The professional development of teachers

The Professional Development of Teachers: Practice and Theory

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The Professional Development of

Teachers: Practice and Theory

by

Philip Adey

King’s College London,

United Kingdom

with

Gwen Hewitt, John Hewitt and Nicolette Landau

KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS

NEW YORK, BOSTON, DORDRECHT, LONDON, MOSCOW

eBook ISBN: 1-306-48518-4

Print ISBN: 1-4020-2005-8

©2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers

New York, Boston, Dordrecht, London, Moscow

Print ©2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers

Dordrecht

All rights reserved

No part of this eBook may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,

mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without written consent from the Publisher

Created in the United States of America

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DEDICATION

for Jennifer Adey

… not just for her love and support for 40+ years, but for many valuable

professional insights into the matter of this book from her experience as a

headteacher, OfSTED inspector, and consultant.

v

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CONTENTS

Abbreviations and Notes ix

PART 1: THE ISSUES AND SOME ATTEMPTED SOLUTIONS

Chapter page

1 Introduction 1

2 Evolving principles: experience of two large scale programmes 9

3 Professional development for cognitive acceleration: initiation 17

4 Professional development for cognitive acceleration: elaboration 31

PART 2: EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

5 Measurable effects of cognitive acceleration 51

6 Testing an implementation model 65

7 A long-term follow-up of some CASE schools 83

8 Teachers in the school context 97

9 Making the process systemic: evaluation of an authority 119

programme

PART 3: MODELLING PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

10 Researching professional development: Just how complex is it? 143

11 Elaborating the model 155

12 Evidence-based policy? 175

References 197

Index 205

vii

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CC

ABBREVIATIONS AND NOTES

CA Cognitive Acceleration

CAME Cognitive Acceleration through Mathematics Education

CASE Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education

CATE Cognitive Acceleration through Technology Education

CASE Coordinator (Person in a school responsible for implementation of

CASE)

DfES Department for Education and Skills (the government ministry in

England responsible for education)

GCSE General Certificate of Secondary Education (national examination taken

at end of Y11 in England and Wales)

HoD Head of Department (in a school)

HoS Head of Science (department in a school)

INSET Inservice Education of Teachers

KS1 etc. Key Stage 1 etc. (see table below)

LEA Local Education Authority (or ‘Local Authority’)

LoU Level of Use (of an innovation)

NLS National Literacy Strategy

NNS National Numeracy Strategy

NQT Newly Qualified Teacher (in their first year)

OfSTED Office for Standards in Education (who inspect schools in England).

PD Professional Development – in the context of this book, this refers

generally to the continuing development of teachers after their initial

training.

PKG Permatan Kerja Guru – literally ‘improving the work of teachers’.

Y1 etc Year 1 etc. (see table below)

WISCIP West Indian Science Curriculum Innovation Project

ZPD Zone of Proximal Development

Ages, years, and grades in different systems

Age, years 5+ 6+ 7+ … 10+ 11+ 12+ 13+ 14+ 15+ 16+ 17+

England Y1 Y2 Y3 … Y6 Y7 Y8 Y9 Y10 Y11 Y12 Y13

Key Stage 1 2 3 4 5

School * primary secondary

Scotland P1 P2 P3 … P6 P7 S1 S2 S3 S4 S5

US grade K 1 2 … 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

* details vary widely across (and within) Local Authorities. For example, some have

middle schools Y4 – Y7 or Y8.

ix

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PART 1: THE ISSUES AND SOME ATTEMPTED

SOLUTIONS

1: INTRODUCTION

AN OUTLINE OF OUR AGENDA

We have subtitled this book ‘Practice and Theory’ because that is the order in which

we plan to deal with the subject. We have been running and evaluating programmes

for the professional development of teachers since 1970 and the first section of the

book will describe some of that practice and the principles which have emerged, and

then been re-cycled back into the practice. Key amongst those principles are:

• the necessarily long-term nature of inservice programmes which are to have a

permanent effect on teaching practice;

• the central role of coaching work in schools; and

• the interaction between individual teacher factors and the department and school

environment which encourages or discourages professional development.

