Professionalism in Education
 
 
 
 

A synopsis of some literature on professionalism, renewal, change and effectiveness.
 
 
 
 

Prepared by Julie Watts

29/04/99



Understanding Education's "Work"
Lewis A. Rhodes

Teaching is a managed work process that provides the environment in which the personal process of learning takes place.

When interdependence provides the platform for work, processes can be improved and people can grow along with them. Indeed, strengthening interdependence is now seen as a key to improving organizational effectiveness and results for all institutions. Managing interactions has become an essential function of the contemporary organization, and understanding the interdependence between work roles means being able to design organizational relationships to enable the system to be more than the sum of its parts.
 

Hargreaves (1997, p. 86) points out that:

Whether this post-modern age will see exciting and positive new partnerships being created with groups of institutions beyond the school, and teachers learning to work effectively, openly and authoritatively with those partners; or whether it will witness the deprofessionalisation of teaching as teachers crumble under multiple pressures, intensified work demands and reduced opportunities to learn from colleagues is something that is still to be decided.

That decision should not be left to 'fate' but should be shaped by the active intervention of all educators who really understand the principle that if we want better classroom learning for students, we have to create superb professional learning for those who teach them.

The professionalisation of teaching
Hargreaves (1997) talks of the difference between being professional, which is related to the conduct and demeanour of individual workers and the standards guiding what they do, and, being professionalised, a process whereby the whole of the occupational group improves its status, standing, regard and level of reward.

Hargreaves argues the professionalising of teaching is occurring as a response to the increased pressures on teachers in an increasingly complex society. These pressures have been well canvassed and would include:

expansion and rapid change in the substance of what teachers are expected to teach, making it harder for teachers to keep up with developments in their subject and encouraging cooperation and team approaches (Campbell 1985).
expansion of knowledge and understanding about teaching styles and methods which have occurred in the last 15 years (Joyce and Weil 1980), generating a much wider range of strategies from which teachers can select to meet the needs of particular and unique groups of students in specific settings addition of social work responsibilities to the task of teaching (Boston 1997) and the need for teachers to work with other professionals in addressing the needs of students   integration of special education students into ordinary classes presenting a wider range of abilities and behaviours for teachers to consider   growing multicultural diversity and increasing recognition of the rights of minorities to see their cultural values and expectations respected the alienating nature of secondary school structures for many students in early adolescence, leading to physical dropout or psychological disengagement (Hargreaves 1980)   changing structures and procedures of school management and leadership, with more emphasis on teamwork and collaborative decision-making. Hargreaves argues that the most appropriate response by teachers to these pressures is in terms of what he describes as collegial professionalism. Teachers' roles have expanded to embrace consultation, collaborative planning with colleagues and hence teachers are starting to turn more to each other for professional learning, for a sense of direction and for mutual support.

In a world of accelerating educational reform this kind of working together helps teachers to pool resources, and to make shared sense of and develop collective responses towards intensified and often capricious demands on their practice. (Hargreaves 1997, p. 95)

To continue the process of professionalising teaching, Hargreaves argues that:
 

Teachers must learn to teach in ways they have not been taught. But teacher education must engage with new teachers' prior beliefs about, or images of, teaching and help teachers rework them and move beyond so that they can become the kind of teachers who can adjust to changing demands.

Professional learning must be seen as a continuing process for teachers. To thrive in an occupation, which is inherently and increasingly complex and difficult, teachers must see their professional learning as continuous, rather than as something they never revisit once their initial training is past or, on the other hand, something with which they engage only episodically through short courses.

Continuous professional learning is an individual responsibility as well as an institutional obligation. Individual teachers must commit seriously to career-long professional learning which should properly be regarded as a measure of professional standards and competence in teaching. At the same time, resources, and opportunities for career-long professional learning must be provided by appropriate agencies so that professional learning is integral to the role of teacher.

Professional learning in teaching is embedded in what teachers do in their own schools and classrooms on a day-to-day basis. Teachers must have opportunities to learn the skills to become leaders of their colleagues as well as leaders of their classes.

Pre-service and inservice teacher education need to provide more and better professional learning about parent-teacher relationships as well as practice in how to manage them effectively.

Teachers should try to learn from parents as well as having parents learn from them. Parent-teacher communication should be treated as a valuable form of professional learning in itself. What is paramount is the principle of treating parent-teacher relationships primarily as reciprocal learning relationships rather than as a bureaucratic or market relationship.

Teachers must meet an exacting set of professional standards of practice. An established system of self-regulation around agreed high standards of practice and professional learning would give teachers the privilege and responsibility of establishing their own collective professionalism. Then they would be the vanguards of educational reform (Hargreaves 1997).
Australian Senate Inquiry into the Status of Teachers: A Class Act

High priority must be given to maintaining the quality and capacity of the existing cohort of teachers.

