by Linda Darling-Hammond
Journal of Staff Development, Spring 1999 (Vol. 20, No. 2)

For the first time in the better part of a century, the United States is now focusing on the quality of teaching as a key element in the improvement of education. Rather than assuming that curriculum packages, testing programs, and management schemes will change schools, policymakers and educators nationwide have begun to focus on how to help teachers learn increasingly sophisticated methods for engaging diverse students in mastering challenging content and skills.

There is growing evidence that student performance is influenced by high-quality preservice education and by professional development opportunities for on-the-job teachers. A recent large-scale study of professional development for mathematics teachers in California, for example, found that teachers who participated in sustained curriculum-based professional development reported changes in practice that, in turn, were associated with significantly higher student achievement scores on state assessments (Cohen and Hill). The professional development that proved effective in this instance involved teachers in working directly with one another and with experts over a sustained period of time on developing, testing, and refining the use of new student curriculum materials for the California mathematics framework. Key features of this successful professional development appear elsewhere in the literature on effective approaches: ongoing work with colleagues, and a focus on curriculum and teaching issues teachers encounter in their classrooms.

The effects of teacher knowledge on practice appear across subject matter fields. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has shown that the qualifications and training of teachers affect reading achievement. For example, teachers who have taken more professional development in literature-based and integrated approaches to reading are more likely to use a wide variety of books, newspapers, and materials from other subject areas, and to engage students in regular writing opportunities, all of which are associated with higher reading achievement. They are also much less likely to use reading kits, basal readers, workbooks, and multiple choice standardized tests that are associated with lower levels of reading achievement for students.

Currently, most states are trying to set high standards that reflect the knowledge and skills citizens need for the 21st century. Schools are unlikely to achieve these standards without much greater investments in both students' and teachers' opportunities to learn. And these investments, in turn, are unlikely to occur without radical rethinking of how professional development fits in the overall organization of schooling, teaching, and learning.

While there is growing consensus that professional development should be sustained and ongoing, embedded in teachers' daily activities, and connected to their work with students, current school structures and schedules make this virtually impossible in many schools. The master schedule–the master of all possibilities in schools–must change before schools can support serious teaching and learning for both students and their teachers.

To improve student learning, schools will need structures and schedules that provide time for complex teaching and long-term relationships, conditions that give serious, ongoing assistance to learners. It is ludicrous, for example, to expect secondary school teachers who see 150 students daily in 42-minute segments for a single year to come to know the minds of any of them particularly well, or to tackle difficult, sustained work with them. Similarly, it is unrealistic to expect that teachers will learn how to incorporate complicated practices into their repertoires on the basis of a few highly general workshops conducted after school in the school auditorium by someone who doesn’t know their field, their students, or their classroom contexts, and whom they are unlikely ever to see again. Creating contexts for powerful learning requires rethinking the school organization we inherited from efficiency experts enamored of new assembly line technologies in the 1920s.

In many other countries, teachers stay with students for multiple years and multiple subjects. American schools, meanwhile, typically pass students off to different teachers for each grade and subject, as well as to other staff for counseling and special programs. Just as teachers begin to know their students, students get passed on to someone else who must discover anew how they learn.

In contrast, Japanese teachers stay with students for at least two years, and German teachers stay with students from two to four years through 10th grade. Also, because teachers in other countries serve as counselors, they know their students well from an academic as well as personal perspective. Because they work in teams, they can help each other solve problems related to individual student needs and teaching. These arrangements turn out to be much more effective for learning–especially the intensive learning demanded by high standards–than the assembly line strategies used by U.S. schools.

• Class preparation and joint planning;
• Collegial work on curriculum and assessment development;
• One-on-one meetings with students, parents, and other colleagues; and
• Learning through involvement in study groups, observation of other teachers, research, and demonstration lessons.

Researchers Jim Stigler and Harold Stevenson have referred to mathematics lessons in Japan and China as "polished stones" because they are so carefully crafted by groups of teachers who regularly use one another as co-planners and critical friends.

Significantly reducing the time that U.S. teachers now spend with students in order to find time for meaningful professional development would be prohibitive within the context of current school structures. However, there are lessons that emerge from contrasting the approaches to staffing and resource allocation used in various countries. For example: In most industrialized countries 60 percent to 80 percent of education staff are classroom teachers, but only about 43 percent of U.S. education staff have regular classroom teaching responsibilities, down from about 70 percent in 1950.

What accounts for such a difference? Other countries invest more of their resources in supporting the efforts of better paid, better prepared teachers who are given time and responsibility for managing most of the work in schools. In the United States, however, schools have invested in a relatively smaller number of lower-paid, often less well-prepared teachers, directed and augmented by large numbers of administrators, supervisors, specialists, and other noninstructional staff. As a result, fewer school employees are available in the U.S. to engage in schools' primary function: teaching. Teachers have less time to plan and learn together, and teachers individually are responsible for more students. Thus they have limited time and opportunities to get to know their students well, to diagnose and address all students' learning needs in thoughtful ways, or to develop a deep knowledge of how to help all students learn to high standards.

Some restructured schools in the United States have dramatically redesigned the use of time and resources to support student and teacher learning with longer periods, shared planning time, and extensive ongoing professional development. The major elements in their efforts include:

• Staffing patterns that allocate more positions to classroom teaching, rather than to other kinds of supplementary staffing roles;
• Schedules that engage students with fewer teachers each day, for longer periods of time: and
• Organizational approaches that allow teachers to work in teams that serve a common group of students around.