Part 1 will describe some of the main professional development programmes for

teachers with which we have been involved – in outline only for the earlier ones –

and show how these principles emerged and how they work out in practice. We will

also explore some of the problems, economic and other, associated with following

them rigorously.

In part 2 we will present a varied body of empirical evidence concerning the

effectiveness of professional development programmes. Most of this evidence has

been reported previously only at conferences and here it will be laid out for closer

inspection, and also collected together so that we can see how it accumulates and

contributes to something like a unitary story. It comprises both quantitative

evidence including gains in student achievement which can be attributed to the

teachers’ inservice courses, and also qualitative data obtained from questionnaires,

interviews, and prolonged observations of classes of teachers participating in

professional development (PD) courses.

There is, of course, already a substantial literature concerned with professional

development in general, professional development of teachers, and the issue of

educational change. We could not presume to offer new insights into effective

professional development of teachers without recognising the enduring work of

such scholars as Michael Fullan, Thomas Guskey, Andy Hargreaves, David

1

2 Introduction

Hopkins, Bruce Joyce, Michael Huberman, Matthew Miles, and Virginia

Richardson. But we have chosen to present our own experience and empirical data

first and then, in Part 3, to show how this experience and data relates to models

which have been proposed by others. We will address here methodological issues

concerned with collecting and interpreting evidence of relationships amongst the

many individual and situational factors associated with PD, and re-visit the

arguments about ‘process-product’ research on PD. In the light of our experience,

we will interrogate models of PD which have been proposed by others and attempt

to move forward our total understanding of the process of the professional

development of teachers for educational change. In conclusion, we will look at

some current national practice in professional development, concentrating on the

recent English experience of introducing ‘strategies’ into schools but referring also,

by way of contrast, to the situation in the United States.

WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?

Why has the professional development of teachers already exercised so many good

minds for so long? And how can we justify adding another book to this field? The

answer to both questions must lie in the continuing demand from society in general

(at least as interpreted by politicians and newspaper editors) for improvements in

the quality of education. We are not here going to question the meaning of

‘standards’ in education, nor the validity of claims and publicly held perceptions

about such standards, and we cannot be bothered to interrogate the motives of many

of those who loudly express their horror at supposedly falling standards. (It is

disappointing that even Michael Fullan (2001, p.47) occasionally makes glib

statements such as “Most people would agree that the public school system is in a

state of crisis”) And we do not have to buy into the cataclysmic view of the rate of

change in society fostered by futurologists such as Gleick (1999) and Toffler (1970)

to accept that change is occurring, and that it is inevitable, is demanding of

attention, and is welcome. It is welcome because a system which does not change is

one which stagnates, and it demands attention, obviously, because methods of

running a classroom, or school, or local authority, or government which worked fine

20 years ago will not work well now. The story of evolution is one of continuous

change – sometimes so slow that we cannot detect it over hundreds of years,

sometimes radically metamorphic. Species which fail to adapt become extinct.

Actually, the justification for continuing to chip away at the problem of

professional development is quite simple. A desire to improve the quality of

education is a perfectly respectable aim in its own right, and is one that will always

continue, that should always continue, whatever successes may be achieved on the

way. One school or one local education authority (LEA), or one country may

achieve standards of instruction, provision of resources, and harmonious and

productive relationships amongst teachers and students that would be the envy of

the world, and yet still feel that more could be done, or at the very least that hard

Introduction 3

work must be put in to ensure that those standards are maintained. So, the raising

and maintenance of educational standards is a continuous quest, and the central

players in that quest must be the teachers.

“Educational change depends on what teachers do and think – it’s as simple and as

complex as that” (Fullan & Stiegelbauer, 1991) p. 117

Hopkins & Lagerweij (1996) characterise decades of attempts to improve education

as: 1960s, curriculum development and a belief that materials alone would do the

job; 1970s, failure of this approach and much hand-wringing; 1980s, success of the

school effectiveness movement in identifying key factors in successful schools, and

the 1990s as the decade of pro-active school improvement. In his own ‘Improving

the Quality of Education for All’ project, Hopkins noted as one of the important

conditions which underpin improvement efforts a commitment to continuing staff

development (p. 81). We would add, not just commitment, but an understanding of

staff development methods which are effective.

