posted by:
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Brian Drayton
on April 23, 1998
at 2:48PM
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subject:
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summary and farewell
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This conversation has explored what it takes to make rigorous sense of the relationship between professional development and student outcomes. We all agree that improved student learning is the primary goal of our teacher PD work. We are also very aware of the systemic context in which all our interventions, and our measurements, are embedded. In the shifting landscape of American education (part of the shifting landscape of American society), we are faced with the task of establishing as best we can some coherent model of how to improve what happens in schools, yet this challenge seems dauntingly complex. There are interventions at every point simultaneously: how can we describe the relations we see between the patterns of interlocked kaleidoscopes?
Research on educational reform serves multiple purposes, and the demands of one constituency will often be in tension with those of others. These tensions require painful decisions by researchers. The tensions and compromises in methodology and theoretical grounding are just in the nature of the work. A careful researcher may accept the policy need for provisional answers, while knowing that reliable understanding over the long term depends on an awareness of all the begged questions, and a fierce dialogue about how to address them. A critical question is how to recognize the needs of policy makers for quick approximate answers, while demanding respect and resources for the longer-term, more painstaking research that rigor and real accountability require.
We hear evidence of work and thought at both levels in the posts to this discussion group. Nadler, Chval, and Kalyani sketch some of the ways that they are seeking to document provisional results. Such formative answers, while preliminary, speak to pressing needs of some constituencies -- the state, the school district, and the professional developers themselves. We may not be able to connect the effects of a particular workshop or seminar to specific student outcomes, but we can learn how better to describe teacher change, and in the course of that to take data on changes in the classroom, including student attitude and performance. We can report these results, but we must also frame them to make as clear as we can the open questions that still beg for resolution. Box, McCary, and others point out especially the need to understand the alignment and interaction of simultaneous interventions in curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment.
St. John points out that we can begin to build a bridge between our longing for rigorous research, with the demands for information, signs of progress, and hints of results which press on us all from parents, policy-makers, administrators, and our own concerns. We can do this by conceptualizing in concrete detail our model of student learning and of teacher learning; by recognizing the many ways in which practice and intent do (and don't) relate; and by recognizing that we may first see diffuse effects, long before we can accurately explain them. A change in teacher competence may not translate directly into better student performance on a standardized test, but it may result from changes in administrative policy, in curriculum materials, in the availability of resources, and in expectations of students and of teachers. Thus there may be a broad climatic shift which supports more inquiry-based learning at a higher level, and *that* results in some important student gains.
The upshot is that our researchers are balancing many tasks, because they must respond to the need for accountability while they are faced every day with the unanswered questions of the field -- they must help us all make sense of our work and our interventions, while dealing with so many uncontrollable variables
Chomsky once wrote that the questions in a field of study can be divided into mysteries and problems. Mysteries are questions we can't imagine how answer, yet. Problems are questions we know how to answer. Progress comes when we can move a question from the "mystery" category into the "problems" category, as new data and better theory accumulate. In studying educational change, we are surrounded by a large number of mysteries and problems, and we can't always figure out which category a question belongs in.
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