In short, teaching in the 1990's is a profoundly more complex and professionally demanding activity than it was twenty years ago.

The American National Commission on Teaching expresses this point in the following terms:

Max Angus, Rules for School Reform, The Falmer Press, 1998 p ix, writes in the Preface to his 1998 book on school reform: The Committee believes that such evidence and comments raise serious questions about recent approaches to school reform.

Combined with other evidence - such as that of an American study of 1,000 school districts which concluded that "every additional dollar spent on more highly qualified teachers netted greater improvements in student achievement than did any other use of school resources" (WMM p8) – there is a strong prima facie case that school reform is best approached by a focus on teachers and their professional standards.

The Committee considers that all who take on the role of teacher must demonstrate their ability to operate at the appropriate professional standards.

Standards are essentially concerned with quality assurance and accountability..

Accountability involves the requirement that one group (here a profession) provide an account or justification of its activities to another group (here the public) in return for the trust or privileges granted to the former by the latter.

Accountability also normally involves the expectation that the accountable group be willing to accept advice or criticism from the public and to modify its practices in the light of that advice or criticism. How, and sometimes whether, such modifications are effected, usually remains the prerogative of the trusted (accountable) group. This prerogative tends to be carefully guarded and partly constitutes what it means to be `professional'.

The Committee concurs with Ingvarson's view that it is very important to distinguish between the government's and the profession's areas of responsibility, and to be clear about the lines of accountability that apply.

The Committee regards the government's domain as embracing what Darling-Hammond [6] calls delivery standards while the teachers' domain embraces standards of professional practice, a matter which will be explored in more detail shortly.

Without standards, a professional body is defenceless. A demonstrated ability to articulate standards for high quality practice is an essential credential if a professional body wishes to be taken seriously by the public and policy makers. When placed on the table in forums with policy makers about reform and accountability, established professional standards are hard to ignore. [7] Ingvarson, Lawrence, Professional Credentials: A discussion paper, Australian Science Teachers Association October 1995, p107

The Concept of Professionalism

Much has been written on this subject. There is no absolute agreement on what constitutes a profession.
However, certain characteristics of professions and professionals are recognised by most writers on this subject. These characteristics include:

A slightly different perspective on professionalism was provided by Professor Anna Yeatman from Macquarie University in her evaluation of the National Schools Network. Teaching has been conceptualised as a labour, a craft, and an art as well as a profession, [4] as follows: The Hon Dr David Kemp MP, when Minister for Schools, Vocational Education and Training nominated the factors which he regarded as identifying a profession. [5] These included: A wide range of views was presented to the Committee, and exist in the literature, on the extent to which teaching can be classified as a profession. UNESCO has no doubt that teaching is a profession. At a 1966 intergovernmental conference on the status of teachers it declared: Teaching should be regarded as a profession: it is a form of public service which requires of teachers expert knowledge and specialized skills, acquired and maintained through rigorous and continuing study; it calls also for a sense of personal and corporate responsibility for the education and welfare of the pupils in their charge. [6] A common theme in evidence to the Committee was teachers' lack of influence over curriculum, training and professional development. This undermined their professionalism.

Many people accepted that controlling standards and entry was an important part of being a professional and that the absence of this control is one reason that teaching is not considered to be a profession. [8]

As employees, teachers generally have not had the opportunity to define their own professional standards or to have input to their own accreditation or registration processes in the way other professions have done. [9]

On the basis of evidence received during the Inquiry the Committee has formed the view that a major contributor to the low status of teachers is the community's lack of understanding of just what is involved in teaching. It would therefore be more helpful to improving status if teachers were able to articulate more clearly their professional skills and convey more emphatically how these enabled students to learn

Some commentators support a school based approach to PD. Hargreaves is one of them, although he also acknowledges that there is a role for course based professional development.

Much of the best professional learning in teaching is embedded in what teachers do in their own schools and classrooms on a day-to-day basis. Professional learning resources are in this respect often best allocated not to courses, workshops and speakers away from where teachers do their teaching, but for teachers to learn from and work with their own colleagues, and sometimes from outside facilitators, in sharing ideas, planning together, being a mentor for a colleague, team teaching,undertaking action research and so on. Professional learning is least effective when it is reduced to paper chases for certificates of course completion. [8]

It seems that teachers learn best in collegial contexts and these findings challenge the type of traditional one-off 'in-service' programs delivered by 'experts' that are typically available to most Australian teachers. [19]

Renewal in the Age of Paradox
by Andy Hargreaves

How can teachers be interdisciplinary and specialized, autonomous and accountable, cognizant of both change and continuity? They can start by embracing some basic principles of renewal.

Six Principles of School Renewal:

  1. Moving missions
Missions will work better if they are temporary and approximate, and do not require complete consensus. Teachers and schools should therefore review and renew their purposes over time.

