Fundamental choices determine quality of professional learning

Fundamental choices determine quality of professional learning

By Dennis Sparks

Results, September 2001

"When people make a fundamental choice to be true to what is highest in them, or when they make a choice to fulfill a purpose in their life, they can easily accomplish many changes that seemed impossible or improbable in the past," Robert Fritz observed in The Path of Least Resistance.

That’s why the most important factors in determining the quality of professional learning for teachers and administrators are the "fundamental choices" made by educational leaders. These choices, in turn, profoundly affect their other major decisions.

Fundamental choices are the basic orientations held by individuals about important aspects of their lives, in this case their work. These choices, in turn, determine primary choices – the major results leaders wish to create, often expressed as goals – and secondary choices – the steps taken to achieve those results, often called strategies or action plans.

A stunning revelation

Here’s a real-life example of such a fundamental choice recounted by Rosa Smith, former superintendent of the Columbus, Ohio, public schools, in an essay in the October 2000 issue of The School Administrator. Smith tells of a stunning revelation that came from an early-morning radio news report.

"The reporter was saying," she recalled, "that as many as 60% of the youth incarcerated in this country are African-American, and most of that group is male. He went on to report that 13% are Hispanic. ... As I lingered in bed, I did the math – nearly 75% of all kids in jail today are African-American or Hispanic."

Smith realized that morning "... that educators are not just in the reading or math or science business. We are very much in the business of saving lives. If educators truly believe in the bigger mission ... this view will determine forever the way we think about our work, talk about our work, and do our work.

"Believing that we are in the business of saving lives will influence dramatically how and with whom we spend our time, what we will tolerate and what we will let slide. ... We all know that this can be difficult and extremely challenging work. However, once we truly understand and hold tight to the resolve that we are in the business of saving lives, the distractions melt away."

Turning dreams into reality

The fundamental choices made by school and district leaders can have a dramatic effect on the quality of professional learning in schools. Powerful fundamental choices, ones like those made by Rosa Smith, typically lead to ambitious goals for student learning. Those goals, in turn, require the kinds of professional development advocated by NSDC’s Standards for Staff Development (www.nsdc.org/standards.htm).

Designing powerful professional development for modest goals would be like providing a supercomputer for someone who is interested only in word processing. The types of staff development strategies long recommended by NSDC (standards-based and job-embedded, with team-oriented learning and intensive in-classroom assistance to teachers) are difficult to initiate and sustain without ambitious goals. In addition, they are often withdrawn at the first signs of resistance if they are not guided and energized by impassioned fundamental choices.

Rosa Smith’s fundamental choice reminds me of the women and men who are T.E. Lawrence’s "dreamers of the day."

"All men dream, but not equally," he observed. "Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their mind wake in the day to find that it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.’’