Teacher Development And Educational Change

Michael Fullan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317973485
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This work traces the link between teacher development and educational change. Each chapter expands on some aspect of teacher development and points to directions for reform and the improvement of practice. They draw upon work carried out in Canada, England and the United States.

Chapter 1

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Teacher Development and Educational Change

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Michael Fullan and Andy Hargreaves

For something as obvious as the need to relate teacher development and educational change, it is surprising how little systematic attention has been devoted to understanding the topic and taking appropriate action.¹ In fact, the focus on the link between teacher development and educational change is barely fifteen years old. In this chapter we want to trace this development briefly, indicate the unfinished agenda, and illustrate how the chapters in this book contribute to what has only very recently become a rapidly growing knowledge base.

We divide the period of research on teacher development since 1975 into two broad phases. The first phase analyzed the relationship between teacher development and successful implementation of innovation—we call this the innovation-focused period. The second phase takes the matter more deeply by considering the total teacher and the total school.

The Innovation-Focused Period

In some ways the logic and evidence linking teacher development to successful implementation of innovations is relatively straightforward, although there are a number of subtleties and complexities in the process. In a review in 1977, Fullan and Pomfret marshalled considerable evidence that demonstrated how teacher development and successful implementation of innovations were related. We observed that effective implementation consists of alterations in curriculum materials, instructional practices and behaviour, and beliefs and understandings on the part of teachers involved in given innovations. Put more simply, successful change involves learning how to do something new. As such, the process of implementation is essentially a learning process. Thus, when it is linked to specific innovations, teacher development and implementation go hand in hand.

At the time we learned that teacher development should be innovation-related, continuous during the course of implementation, and involve a variety of formal (e.g. workshops) and informal (e.g. teacher-exchange) components. We also confirmed that most innovation attempts did not incorporate these characteristics.

Since 1977, significant advances have been made in spelling out the processes involved in these relationships. Huberman and Miles (1984) captured these processes in their twelve case studies of school districts.

Large-scale, change-bearing innovations lived or died by the amount and quality of assistance that their users received once the change process was under way… The forms of assistance were various. The high-assistance sites set up external conferences, in-service training sessions, visits, committee structures, and team meetings. They also furnished a lot of ongoing assistance in the form of materials, peer consultation, access to external consultants, and rapid access to central office personnel… Although strong assistance did not usually succeed in smoothing the way in early implementations, especially for the more demanding innovations, it paid handsome dividends later on by substantially increasing the levels of commitment and practice mastery, (p. 273)

Huberman and Miles, along with others, also contributed new insights into the process of teacher learning, which included: the universal presence of early implementation problems in all cases of success, the role of pressure and support, the way in which change in practice frequently preceded change in beliefs and understanding, and the time-line of two or more years of active assistance during implementation.

Stallings (1989) in a series of experimental studies also demonstrated how staff development was connected to change in teacher practice, and in turn to increases in student achievement. Stallings found that teachers are more likely to change their behaviour and continue to use new ideas under the following conditions:

1 They become aware of a need for improvement through their analysis of their own observation-profile.

2 They make a written commitment to try new ideas in their classroom the next day.

3 They modify the workshop ideas to work in their classroom and school.

4 They try the ideas and evaluate the effect.

5 They observe in each other's classrooms and analyze their own data.

6 They report their success or failure to their group.

7 They discuss problems and solutions regarding individual students and/or teaching subject matter.

8 They need a wide variety of approaches: modelling, simulations, observations, critiquing video tapes, presenting at professional meetings.

9 They learn in their own way continuity to set new goals for professional growth. (Stallings, 1989:3–4)

The corner-stones of the model, according to Stallings, are:

● Learn by doing—try, evaluate, modify, try again.

● Link prior knowledge to new information.

● Learn by reflecting and solving problems.

● Learn in a supportive environment—share problems and successes. (p. 4)

Joyce and Showers (1988) in their well-known theory-demonstration-practice-feedback-coaching model have shown rather conclusively that staff development is central to instructional change involving teaching models. In a more thorough test of the approach in Richmond County, Georgia, Joyce et al. (1989) provide further confirmation of the link between staff development, implementation, and student outcomes. After eighteen months of intensive training and follow-up with teams of teachers focusing on models of teaching, Joyce and his colleagues were able to claim considerable implementation in the classroom, which in turn was related to a dramatic impact on student achievement and student promotion rates (p. 7).