We must recognize, however, that people cannot be given a purpose: purposes come from within. My colleagues and I recently studied work cultures and educational change in eight high schools. We found that the teachers most likely to resist a newly legislated mandate to de-track 9th grade were those in academically successful suburban schools (Hargreaves et al. 1992).

For them, the mandate addressed alien agendas of student equity in multicultural communities within the inner city. Policymakers often impose purposes in this way. So do some school principals. As Fullan (1993, p. 13) says,

"It is not a good idea to borrow someone else's vision."


2. Policy realization

 If teachers are to continuously review and renew their moral purposes, they must have sufficient scope to do so. Policy is best established by communities of people, within and across schools, who talk about the provisions, inquire into them, and reformulate them, bearing in mind the circumstances and the children they know best.   3. Reculturing Before collective action and dialogue can take place, certain relationships must be built among teachers and others, relationships that form the culture of the school. To develop or alter these relationships is to reculture the school (Hargreaves 1991, Fullan 1993).

Among teachers, two kinds of cultures have traditionally prevailed:

 
Cultures of individualism, where teachers have worked largely in isolation, being sociable with their colleagues, but sharing few resources and ideas, rarely visiting one another's classrooms, and engaging only ccasionally in joint planning or problem solving (Little 1990).

Balkanized cultures, where teachers have worked in self-contained subgroups--like subject departments--that are relatively insulated from one another, and that struggle competitively for resources and principals' favors (Hargreaves 1994).
 

 Both individualism and balkanization fragment professional relationships, making it hard for teachers to build on one another's expertise. They also stifle the moral support necessary for risk-taking and experimentation.   Reculturing the school to create collaborative cultures among teachers and with the wider community reverses these dynamics. It creates a climate of trust in which teachers can pool resources, deal with complex and unanticipated problems, and celebrate successes. Collaboration also furthers the development of a common professional language, so that teachers can resist the pervasive business vocabulary of quality control and performance targets that is now consuming education.   A key component of reculturing is the willful involvement of critics and skeptics, who might initially make change efforts more difficult. We must recognize that diverse expertise contributes to learning, problem solving, and critical inquiry.

4. Restructuring

 Cultures do not exist in a vacuum; they are grounded in structures of time and space. These structures shape relationships. Structures of teacher isolation have their roots in schools that have been organized like egg crates since the mid-19th century: schools in which children are moved in batches through prescribed curriculums, from grade to grade, teacher to teacher. Similarly, balkanized teacher cultures are often a product of subject department structures based on the university- oriented system of Carnegie units, devised in the United States in the 1920s (Tyack and Tobin 1994).   If the schedule does not allow teachers to meet during the regular school day, they may become worn down and captives of their schedule--"prisoners of time" (National Education Commission on Time and Learning 1994). Under these circumstances, collaboration becomes exhausting and contrived--tagged on rather than integral to ordinary commitments and working relationships. It is time for teachers to work with the structural grain, not against it.   Some of these structural problems can be solved by administrative ingenuity. Routinely coordinated planning times can bring together teachers who teach the same grade or subject. Placing 1st and 6th grade teachers in adjacent classrooms can begin to break down stereotypes and the boundaries between the upper and lower ends of elementary school. Peer tutoring can have the same effect, bringing together not only students of different ages, but also the teachers who supervise them.   In the end, however, it makes no sense to devote so much effort to working around basic structures that are so unsympathetic to professional collaboration. Murphy (1991, p. 15) argues that restructuring "involves fundamental alterations in the relationships" among teachers, students, parents, administrators, and communities. For Sarason (1990, p. 10), these are relationships of power that we have avoided confronting, but we must now redistribute this power.

5. Organizational learning

 Working together is not just a way of building relationships and collective resolve. It is also a source of learning. It helps people to see problems as things to be solved, not as occasions for blame; to value the different and even dissident voices of more marginal members of the organization; and to sort out the wheat from the chaff of policy demands. Collaborative cultures turn individual learning into shared learning. This is what Senge (1990) means by organizational learning. Learning organizations, he says, are "organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free...." (p. 3)   The theory has limitations that derive from its origins in the corporate sphere. These limitations should make us cautious about transplanting it wholesale into education. For example, the commitment to continuous improvement can easily degenerate into interminable improvement, where no one values heritage and such vital ingredients of schooling as tradition, continuity, and consolidation.

6. Positive politics

 Schools are intensely political places where power is everywhere. Teachers exercise power over their students, administrators exercise power over teachers, and the smarter teachers know how to manipulate or maneuver around administrators. In addition, schools are becoming more and more subject to the pressures of diverse groups with single-issue interests. Business organizations, computer companies, chambers of commerce; environmental lobbies; fundamentalist religious groups; and pressure groups opposing sexism, racism, and violence against women are all competing for space and influence in today's schools (Emberley and Newell 1994). The moves toward site-based management are also making schools and what they do more overtly political.   Blase (1988) describes what he calls positive politics, where power is used with other people rather than over them. How can teachers apply positive politics to benefit their students? Following are some suggestions. Teachers are highly skilled at explaining the world to their students, but are often much less skilled at explaining to the world what they do with their students. Language is power--use it. And use positive politics to help you take charge of change rather than being its conduit or victim. Pursue each of these principles of school renewal for those who matter most--the children you teach.