At International High School in New York City, for example, teachers on interdisciplinary teams share 70 minutes of planning time daily, and have a half day each week for staff-planned professional development while students are in clubs. This amounts to nearly nine hours of shared time each week, in addition to individual time that can be spent observing other teachers teach. Students work with their teachers in 70-minute class periods, and they experience a more coherent program because a team of teachers who plan together manages their coursework. Each staff member leads a small advisory group that meets weekly to discuss issues related to students' personal, academic, and social growth. Because of the reorganized schedule and the fact that virtually everyone in the school teaches and takes responsibility for advisory groups, teachers work with an average pupil load of 75 students a term and spend 70 minutes or more with them each day. This model supports teaching that is extraordinarily successful: Virtually all of International's students — who enter 9th grade unable to speak English — graduate from high school and go on to college.

Altogether, teachers at Central Park East Secondary School average 7.5 hours a week for joint planning, in addition to five hours of weekly personal planning time. The school reduced class size to 18 and total teacher load to 36 by creating longer interdisciplinary classes and by allocating nearly all of its positions for teaching, rather than hiring counselors, supervisors, specialists, nonteaching aides, security guards, and many administrative positions. PLACE FIGUERE 2 ABOUT HERE. The personalization that this alternative model produces for students is a major factor in the school's extraordinary outcomes. With a largely African-American and Latino student body, most of whom qualify for free or reduced lunch and at least a quarter of whom qualify for special education services, Central Park East Secondary School routinely graduates more than 90 percent of its students and sends more than 90 percent of its graduates to college.

Elementary schools have created a range of different models as well. At Hefferan Elementary School in Chicago, teachers teach four full days of academic classes each week and spend the fifth full day planning together with their multi-grade teams and pursuing professional development. Meanwhile, their students rotate to "resource" classes in music, fine arts, computer lab, physical education, library science, and science lab (Miles, 1995).

At Quebec Heights Elementary in Cincinnati, teachers have found 5.5 hours a week to plan together, and have lowered pupil teacher ratios to 15 to 1 by reducing specialization, creating multiage clusters of students and teachers that stay together for three years, integrating special education teachers into cluster teams, and eliminating separate Title I classes to reduce the size of groups for all students (Miles, 1995).

Like some other restructured elementary schools, Quebec Heights found that using special program money (e.g., from Title I and special education) was a major lever in reallocating time for teaching, learning, and professional development. The number of pull-out teachers who are assigned at the edges of the system rather than directly to classroom teaching is a major reason why class sizes have not decreased and staff planning time has not expanded in the United States, even as pupil-teacher ratios have declined. One study found that, among staff classified as teachers in Boston, fully 40 percent were assigned as pull-out teachers for compensatory, remedial, or special education (Miles, 1995). Just redefining how these professionals do their jobs and assigning them as regular classroom teachers creates opportunities to reduce class size and provide time for professional development simultaneously.

• Approaches that reduce teacher isolation and allow teachers to work in teams, share planning time, and pursue connected agendas based on a set of common curriculum goals. Such approaches provide naturally occurring opportunities for daily learning among colleagues.
• Organizational changes that reduce fragmentation in teaching and other school services. These changes support the stronger relationships and deeper knowledge of learners that are essential to serious learning.
• Strategies that use time more productively by creating longer blocks of instructional time, which make it possible to reduce teaching loads while increasing planning and learning time.
• Long-run strategies that direct resources toward knowledgeable teachers as the central investment of schools. This could ultimately lead to less specialized and fragmented bureaucracies. With greater education and ongoing support, teachers can be prepared to exercise greater authority and to handle a wider range of student needs and organizational tasks, thus reducing the need to hire lots of people who develop regulations, special programs, curriculum packages, and other tools to "teacher proof" the system. The coming retirements of many administrative and other staff, as well as teachers, could be used to expand the teaching force and reduce the administrative bureaucracy that currently directs a majority of education dollars away from students and classrooms to the periphery of education.

With these strategies in mind, states and districts can begin to work with schools to adopt proven designs through a conscious process of changing resource allocations, practices, and regulations at each level. To do so, schools might undertake a comprehensive review of how their practices, schedules, resources, knowledge, and skills would need to change to implement a new model. Districts could then organize their work to support these plans and develop strategies for helping schools make changes, including changes in state and district policies to support alternative forms of organization.

Without increased time for professional development linked to the curriculum, teachers cannot acquire the knowledge and skills they need to help all students perform at high levels. From the experiences of other nations and from restructuring schools in the U.S., we see that the time teachers spend with each other and with other knowledgeable educators–engaged in thinking about teaching and learning–is just as important to students' opportunities to learn as the time teachers spend in direct facilitation of learning.

If we are willing to think outside the boxes created by Frederick Taylor and his colleagues so many decades ago, we can imagine and create schools that provide real time and focus for both student and teacher learning.

Linda Darling Hammond is a professor of education at Stanford University and executive director of the National Commission on Teaching & America’s Future. She can be reached at 520 Galvez Mall, Room 402, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, (650) 725-0703, fax (650) 723-7578, e-mail: ldh@leland.stanford.edu.

-----

References

Cohen, D., & Hill, H. (1997, March). Policy, practice, and learning. Paper prepared for the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL.

Darling-Hammond, L. (1997) The right to learn: A blueprint for creating schools that work. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, Inc.

Miles, K.H. (1995, Winter). Freeing resources for improving schools: A case study of teacher allocation in Boston Public Schools. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 17, 476-493.

Miles, K.H. and Darling-Hammond, L. (Spring, 1998). Rethinking the allocation of teaching resources: Some lessons from high-performing schools. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 20.

National Commission on Teaching & America's Future (1996). What matters most: Teaching for America's future. NY: Author.