Interview with Susan Loucks-Horsley

Try on strategies to get a good fit: Interview with Susan Loucks-Horsley

by Dennis Sparks

Journal of Staff Development, Summer 1999 (Vol. 20, No. 3)

(Editor's Note: Susan Loucks-Horsley is director of the professional development project for the National Institute for Science Education, WestEd, and K-12 director at the National Research Council’s Center for Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Education. A more complete bio follows at the end of the interview.

A chart referred to in this article appears only in the printed version of the Journal of Staff Development and in the Adobe PDF version which is available on this web site.)

JSD: In your recent book, Designing Professional Development for Teachers of Science and Mathematics, you describe 15 learning strategies for teachers, most of which are applicable across the curriculum. Why is it important for staff development leaders to understand that there are many possible designs for adult learning?

Loucks-Horsley: We recognize that young people learn in different ways, but often don’t acknowledge that this applies to teachers as well when we plan learning experiences for them. So we set out in this book to identify various robust processes for teacher learning.

JSD: How does someone decide which of the 15 strategies (see chart) to use?

Loucks-Horsley: Selecting strategies is really the process of designing staff development. It is a dynamic process similar to one teachers go through in designing lessons for their students.

Staff development leaders have to ask themselves which strategies make sense to use at that particular time with that particular set of teachers for a particular set of outcomes.

Context variables are important in making these decisions. What are the district or school standards and goals for student learning? What do teachers already know and what do they need to know? What current practices and policies influence student learning? What is the school culture? What is the nature of the student population? Teachers’ levels of content understanding are also very important, especially at the elementary level where teachers may not have a deep understanding of content, as is often the case with science and mathematics. A lot of different aspects of the context come into play when selecting the right combination of strategies.
Various strategies

JSD: What purposes do these various strategies serve?

Loucks-Horsley: We’ve identified several. Strategies that develop awareness provide participants with the lowest level of understanding, often to help them choose among teaching strategies they will later study more deeply. Knowledge and skill-building strategies deepen teachers’ understanding of subject matter content, how students learn a particular content, and where students get hung up in the learning. Strategies that translate knowledge into practice help teachers take a new set of skills or curriculum materials and consider what they will actually do with them. These strategies help teachers plan lessons and adapt new materials and approaches to their own students. Practicing teaching strategies involve teachers in actually using the new knowledge and skills in the classroom. Reflection strategies ask teachers to consider how what they’re doing is working, how it might be done better, and what they can learn from the practices of other people.
Combining strategies

JSD: You mentioned earlier that strategies could be combined to increase their influence. What are some examples of that?

Loucks-Horsley: Here’s a common way that’s done. A school provides workshops on the implementation of a new curriculum, and peer coaches or mentors are used to support the new program. This combines three of the 15 strategies on our chart.

Some of the more interesting combinations include strategies whose primary purpose is reflection. For instance, a district offers workshops on a topic like cooperative learning. The issue soon arises about what should be done in the second and third years as follow-up. Strategies such as study groups, examining student work, action research, and case discussions all could be used to bring teachers together to think about the impact of the new techniques on student learning. In using these reflective strategies, teachers learn how to collect and interpret data on student learning and to share what they are doing with one another.
Little-known strategies

JSD: Let’s discuss some of the least frequently used strategies in more detail. In particular, I’d like to discuss immersion in inquiry, curriculum replacement units, case discussions, examining student work, and technology.

Loucks-Horsley: Immersion in inquiry gives teachers opportunities to learn using the methods of inquiry and problem solving that are used in their discipline and that they’ll use later with their students. When using this strategy, teachers are actually doing the work of the discipline. History teachers might, for example, do an inquiry using a historical database. Writing process workshops in which participants write for long periods of time before even beginning to talk about teaching students to write is another good example.

Curriculum replacement units provide an opportunity for teachers to experience for themselves new ways of teaching or a content they haven’t taught before. For example, a mathematics teacher doesn’t always know how to teach the statistics that are part of the K-12 national mathematics standards. So teachers are given a unit on statistics that replaces a unit they used to teach – a replacement unit that uses standards-based teaching methods as well as the new content. Later, teachers talk about their experiences in using the replacement unit, highlighting how the teaching was done and what and how well students were learning. Replacement units can also help teachers decide about adding additional units or implementing an entire set of curriculum materials that use a similar approach.

Case discussions are often used in the professional preparation of doctors and lawyers and other professionals. Cases present a student learning dilemma or descriptions of teaching/learning processes written by teachers. Facilitators use questions to guide the discussion of a case so that it leads to a deeper understanding of content as well as new teaching strategies. While most cases are written narratives, video cases are used as well.

Examining student work is a strategy that’s being used more frequently these days. Used initially to implement new assessment systems, it is used more broadly now to give teachers the opportunity to look at students’ written products, to analyze students’ thinking, and to talk with one another about helping students improve. It’s a powerful kind of professional learning that shortcuts the steps that other strategies require because it focuses directly on student learning.