Michael Fullan and Andy Hargreaves identified four cultures of teaching:

Fragmented individualism -- there is a lot of isolation and barriers to change and improvement because there is a "ceiling effect" on how much people can learn. In a culture where there is not much access to each other, there is a limitation to the amount of learning possible.

Collaborative culture -- there is a lot more sharing, trust, and support. Teachers collaborate on instructional issues, and this facilitates growth. You can actually become a better teacher just by being on staff at a certain school.

Balkanization -- the teachers' loyalties are to a sub group, not to the school as a whole. People in the sub groups don't have much to do with people from other groups. And when they are forced to do something across groups, like developing a school plan, then they fight.

We use this description not only for sub groups that are against change, but also for sub groups of innovators. Are they either wittingly or unwittingly doing things that seal themselves off from other parts of the school? Although we favor a strategy that is called "start small, think big," it's also the case that when you do start small, you have to pay attention to the question of whether or not the change will spread inside the school.

Contrived collegiality -- collaboration is valued and you see examples of peer coaching, site-based teams, and mentoring, all of which seem to be good ideas and on the right track. But they're contrived because they are policies. We need to make a distinction between having a new structure and whether or not that new structure has a new culture with it because it is possible to have the new structure without the culture.
 

Strategies For Working in a Collaborative Culture
Fullan/Hargreaves (1991)

Guidelines For Teachers

Guidelines For Principals Guidelines For School Systems Fullan and Hargreaves: Eight Lessons of Change
  1. You can't mandate the things that matter


    2. You can mandate budget cuts but you can't mandate anything that requires skill and understanding to implement. In terms of success, the things that matter are acquiring new skills, getting new insights, having the energy and the committment to really push through.
     

  2. Change is a journey not a blueprint


    3. Change is non-linear; there are fits and starts to it. Even if we were doing one innovation at a time, I would question whether or not we could blueprint it. In a non-linear situation, you've got to learn by doing to a certain extent.
     

  3. Problems are our friends


    4. All changes involve problems, and all successful change involves solving those problems. If you don't tackle problems, you might have less conflict, but you don't get anywhere in terms of change. That is why risk- taking is important. Those who are successful at implementing change do not have fewer problems. (They probably have more because they're trying to do more.) The difference is they have a problem-solving attitude and a problem-solving mechanism. (8)
     

  4. Vision and strategic planning


    5. These come in the middle of the process, not in the beginning. A premature vision can blind you. If you want to restructure something, one of the counter indicators for that kind of change is to try to get it right before you do it. Doing a needs assesment, creating a task force, and getting evrybody on board in advance requires a lot of debate and eats up a lot of energy. Elaborate visions are often too vague and owned by too few people.

    A sequence that seems to make more sense is "ready, fire, aim." The "ready" part can be agreement to the principles involving integrated teacher development and school development or agreement to establishing some new pilot projects or partnerships. This type of readiness doesn't take long -- a few brainstorming sessions will do it. The "fire" part is the pilot projects. Then you can establish a committee and have a retreat and come up with an aim that can guide the next phase, an aim that is more like a vision or a strategic plan. You will find that people's ideas will be very clear, very concrete because they have been trying them out. The discussion will be far more realistic than if you had started with the concepts in the absence of trying them out.
     

  5. Individualization and collectivism must have equal power


    6. We usually think of the strengths of collaboration and the weaknesses of isolation. But they both have positive and negative sides. In terms of the weaknesses of collaboration, there are a lot of examples where people can collaborate to do the wrong thing or to do nothing. There are also a lot of examples of group decision making where the group has been too powerful.

    On the individual side, there is the whole question of what happens to the individual's creativity if you break down the isolation? What happens to the people who are dissenting and have some legitimate dissent? Furthermore, how do we come to grips with our own personal vision and inner reflection? Personal vision is important because the group doesn't stay stable. Research that identifies the best collaborative schools shows very clearly that these schools have the capacity to work in clusters, but they also have the capacity to simultaneously respect the individual as a total person. Individualism and collectivism need to co-exist at the school.
     

  6. Neither centralization nor decentralization works


    7. In the relationship between schools and their districts, simultaneous top/down, bottom/up strategies are what seem to work. One of the findings from the research on site-based management is that it leads to changes in governance and decision making, but it doesn't get inside the classroom. Another finding is that an individual school can become highly collaborative despite the district they are in, but it can't stay that way if it's not being supported.
     

