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Professional Development in a Technological Age: New Definitions, Old Challenges, New Resources

PRINCIPLES FOR SUCCESSFUL PRACTICES IN PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Extending a Vision of Technology as an Empowering Tool

Stimulating Reflective Practice That Is Grounded in the Teaching Context

Exemplifying Our Beliefs on Learning: Inquiry, Collaboration, and Discourse

Recognizing the Interplay in Learning Between Activity and Belief

Valuing and Cultivating a Culture of Collegiality

Providing Continual Contexts for Formal and Informal Learning

Providing Opportunities for Meaningful Leadership Roles to Emerge

Enabling Teachers to Shape their Own Learning

Whether or not a new procedure, curriculum, or innovation such as technology integration takes hold depends on "the extent to which the school creates a professional community that harnesses and develops individual commitment and talent into a group effort that pushes for learning of high intellectual quality" (Brandt, 1995, p. 73). We believe that the following principles of professional development are central to creating and nurturing such a professional community of teachers working with the complex task of bringing technology into schools to enhance learning:

• Professional development for technology must extend a vision of technology as an empowering tool for teachers and students.
• Professional development must stimulate reflective practice and be grounded in the context of teaching.
• Professional development must exemplify our deepest beliefs about learning: inquiry, collaboration and discourse.
• Professional development must recognize the interplay in learning between activity and belief.
• Professional development must value and cultivate a culture of collegiality.
• Professional development programs must provide continual contexts for formal and informal learning.
• Professional development must provide opportunities for meaningful teacher leadership roles to emerge.
• Professional development must enable teachers to shape their own learning.
  

Extending a Vision of Technology as an Empowering Tool

Technology is best seen as a facilitator of learning rather than an end in itself. Many teachers are not motivated by the idea of placing technology in their classrooms. But they are motivated by the vision of helping their students to learn more and take more control of their learning. Technopush does not work. Learning more effective strategies for teaching does. (Mergendoller, 1994, p. 6.20-1)

The goal of professional development for technology should be to help teachers become more productive professionals, and to empower them to make sense of how mastery of technologies can be useful to them, in their teaching and as a tool for professional growth. What teachers learn about technology should be personally valuable for the things they need to do. And learning about technology should be exciting and exhilarating. As one teacher suggests, "We want to help make teachers fearless with technology" (Office of Technology Assessment, 1995).

What, then, do teachers need from a professional development program to support technology use in schools? They need to become comfortable enough with technologies to grasp their potential for teaching and learning, to navigate changes in practice and pedagogy to meet that potential, to evaluate and make choices among myriad options, and to manage the enormous quantities of information that come their way as a result of increased access to primary sources and to a much more extensive audience. They need to position themselves to become continual learners, from one another, from their students, and from the broader world "out there." Most important, they need to make technology tools their own.

Many school technology programs emphasize teacher mastery of operational skills; i.e., how to make technology work (OTA, 1995). Though important, mere proficiency cannot be the central goal of a technology professional development program. Teachers must be involved in defining an educational vision from which decisions about technology use will be made. Rather than concentrating solely on technology, professional development should promote significant school talk about ideas and issues that technology can facilitate (Lieberman & Miller, 1990).

In Teachers and Technology: Making the Connection (OTA, 1995), a national study for the U.S. Congress, teachers identified the key areas, beyond operational skills, they need in order to make effective use of computers in their classrooms:

• A broader understanding of what the technologies can do (ways in which it can enrich and support the ongoing work and goals of their own classroom)
• Provision for the time and effort that are required for educating themselves about a particular piece of hardware or software, and its applications for their classroom
• Knowledge about how to organize and effectively manage their students in technology-based environments
• Knowledge about how to teach with technology or to orchestrate learning activities in order to make optimal use of it.

Professional development programs also need to help teachers integrate technology into their ongoing practice. Teaching to support inquiry with technology requires, among other things, that the teacher become a facilitator of student explorations, a fellow problem solver, and a resource for integrating students' diverse experiences, knowledge bases, and understandings. Teachers need support in developing alternative structures and approaches to the traditional methods in which the teacher's primary role has been that of deliverer of knowledge.