Perhaps here an aside is in order about possible alternative routes to educational

success which appear to by-pass teachers – the teacher-proof curriculum, the tightly

specified lesson plan, and the computer-delivered lessons. It should not even be

necessary to write this paragraph as we guess that it will be blindingly obvious to

the great majority of our readers, but just in case someone1 out there still believes in

such by-passes, here goes. Education is first and foremost a social process, one that

occurs between people. Whatever the de-schoolers or futurologists might argue, it is

not an historical accident, nor a throw-back to medieval practice, nor the hopeless

inertia of the system that has led all school education, everywhere in the world, to

be conducted in ‘classes’ of from 15 to 90 students with one ‘teacher’. The reason

that the process of teaching and learning – even rather bad, didactic, teaching – can

never be adequately replicated by a teaching machine, a computer, interactive video,

or hypermedia text is that no machine can get near to managing the billions of subtle

interactions which occur amongst even 30 students and between them and their

teacher. Schön (1987) describes the artistry of the professional (including teachers)

and the impossibility of reducing this artistry to some form of technical rationality.

This is more than just saying that there are too many variables for a machine to

handle for if that were all it was, machine development would soon catch up. It is

that too many of the variables are indeterminate and manifest themselves anew

whenever the context changes. Only a human agent can even approximate the most

appropriate responses required to achieve a particular instructional goal with a

group of other human beings. Human teachers are and will remain at the centre of

the educational system, and thus the continuing professional development of

teachers remains the most important force in the quest for educational improvement.

1 At a dinner party while writing this book, the city types around the table agreed unanimously that star

presenters of history and nature programmes on television were so excellent that they should be

employed to make programmes to cover the school curriculum, which could then be shown in place of

the teachers’ ‘boring’ lessons. Then all the schools would need would be someone to take the register,

turn on the video player, and stop fights in the playground. Obvious, really.

4 Introduction

That is the justification for continuing to pay attention to professional

development. The justification for this particular book will become apparent. It lies

in our unique and prolonged experiences with extensive professional development

programmes and the lessons which may be learned from them.

THE CONTEXT OF OUR WORK, AND ITS GENERALISABILITY

We would like to contextualise our work at two levels: within the school

improvement literature in general and then as a specific example of professional

development.

Professional Development and School Improvement

The radical conservative agenda of the 1970s in the United States and the United

Kingdom turned an ‘accountability’ spotlight on to education. Education, it was

argued, had much in common with any service industry: it had aims, outcomes,

clients, stakeholders, and people who paid for it (generally the taxpayer). Since a

main item of the agenda was to reduce taxes, the education system was required to

account for its performance and to demonstrate cost-effectiveness. Notwithstanding

a major problem in agreeing what counted as useful outcomes – for the

manufacturer, these may be basic literacy and technical skills, for the service

provider, interpersonal abilities and for the university admissions tutor, academic

excellence – the political demand released funding for a wave of studies of

educational effectiveness and educational change. This work has had a long-lasting

impact both on methods of assessing effectiveness (e.g. Miles & Huberman, 1984)

and on the construction of macro-models of educational change (e.g. Fullan, 1982;

Fullan & Stiegelbauer, 1991). Early sociologists’ suggestions that schools actually

made very little difference to students’ academic and personal development were

countered by sophisticated longitudinal studies incorporating multi-level modelling

which demonstrated unequivocally that school variables under the control of the

school’s managers did indeed have a significant effect on the variance in outcomes

for students (e.g. Mortimore, Sammons, Ecob, Stoll, & Lewis, 1988; Rutter, 1980).

Once it was established that schools did make a difference, attention could be turned

to just how less-good schools could be improved, and the school improvement

literature was born. Two excellent examples of this genre are provide by Joyce,

Calhoun, & Hopkins (1999) and Stoll & Fink (1996), each of whom draws on

experience, research, and imaginative analyses to present practicable ideas for

improving schools by multi-pronged attention to a diverse range of parameters.

Although it constitutes only one of these prongs, the professional development

of teachers is central to all plans for school improvement. In this book we will be

recognising this centrality and focussing particularly on methods of effective

professional development and its evaluation, but we recognise that this does only