it by" the teachers. I also am not talking about asking teachers to "look at" or "consider" an issue such as whether to convert to heterogenous grouping or a year round school. Such approaches usually result in teachers quickly concluding that making a fundamental shift will result in more risk and hard work. Consequently, they report that the practice under consideration "will not work" in the school or that the school is not "ready" to make a shift.

It is qualitatively different, however, to ask teachers to study in depth an extant problem, and craft solutions that teachers could implement. For example, if the issue is how to increase all students' access to challenging and engaging curricula, teachers may struggle with this differently than if they are asked to decide whether the school should convert to heterogenous grouping. Another current opportunity is to engage teachers in studying how they can change their schools and their practice to enable students to meet high standards. We should seize these opportunities to mobilize teachers as problem solvers.

Create contexts that support teachers' intellect and creativity

I know that none of these observations are "rocket science," but of course I am not a rocket scientist. Neither are teachers; they are ordinary people in extraordinary jobs. We have to be careful not to make professional development so professional that it is no longer of use to teachers. Perhaps this is where we are now. We have managed to suck the life out of learning for both students and teachers. We have not only robbed learning of its joy and discovery, but of its challenge and labor. Real learning is more hard work than fun, at least in the beginning, and we do students and teachers no favor when we seek to make it otherwise.

Our best chance for fostering high quality professional development is to create contexts of reform which signal teachers that they have all the intellect and creativity necessary to change schools and enhance student performance. I believe foundations can call teachers to a higher purpose, and create local support systems that cause them to respond. To do so, we need to have high expectations of teachers but understand that we are seeking deep, profound changes in professional practice. We need to keep in mind what it would take for us to change in ways we expect of teachers, and we need to help teachers get what we would want for ourselves.

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Ordinary People

Many of us want teachers to lead the charge to create schools that more effectively educate young people. Yet, teachers were not trained or hired to do these things.

There are few incentives for teachers to deepen their knowledge of content or to increase their understanding of how students learn, and to modify their instruction accordingly.

How much is spent for staff development in the nation's public schools? Whatever the amount, it is large, and it has little consequence for improving teachers' effectiveness in classrooms.