Stimulating Reflective Practice That Is Grounded in the Teaching Context

[T]he most promising forms of professional development engage teachers in the pursuit of genuine questions, problems, and curiosities, over time, in ways that leave a mark on perspectives, policy, and practice. (Little, 1993, p. 133)

The realities of teaching, and the experience of teachers, must provide the backdrop onto which new ideas are considered and reflected upon. Powerful teaching is a deeply intellectual activity, involving asking questions, observing carefully, making connections between discrete experiences, developing approaches and solutions based on needs of one's students and classroom, and reflecting on practice.

In The Reflective Practitioner, Schön (1983) describes reflection-in-action as the conscious interaction by the practitioner with a problematic situation, and the conversation and experimentation that accompanies it. Grimmet et al. (1990, p. 23) describes one aspect of reflection as "a process that leads to thoughtful, mediated action." Through the habit of reflection we make sense of experiences. We attend to features of a situation that we had previously ignored, and assign new significance to previously identified features. "Reflection involves recasting situations once they have been clarified, rethinking the assumptions on which initial understandings of a problematic issue were based, and beginning to reconsider the range of possible responses [one] might use" (p. 27).

As part of their reflective practice, teachers need to look beyond the segmented boxes of curriculum, subject areas and the demands of day-to-day practice. To tap their students' personal knowledge and to better understand their interaction patterns, teachers need to reach further than the context of the classroom and seek to comprehend the range of personal and cultural experiences that students bring to learning (Valli, 1990). And teachers need to look at the wider meanings and purposes of school work, and at the connections between students' experiences, teachers' classroom practice, and schoolwide structures and cultures (Little, 1993).

Exemplifying Our Beliefs on Learning: Inquiry, Collaboration, and Discourse

Compared with the complexity, subtlety, and uncertainties of the classroom, professional development is often a remarkably low - intensity enterprise. It requires little in the way of intellectual struggle or emotional engagement and takes only superficial account of teachers' histories or circumstances. Compared with the complexity and ambiguity of the most ambitious reforms, professional development is too often substantively weak and politically marginal. (Little, 1993, p. 148)

Professional development should offer "meaningful intellectual, social, and emotional engagement with ideas, with materials, and with colleagues both in and out of teaching" (Little, 1993, p. 138). Because the reform movement in education is based on a view that children need to construct their own understanding of the world through active engagement with topics and problems that are meaningful to them, it is logical that constructivist staff development is, therefore, the best way to support constructivist learning (Sparks, 1994). Teachers need the opportunity to construct their own knowledge through interaction with others about meaningful activity; they need permission to experiment and take risks; and they need to do their learning in an environment that is respectful and supportive.

The pursuit of knowledge, through continuing inquiry and experimentation, is central to professional development (Little, 1993). Rather than handing "development" to teachers, those interested in supporting the professional growth of teachers need to encourage them to identify and "formulate valid questions about their own practice, and to pursue objective answers to those questions" (Sparks & Loucks - Horsley, 1990, p. 243). They should invite - and, with the support of technology, enable - teachers to theorize, interpret, and critique their own practice (Cochran - Smith & Lytle, 1993). Rather than promoting the consumption of knowledge, professional development should support the process of teachers generating their own knowledge and assessing that claimed by others (Little, 1993).

Teachers need to be supported in developing the ability to respond thoughtfully to the ambiguities and changes that reform presents, as well as the day - to - day challenges of the practice. How can technologies support and enhance core learning experiences in the classroom? How can effective use be made of authentic assessments to better understand student learning? How can teaching accommodate diversity in culture, language, socioeconomic role, gender, and learning style? These and many other pressing questions are central to teaching and learning in schools today, and provide teachers with opportunities to contemplate, articulate, and elucidate their own deepest beliefs and understandings about learning.

Teachers also need to have the opportunity to actively expand and shape their understanding of the content that they teach.

Teachers are also learners - learners of practice. If we are to support their efforts to teach science well, we need to provide forums in which they can do science in new ways, reflect on their own learning and consider implications for their own classrooms. If current theory is to reach the classroom, teachers must have more than awareness of current ideas. They must have action knowledge that can only come from experiencing active learning themselves. (Doubler et al., 1994, p. 3)

Whatever the subject domain, by becoming active learners themselves, teachers can deepen their understanding of the content that they teach, and the processes by which their students learn. Through the process of conducting their own inquiries, they learn what it is to become deeply engaged with the content that they teach. Through collaboration, they come to value the contributions of various team members to the evolution of the group's thinking. And through collegial interchanges and study they come to recognize the importance of discourse in sense - making, and to value their own central role as listeners and fellow sense - makers, as well as teachers (Warren & Rosebery, 1992).