Technology is not an approach to learning per se, but rather provides the vehicle through which teacher learning can occur. As is true with other innovations, a kind of amnesia hits people regarding what they already know about human learning when they think about using technology. That’s happening a lot with the professional development uses of technology. The technologies for teacher learning include video, CD-ROMs, the Web, e-mail, and other telecommunications vehicles. In some of my work at the National Research Council, we’re experimenting now with putting cases and videos up on the Web for discussion. We’re also putting examples of student work on the Web so teachers can discuss them in online conferences. These processes connect people in diverse settings to each other and to learning opportunities that they aren’t able to access in other ways in their own environment.
Technology’s benefits

JSD: What are benefits of technology for the learning of staff development leaders?

Loucks-Horsley: Technology makes it possible for staff developers to access otherwise inaccessible knowledge. For example, they can plug into a video conference with someone who has a particular expertise that’s not otherwise available to them. Staff developers can trouble shoot their own work and reflect with others; technology provides a way for staff developers to connect to each other because it’s a pretty lonely job.
Little use of new ideas

JSD: The vast majority of staff development still occurs in workshops and courses, often at the awareness level. Why do we see so few of these strategies you recommend in use today in spite of the fact that some of them have been in the literature for many years? And what do we need to do to increase the range of strategies used?

Loucks-Horsley: It’s always easier to continue using what you are most familiar with than to try things that are less familiar. That is the force of inertia. For many staff developers, the 15 strategies have come as a big surprise. The chart included with this article, however, displays the strategies in ways that have helped people be aware of them and to make choices among them.

Getting the strategies out into the literature that practitioners read is important. When I look at our reference list for these strategies, I see lots of obscure journals and types of publications that busy practitioners don’t have access to or time to read. NSDC’s annual conferences and affiliate meetings provide opportunities to share information about and demonstrate the different strategies. And, as with other instances in which substantial changes are required, staff developers need to study and experience the different strategies as learners before using them with teachers. Some are not as easy to use as they appear!

My experience has been that as soon as people learn about the strategies they want to use them. And that raises a caution. For the past year, we have worked in our National Institute for Science Education project to guide people about which strategies they should select for which situations. We understand that some federal agencies have begun to see these different strategies proposed by projects seeking funding without a clear sense of why one was being proposed over others. We’re trying to help people differentiate strategies from one another so that they can make better choices among them.

We have to go beyond just discussing these strategies in journals and presenting them at conferences, though. The problem is that staff developers themselves are constrained in the ways they are able to learn about their own craft. The challenge is to find new ways to share this knowledge with staff developers, perhaps using the Web or by connecting them to researchers who are doing very interesting development studies but could benefit from some "wisdom of practice" to interpret what they find.

One of my personal goals related to this has been to bring the science and mathematics communities and the professional development community closer together. I’m seeing progress. Staff developers are coming to understand the importance of content and looking to content experts for help. Content educators are coming to realize that there is a whole field of adult learning and change theory they know little about, and that they have a great deal to learn from staff developers. Our work in identifying and sharing a range of staff development strategies used by mathematics and science educators has served to make these links more frequent and more significant.
Designing Professional Development for Teachers of Science and Mathematics can be ordered through NSDC. Order # B51. Price: $36.50, non-members; $29.20, members. Call (800) 727-7288, (513) 523-6029, or fax (513) 523-0638.

Bio of Susan Loucks-Horsley

Job: Director of the professional development project for the National Institute for Science Education, WestEd, and K-12 director at the National Research Council’s Center for Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Education.

Education: B.A. in science and mathematics, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1968. M.A. in curriculum and instruction, 1972, and Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction, University of Texas, 1975.

Professional history: Her current work with the National Research Council includes promoting, supporting, and monitoring the progress of standards-based education, especially the National Science Education Standards. Her work at the National Institute for Science Education led to the publication of Designing Professional Development for Teachers of Science and Mathematics.

At WestEd, she oversees science and mathematics projects and directs the National Academy for Science Education Leadership, funded by the National Science Foundation and designed after the NSDC Academies. She leads the development team of Facilitating Systemic Change in Science and Mathematics Education: A Toolkit for Professional Developers, a product of the10 regional education laboratories. She is senior author of Continuing to Learn: A Guidebook to Teacher Development, An Action Guide for School Improvement, Elementary School Science for the ’90s, reports from the National Center for Improving Science Education on teacher development and support, and numerous chapters and articles on related topics.While at the University of Texas Research and Development Center for Teacher Education, she worked on the development team of the Concerns-Based Adoption Model.

To continue the conversation with Susan Loucks-Horsley, write her at at 4732 N. Oracle Road, Suite 217, Tucson, AZ 85705-1674, (520) 888-2838, fax (520) 888-2621, or e-mail: sloucks@wested.org.
About the Author

Dennis Sparks is executive director of the National Staff Development Council.

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