  7. Connection with a wider environment is critical for success


    8. Successful collaborative work organizations have to generate the best ideas and resources from themselves, but they also have to plug into the outside. (9) If they don't, they will get out of date or become vulnerable because they will lose access to ideas and resources and will be less likely to be connected to the politics that allows them to be proactive. The ability to carry off both of these -- to be internally focused but externally open -- will allow the flow of ideas to happen.
     

  8. Every person is a change agent
Change is too important to be left to the experts. Because the system is so complex, we shouldn't leave it in the hands of people who are studying change like me. Nor should we leave it in the hands of formal leaders. The answer is to build up the awareness and capacity of individuals and small groups to carve out their own niche in the change process. What we try to do is to make the change process accessible not to leaders only, but to the staff.
  Initiating, Implementing, and Institutionalizing Change

A couple of years ago Matt Miles took a look at the major change projects and identified some of the factors that are associated with different stages of initiation, implementation, and institutionalization of change. (3) Here are some of his findings.

Initiation Factors
Miles found four factors that seem to cluster together in successful cases.

Linked to High Profile Need

Clear Model

Strong Advocate

Active Initiation
  1. One was where the educational need and the political need got linked up. The educational need emerged when several teachers would say, "This is a problem we should work on." The political need was served when this need was linked into a policy, a new intiative, the agenda of the Board or the principal -- whatever helped move it along.

    2.  
  2. The second factor, having a clear model, refers to the implementation plan, not to the innovation. A school improvement team says "how are we going to implement this over the next ten months?" And they build in strategies of peer coaching and class visitations and so on. It wasn't so long ago that implementation planning wasn't done at all.


    3. A lot of the early innovations got produced and it was assumed that people would be so excited that they would somehow be able to use them effectively. Now, sometimes the opposite will occur, and this is why the word "clear" is so important because we have found it is possible to develop a plan that is worse than having no plan at all. The plan gets so complicated and so owned by the four or five people who produced it that it gets in the way.
     

  3. The third factor, strong advocate, is certainly well known, especially at the initiation stage. One or more people are needed to get it going.

    4.  
  4. Active initiation is finding that it's better to get started sooner than later, that there's a limit to how much readiness one should do. Assumptions that you need to do a lot of needs assessment before you get started or that you have to have a task force for twelve months are limiting. It can actually lead to confusion because people get overloaded with information without action.
People argue with words that are not grounded in action, and often it's the action that produces clarity. Of course you don't just jump into action without any plan. It's got to be carefully thought through, but the sequence seems to be "ready, fire, aim" not "ready, aim, fire." Get ready to do something, begin doing something carefully, and then consolidate that experience with an aim. Implementation Factors Orchestration

Shared Control

Pressure and Support

Technical Assisstance

Rewards

 We came to the conclusion that to sit down with the notion that you should produce a vision and a mission statement and then implement it is the wrong way around to a certain extent. It is too abstract. A better way is to get some common principles organized, start implementing, and draw lessons from that.

Orchestration is really coordination. These days we usually have school improvement teams, the group that oversees, troubleshoots, and is responsible for monitoring implementation, for working through the implementation dip.

Shared control is the antidote to active initiation. A lot of the projects that work seem to combine an aggressive start up with lots of participation.

Pressure and support. We always think of pressure as a bad thing. There is a role for positive pressure. How often have you been in situations where you tried to acheive your goals without telling anyone and did less well than if you worked on something where you were part of a support that had pressure as well as support built into it? We know that accomplished performance has its stress points, but that does not translate into "if you are experiencing lots of stress you must be on the right track."

Technical assistance is all of the professional development support that goes along with follow through for implementation. Sometimes it's workshops; sometimes it's a peer coaching relationship. It is all of those formal and informal learning connections that people have available to them as they work through a new problem.

Rewards is the notion that in the early stages of implementation the rewards are few and the costs are high. Later on when the dip starts to go up and you're getting some results, the costs are less and the rewards are higher. People are always complaining about time, but if you look at it in terms of the implementation dip, when people are at the bottom of the dip, they're really annoyed about the lack of time. But when they're up at the other end, they are putting in more time but they are not complaining about it because they are getting something out of it.

Frustration about time is related to what the yield is in terms of your investment of energy. The questions we ask with any kind of group at the early stages of change are: "How do we reduce some of the early costs?" or "How do we increase some of the early rewards?"

Institutionalization Factors

Embedding

Links to Instruction

Widespread Use

Removal of Competing Priorities

Continuing Assistance

 Embedding is building the change into the organization, into the mission or vision statement, into the timetable, into the budget.

Links to instruction sounds obvious, but it is true that many of the innovations we are involved in are remote from the day-to-day instructional changes. I have reviewed a lot of the work on site-based management, and the predominant finding is that site-based management has an influence on governance, but not necessarily teaching and learning.

Widespread use is the critical mass.