When viewed as providing lifelong learning opportunities for teachers, professional development can promote a spirit of inquiry into teaching, learning, and the vast fields of knowledge and understanding.

Recognizing the Interplay in Learning Between Activity and Belief

Belief and practice are very closely linked. Some learners prefer starting from the conceptual and then moving into experience. Others prefer beginning with practice and then addressing beliefs. Whatever the case, it is important for professional development programs to provide opportunities for both.

As they grow professionally, teachers need frequent opportunities to play activity and belief off one another. No matter how compelling a vision is, one can only go so far down a path through intellectual reasoning alone. Experience gives new meaning to theory and sparks new understandings. At the same time, the periodic opportunity to step back from practice and to grapple with its meaning and direction is essential to making new ideas and approaches one's own.

Some of the most important changes in teacher attitudes and beliefs come after they have implemented changes and seen evidence of improved student learning (Guskey, 1986, in Loucks - Horsley et al., 1987). Only after they have mastered the basic elements of implementation of a new idea are teachers ready to grapple with the underlying meanings of innovations and how they are reflected in actual experience (Loucks - Horsley et al., 1987).

Valuing and Cultivating a Culture of Collegiality

When teachers work together to develop common bonds around shared goals, interactive decision making, and mutual inquiry, there develops a school culture that is rewarding for teachers as well as beneficial for students. When teachers are engaged together in thinking aloud about their work and its consequences, the results are not simply a greater sense of professionalism on the part of teachers, although that certainly is the case, but a stronger and more coherent instructional program for children and youth. (Griffin, 1991, p. 250)

"[R]ecent research points strongly to the power of teacher - teacher professional collegiality as a key to school success and to effective school change" (Lieberman, 1986). Personal reflection feeds and is enriched by a learning community. In schools enriched by a professional culture of collegiality one recognizes the important role of informal networks in providing means for intellectual learning and social support for teachers (Lieberman & Miller, 1991). In such a culture, teachers talk to one another about teaching often "at a level of detail that makes their exchange both theoretically rich and practically meaningful"; they work with colleagues to plan, prepare, and evaluate teaching topics, methods, and materials (Little, 1987, p. 503); they make fruitful use of observations in each other's classrooms; they train together and train one another; they form "long - term habits of shared work and shared problem solving" (Little, in Lieberman, 1986, p. 43); and they provide one another with collective support. Lieberman and Miller cite a study in six urban schools in which norms of collegiality and experimentation were established:

As teachers and administrators talked together about their work, observed one another, and involved themselves in problem - solving activities, they came to "own" issues in common, consider alternative approaches, and value one another as people engaged in a common enterprise. (Lieberman & Miller, 1991, p. 105)

Professional development should not be a process of "inoculating" teachers with a given set of in - service development activities. Rather than a one - shot injection of information, professional development needs to be seen as a continuing process that values, builds upon and supports the learning of teachers, via informal and flexible means as well as through more formal professional development activities.

The teaching population embodies a range of experience, expertise, and settings (Little, 1993). A successful teacher development program is characterized by diversity of ideas, people, and support practices, in response to the uniqueness of concerns, interests, and cultures within the school building and staff (Loucks - Horsley et al., 1987, p. 21).

A successful program of professional development also incorporates an understanding that change is a process; that it is a collection of individuals who take part in that process; that change is a highly personal experience, to which each individual reacts differently; that those individuals have preferred modes of learning; and that change involves developmental growth (Hall & Hord, 1987).