Other large-scale studies show time and again that staff or teacher development is closely related to successful change (Mortimore et al., 1988; Fullan, 1991). However, there are some unsettling issues within these approaches which require explanation, and which eventually lead us to consider a radically different approach to teacher development. First, it is worth emphasizing that the initiatives examined by Huberman and Miles, Stallings, Joyce and Showers, and others required great sophistication, effort, skill and persistence to accomplish what they did. They work, but they are exceptions. More typical is Pink's (1989) litany of problems in the projects he examined. He identified twelve barriers to innovation-effectiveness:

1 An inadequate theory of implementation, including too little time for teachers to plan for and learn new skills and practices

2 District tendencies toward new skills and practices

3 Lack of sustained central office support and follow-through

4 Underfunding the project, or trying to do too much with too little support

5 Attempting to manage the projects from the central office instead of developing school leadership and capacity

6 Lack of technical assistance and other forms of intensive staff development

7 Lack of awareness of the limitations of teacher and school administrator knowledge about how to implement the project

8 The turnover of teachers in each school

9 Too many competing demands or overload

10 Failure to address the incompatibility between project requirements and existing organizational policies and structures

11 Failure to understand and take into account site-specific differences among schools

12 Failure to clarify and negotiate the role relationships and partnerships involving the district and the local university— which in each case had a role, albeit unclarified, in the project. (Pink, 1989:22–4)

We believe that these types of ‘typical’ barriers will always eventually take their toll on existing pockets of success because the innovation-focused approach is too narrow and too weak an intervention to impact on more basic institutional conditions that must be altered if teacher development is to flourish.

Second, and more fundamental, the success stories we referred to above ‘worked’ in only a narrow sense—some specific instructional innovations were implemented, but we have little idea of how they relate to the wider context of the teacher, the school and the district. As we have noted elsewhere, schools are not in the business of simply implementing specific single innovations one at a time (which is difficult enough); they are in the business of managing multiple innovations simultaneously (Fullan, 1991). It does not tell us much to know how one particular innovation fared. Nor do we know enough about the relationship of these innovation experiences to the teacher's sense of purpose, the teacher as a person, or the contexts and conditions under which they work (Hargreaves, 1991). Do experiences with innovation make teachers more or less dependent? Do they result in a more or less developed sense of efficacy and self-esteem? Are the selected innovations the right ones for that teacher, those students, this situation? Does the school as an institution improve i.e. provide better working and learning conditions for all teachers and all studies, as a result of becoming involved in particular innovations? Do the expert's and the administrator's voices drown out or inhibit the development of the teachers’ voices?

The Total Teacher and the Total School

These questions lead us to the conclusion that the innovation-focused paradigm is useful but fundamentally limited for understanding teacher development. For the latter we need a more comprehensive framework. We have written elsewhere that such a framework must take into account four main elements (Fullan and Hargreaves, 1991):

1 The teacher's purpose

2 The teacher as a person

3 The real world context in which teachers work

4 The culture of teaching: the working relationship that teachers have with their colleagues inside and outside the school.

We can only comment briefly on the importance of each of these components. Because teaching is a moral craft, it has purpose for those who do it. There are things that teachers value, that they want to achieve through their teaching. There are also things that they disvalue, things that they fear will not work or will make matters worse. In this sense teacher development means enabling teachers to develop, to voice and to act on their sense of purpose. We are not saying that the teacher's sense of purpose is sacrosanct: only that it is neglected and underdeveloped as a source of innovation and effectiveness. Teacher development then, must actively listen to and sponsor the teacher's voice; establish opportunities for teachers to confront the assumptions and beliefs underlying their practices; avoid faddism and blanket implementation of favoured new instructional strategies; and create a community of teachers who discuss and develop their purposes together, over time.

The teacher as person has also been neglected in teacher development. Most approaches to staff development, for example, either treat all teachers as if they are the same (or should be the same), or stereotype teachers as innovators, resisters, and the like. In more recent research, we are seeing that age, stage of career, life experiences, and gender factors—things that make up the total person —affect people's interest in and response to innovation and their motivation t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Teacher Development and Educational Change
• Chapter 2 Teacher Education and the Developing Teacher: The Role of Personal Knowledge
• Chapter 3 Imposed Change and the Experienced Teacher
• Chapter 4 The Nature of Collegiality in Teacher Development: The Case of Clinical Supervision
• Chapter 5 The Principal's Role in Teacher Development
• Chapter 6 Teacher Growth in the Effective School
• Chapter 7 School-Based Teacher Development
• Chapter 8 Teacher Performance Appraisal and Staff Development
• Chapter 9 Teacher Development and Educational Policy
• Chapter 10 Universities in Partnership with Schools and School Systems: Les Liaisons Dangereuses?
• Chapter 11 Beyond School District-University Partnerships
• Notes on Contributors
• Index