Removal of competing priorities. While you can think of institutionalization as coming later, this process is not that linear, and you should be thinking about it from the beginning. "Competing priorities" is the overload problem. All of us are faced with too many policies, too many innovations, too much to do. One way to put it is to say that the biggest problem in school districts these days is not resistance to change as much as it is the presence of too many fragmented, unconnected changes.

To a certain extent you can't eliminate the overload problem, but there are ways to deal with it. One of them is that when you start working in a collaborative way at a school level and you generate a sense of vision, you start to have screening criteria that enable you to sort out the overload problem a little bit more on your own. Another way is that you begin to ask the question, "If this new idea is important, how does it fit in?" Sometimes we just take it on as a parallel thing that is not connected.
 

Elements of High Quality Professional Development

The "Elements of High Quality Professional Development" is the result of the collaborative efforts of the California Professional Development Program (SB 1882) Consortia Directors. This document is designed to serve as a guideline to schools and districts while planning and implementing professional development programs. We believe that high quality programs will incorporate a majority of the elements contained in this document.

Quality professional development:

  1. Is focused on conditions for improving student learning with attention to developing curriculum and designing instruction compatible with current research, state frameworks and content and performance standards.

    2.  
  2. Promotes long term, in depth, sustained learning activities that include a variety of strategies to help educators apply what they've learned.

    3.  
  3. Is related to identified classroom, school and district goals.

    4.  
  4. Is embedded in the workplace so it is more closely related to educators' work experiences.

    5.  
  5. Is accessible to teachers of all levels and groups of students.

    6.  
  6. Requires key administrative participation, support and follow up.

    7.  
  7. Encourages educators to participate in the planning of their own professional learning.

    8.  
  8. Provides opportunities for school and district staff and other stakeholders to adapt strategies to diverse classroom needs.

    9.  
  9. Encourages educators to develop collaborative relationships and a safe learning environment that promotes and sustains continuous improvement of professional practice.

    10.  
  10. Provides opportunities for giving and receiving feedback, e.g., portfolios, analysis of student work, peer support groups, videotaped and audiotaped lessons, self critique, peer coaching, helping trios, anecdotal records, journal writing, etc.

    11.  
  11. Allows time for educators to reflect, analyze and refine their own professional practice.

    12.  
  12. Uses standards and monitors progress in order to improve the impact of professional development.

    13.  
  13. Recognizes that educators learn in a variety of ways.

    14.  
  14. Offers opportunities for leadership development.
Strong Leadership Guides the Instructional Program.
This data has been collated from research findings and literature on education

Administrators and other instructional leaders:

  1. Believe that all students can learn and that the school makes the difference between success and failure.
  2. Emphasize learning as the most important reason for being in school; public speeches and writings emphasize the importance and value of high achievement.
  3. Have a clear understanding of the school's mission and are able to state it in direct, concrete terms. They establish an instructional focus that unifies staff.
  4. Seek, recruit and hire staff members who will support the school's mission and contribute to its effectiveness.
  5. Know and can apply validated teaching and learning principles; they model effective teaching practices for staff as appropriate.
  6. Know educational research, emphasize its importance, share it, and foster its use in problem solving.
  7. Seek out innovative curricular programs, observe these, acquaint staff with them, and participate with staff in iscussions about adopting or adapting them.
  8. Set expectations for curriculum quality through the use of standards and guidelines. They periodically check the alignment of curriculum with instruction and assessment, establish curricular priorities, and monitor the implementation of curriculum.
  9. Check student progress frequently, relying on explicit performance data. They make results public, and work with staff to set standards, use them as points of comparison, and address discrepancies.
  10. Expect all staff to meet high instructional standards. They secure staff agreement on a schoolwide instructional model, make classroom visits to observe instruction, focus supervision activities on instructional improvement, and provide and monitor staff development activities.
  11. Communicate the expectation that instructional programs will improve over time. They provide well-organized, systematic improvement strategies; give improvement activities high priority and visibility; and monitor implementation of new practices.
  12. Involve the full staff in planning implementation strategies. They set and enforce expectations for participation, ensure that others follow through on commitments, and rally support from the different constituencies in the school community.
Andrews and Soder (1987); Bamburg and Andrews (1991); Berman and McLaughlin (1979); Biester, et al. (1984); Bossert (1988b); Brookover (1979b, 1981); Brookover and Lezotte (1979); Brundage (1979); Cawelti (1987); Corbett, et al. (1984); Cohen, S. A. (1994); Cohen, S. A., et al. (1989); Crisci, et al. (1988); DeBevoise (1984); Druian and Butler (1987); Eberts and Stone (1988); Edmonds (1979a); Emrick (1977); Everson, et al. (1986); Fullan (1994); Glasman (1984); Good and Brophy (1986); Krug (1992); Hallinger, Bickman, and Davis (1989); Hawley, et al. (1984); Heck (1992); High and Achilles (1986); Larsen (1987); Leithwood and Montgomery (1982, 1985); Levine and Lezotte (1990); Little (1982); Louis and Miles (1989); Madden, Lawson, and Sweet (1976); Ogawa and Hart (1985); Pavan and Reid (1991, 1994); Purkey and Smith (1983); Rosenholtz (1987, 1989a,b); Sammons, Hillman, and Mortimore (1994); Schmitt, (1990); Venezky and Winfield (1979); Weber (1971)
 

Administrators and Other Leaders Continually Strive to Improve Instructional Effectiveness.