There is a personal side to change that is frequently ignoredä [W]e believe that, for change to be successful, the perceptions of the clients (e.g., teachers) must be understood by themselves and by the change facilitators. Without understanding where the clients "are," only through chance will the interventions made by change facilitators address the needs of innovation users and nonusers. (Hall & Hord, 1987, p. 8)

As individuals grow in their knowledge about innovations and as their practice changes, they experience different types of concerns. The Concern - Based Adoption Model (Hall & Hord, 1987) provides a lens through which to look at ways in which individual teachers experience innovations, and what kinds of support might assist them most appropriately. For example, when they are first introduced to a new practice, for many teachers the dominant concerns are personal: "What is it, and how will it affect me?" Later, their concerns might center around mastery of the new practice, and how to coordinate and organize it more comfortably into classroom routines. Finally, as they become more comfortable with the practice, teachers' primary concerns might focus on how it is affecting students, and how it might be adapted to have more of an impact on particular goals (Hall & Hord, 1987).

To support any reform effort, it is essential that teachers at all levels of experience and sophistication be provided with entry points into the learning process (St. John et al., 1994). These entry points may be different for different people, depending on what they know and need. This might mean introductory workshops and technical assistance to those who are new to technology and hands - on learning; long - term support for teachers who are just beginning to implement these processes in their classrooms; long - term professional development for teacher leaders who provide professional support for their colleagues; and opportunities for leaders of the reform effort to engage with others doing similar work as they continue to hone their skills and deepen their understanding of their own work (St. John, 1994, p. III - 8).

Providing Opportunities for Meaningful Leadership Roles to Emerge

True teacher leadership enables practicing teachers to reform their work and alter the hierarchical nature of schools. (Boles & Troen, 1995, p. 30)

One of the challenges that schools face is the double demand of improving the quality of students' educational experience while simultaneously working to retain, stretch and nurture top - quality people in the teaching profession (Wasley, 1991b). Providing opportunities for teachers to take on leadership roles holds promise for tapping the talents of gifted teachers as they grow. Developing leadership requires establishing a culture in which roles are interchangeable and where it is not always clear who the "experts" are.

When schools offer teachers the possibility of taking on leadership responsibilities, these teacher leaders can develop a whole new set of skills as they seek to influence their colleagues (Wasley, 1991a). And where structures are in place to support their work, teacher leaders have reported finding both extrinsic rewards (lighter teaching loads, release time, extra stipends) and intrinsic rewards (personal satisfaction, resume building, greater influence) in taking on these roles (Wasley, 1991b).

Teacher leaders need to have knowledge that is specialized and accessible if it is to be useful to their colleagues seeking to incorporate new approaches and tools into their teaching (Griffin, 1991). Supportive structures need to be in place in order to facilitate good communication between teacher leaders, administrators, and other teachers. And as they work to define their roles in schools, teacher leaders need to model reflective practice themselves as they explore how their position can best support the growth of students as well as other teachers in the school (Wasley, 1991b).

Enabling Teachers to Shape their Own Learning

[I]ndividuals can best judge their own learning needs and...they are capable of self direction and self - initiated learning. [Individually guided professional development]...assumes that adults learn most efficiently when they initiate and plan their learning activities rather than spending their time in activities that are less relevant than those they would design. (Sparks & Loucks - Horsley, 1990, p. 42)

If, as we believe, professional development is at the heart of school change, then thinking and planning for professional development must be grounded in a deep understanding of both the possibilities and the constraints of school life. It must be guided by respect for teachers' own qualities of reflection, flexibility and vision. It must recognize that at any point in time teachers are at different places with reference to experience and expertise. And it must address the issue of teacher authority - teacher authority, as in teachers as authors of their learning trajectory as they plan for and carry out activities that they think will advance their own learning (Sparks & Loucks - Horsley, 1990).

The job of professional development is to support teacher engagement and reflection around new initiatives and areas of growth teachers themselves are seeking, in the delicate balance of top - down/bottom - up efforts that builds and sustains vital school communities.

A supportive context for staff development requires both a top - down and a bottom - up approach. The top - down component sets general directions for the district or school and communicates expectations regarding performance. The bottom - up processes involve teachers in establishing and designing appropriate staff - development activities. (Lieberman & Miller, 1986, p. 246, in Sparks & Loucks - Horsley, 1990)

Each of the underlying principles noted in the above section are foundations for a professional development program that successfully builds on an understanding of enhancing lasting teacher growth. These principles apply, and are perhaps even more important, to enabling teachers to grow and learn with technology.

Furthermore, as the next section makes clear, just as careful thought needs to be given to underlying principles that make up a successful program of professional development, thorough planning needs to go into providing the necessary supports for enabling teachers to use technology effectively.