Administrators and other leaders:

  1. Expect that educational programs will be changed so that they work better; they are never complacent about student achievement.
  2. Direct school improvement efforts at clearly defined student achievement and/or social behavior goals; they secure schoolwide and community understanding and agreement about the purpose of improvement efforts.
  3. Work with staff and school-based management groups to develop improvement goals based on review of school performance data; the goals then drive planning and implementation.
  4. Review programs and practices shown to be effective in other school settings for their potential in helping to meet school needs.
  5. Specify clearly the roles and responsibilities for the various aspects of the school improvement effort.
  6. Check implementation carefully and frequently, note and publicize progress, and modify activities to make things work better.
  7. Secure and encumber resources to support improvement activities, acquire resources from many sources including the community, and make resource allocations based on instructional priorities.
  8. Renew or redirect the improvement focus as goals are achieved, report and celebrate success, and work with staff to establish new goals.
  9. Allow adequate time for innovations to become integrated into the life of the school, and provide ongoing support to the full staff during the implementation process.
  10. Provide periodic events to acknowledge and celebrate successes and to renew interest and energy for continued school improvement work.
Bamburg and Andrews (1989, 1991); Berman and McLaughlin (1979); Biester, et al. (1984); Bossert (1982, 1988); Boyd (1992); Brookover (1979b); Brundage (1979); David (1989); Deal and Peterson (1993); Edmonds (1979a, b); Emrick (1977); Everson, et al. (1986); Evertson (1986); Fullan (1992, 1994); Gall, et al. (1985); Good and Brophy (1985); Hallinger and Hausman (1993); Hawley, et al. (1984); Hord (1990, 1992); Hord and Huling-Austin (1986); Leithwood and Montgomery (1982); Levine (1990); Levine and Lezotte (1990); Little (1981, 1982); Louis and King (1993); Louis and Miles (1989); Madden, Lawson, and Sweet (1976); Murphy and Hallinger (1993); Oakes (1989); Pavan and Reid (1994); Purkey and Smith (1983); Rosenholtz (1985, 1989a,b); Sparks (1983, 1986); Stringfield and Teddlie (1988); Venezky and Winfield (1979); Weber (1971)
 

Administrators and Other Leaders Engage Staff in Professional Development and Collegial Learning Activities.

Administrators and other leaders:

  1. Make resources available to support ongoing programs of professional development for staff.
  2. Set aside time for staff development activities, with at least part of that time made available during the regular work day.
  3. Solicit and use staff input for the content of professional development activities; staff must feel the activities are relevant to them in order to benefit.
  4. Provide activities that enhance teacher's capabilities in the major areas of technical repertoire, reflective practice, application of research, and collaborative skills.
  5. Review research findings to identify effective staff development approaches for improving student performance.
  6. Recognize that adults, like children, have different learning styles and provide diverse kinds of activities in response to these differences.
  7. Arrange for staff involvement in group staff development activities at the building and district levels.
  8. Make certain that skill-building activities are delivered over time, so that staff have the opportunity to practice their new learnings and report outcomes.
  9. Build into staff development activities the opportunity for participants to share ideas and concerns regarding the use of new programs and practices.
  10. Provide or arrange for ongoing technical assistance for school staff as they pursue school improvement activities.
  11. Provide follow-up activities to ensure that newly acquired knowledge and skills are applied in the classroom.
  12. Make resources available for staff to participate in individual professional development activities to enhance job-related knowledge and skills.
  13. Create structures for staff members to learn from one another through peer observation/feedback and other collegial learning activities.
  14. Work to establish a norm of collegiality; communicate the expectation that staff members will routinely share ideas and work together to improve the instructional program.
Bamburg and Andrews (1991); Bennett (1987); Block (1983); Boyd (1992); Butler (1989, 1992); Corcoran (1985); David (1989); Deal and Peterson (1993); Eubanks and Levine (1983); Everson, et al. (1986); Evertson (1986); Fullan (1992, 1994); Gage (1984); Gall, et al. (1984); Gall and Renchler (1985); Hawley, et al. (1984); Hord and Huling-Austin (1986); Joyce and Showers (1980); Joyce, Murphy, Showers, and Murphy (1989); Korinek, Schmid, and McAdams (1985); Levine, Levine, and Eubanks (1985); Levine and Lezotte (1990); Little (1982, 1986); Loucks-Horsley, et al. (1987); Louis and King (1993); Louis and Miles (1989); March, et al. (1993); Murphy and Hallinger (1993); Oakes (1989); Rosenholtz (1985, 1989a,b); Sammons, Hillman, and Mortimore (1994); Sparks (1983, 1986); Sparks and Loucks-Horsley (1990); Stevenson (1987); Wade (1985)
 

Fullan discussed eight basic lessons on the Complexity of Change, elaborated in his book Change Forces, which provide some general strategies for dealing with these complexities. The lessons are as follows:

The Complexity of Change

Lesson One:  
You Can't Mandate What Matters

(The more complex the change the less you can force it)
 

 Lesson Two:  
Change is a Journey not a Blueprint

Change is non-linear, loaded with uncertainty and excitement and sometimes perverse)
 

 Lesson Three:  
Problems are Our Friends

(Problems are inevitable and you can't learn without them)
 

 Lesson Four:  
Vision and Strategic Planning Come Later

(Premature visions and planning blind)
 

 Lesson Five:  
Individualism and Collectivism Must Have Equal Power

(There are no one-sided solutions to isolation and group think)
 

 Lesson Six:  
Neither Centralization Nor Decentralization Works

(Both top-down and bottom-up strategies are necessary)
 

 LessonSeven:  
Connection with the Wider Environment is Critical for Success

(The best organizations learn externally as well as internally)
 

 Lesson Eight:  
Every Person is a Change Agent.

(Change is too important to leave to the experts, personal mind set and mastery is the ultimate protection)

 Fullan continued by suggesting that there is a pattern underlying these lessons. It involves:


What Matters Most
National Commission on Teaching and America's Future - Five Interlocking Recommendations

  1. Get serious about standards, for both students and teachers.
  2. Reinvent teacher preparation and professional development.
  3. Overhaul teacher recruitment, and put qualified teachers in every classroom.
  4. Encourage and reward knowledge and skill.
  5. Create schools that are organized for student and teacher success.
Fullan's ten assumptions about change, often known as the "Fullan 10."
  1. Do not assume that your version of what the change should be is the one that should be implemented.
  2. Assume that any significant innovation, if it is to result in change, requires individual implementers to work out their own meaning.
  3. Assume that conflict and disagreement are not only inevitable, but fundamental to successful change.
  4. Assume that people need pressure to change (even in directions that they desire). But, it will only be effective under conditions that allow them to react, to form their own position, to interact with other implementers, and to obtain technical assistance, etc.
  5. Assume that effective change takes time: 3-5 years for specific innovations, greater than 5 years for institutional reform.
  6. We should not assume that the reason for lack of implementation is outright rejection of the values embodied in the change, or hard core resistance to all change. There are a number of possible reasons; value rejection, inadequate resources to support implementation and insufficient time elapsed.
  7. We should not expect all or even most people or groups to change. Progress occurs when we take steps that increase the number of people. Our reach should exceed our grasps but not by such a margin that we fall flat on our face.
  8. Assume that you will need a plan that is based on the above assumptions.
  9. Assume that no amount of knowledge will ever make it totally clear what action should be taken.
  10. We should assume that changing the culture of institutions is the real agenda, not implementing single innovations.
Fullan,M. (1997) Emotion and hope: Constructive concepts for complex times in A. Hargreaves (ed.) Rethinking educational change with heart and mind. ASCD Yearbook. Alexandria, Va: ASCD

Fullan suggests that in order to gain an understanding of how to deal with change more contructively, it is necessary to look closely at the roles of emotion and hope in interpersonal relationships.Perhaps the best way to deal with change is to improve relationships.

Emotion and hope are part of what Fullan refers to as emotional development. What are the implications for leadership, in terms of Fullan's focus on emotional development as a "survival strategy" for successful change agents? What are the attributes, skills, and qualities that leaders will require as we move into the 21st century?

Goleman, Daniel (1995). Emotional intelligence New York: Bantam Books

I find Daniel Goleman's description and articulation of emotional intelligence helpful in trying to answer these questions, because it describes for me what emotional development "looks like."Goleman refers to such interpersonal skills as empathy, listening, non-verbals, knowing and managing one's own feelings,i.e. self- control, and reading and dealing with other people's feelings, as crucial to effective interaction. Those in positions of leadership in schools today, need to work in new ways in team building, decision- making, consensus seeking, and conflict management situations.

Inherent in all of these processes are the skills of emotional development. These are skills that leaders may or may not possess. The good news is that they are skills that can be learned or developed. According to Goleman, "crucial emotional competencies can indeed be learned and improved upon....."(P.34) The process of change involves uncertainty, fear, and risk-taking. Often it is because we fail to address these emotional aspects of the change process, that change is unsuccessful or not sustained. The role and skill of the school leader in establishing honest and open relationships that support teachers in looking at and doing things in new ways is crucial to the change process.