How Should We Spend Our Time in Professional Development?

Is There A Research Base that Links PD to Student Achievement?

Why We Have Staff Development Protocol? Do We Need it?

1986 – Guskey: Virtually every major work on the enhancement function of staff development emphasized its lack of effectiveness.

1988 – Smylie could find few attempts to evaluate professional development through changes in student performance.

1998 – Middle Grades Initiative of NSDC: >90% of 450 projects did not attempt a measure of student achievement (Killion)

1999 – Loucks-Horsely and Matsumoto said we typically measure some aspect of teacher engagement

2002 – Birman & Porter: Millions spent on “Eisenhower” unconnected to student gains

Student Achievement Through Staff Development

Joyce, B. & Showers, B. (3rd ed., 2002)Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development

What Would Have to Happen to Make Impact on Student Achievement?

Community of professionals studies together, puts into practice, shares results

Content has high probability of affecting student learning AND ability to learn

Magnitude of change is “palpable”. Change what is taught, how it is taught, and climate ENOUGH to show in student performance

Process enables educators to develop the skill needed for implementation

Points to Ponder

Good innovation to replace a good practice: little or no effect. Example: Just Read among avid readers…

Must change student behavior to a considerable degree Example: Students rarely write. Initiative that

requires more student writing and has teachers studying the teaching of writing at the same time will have more impact than either measure alone.

Must have continuous diagnostic study of student performance (Enables progressive modification and feedback that assists students in knowing when they progress)

Effect Size

To tell what good a treatment did, compute changes in units of standard deviation compared to a control.

People think we don’t look. Someone had a big presentation pushing a summer camp for kids and PD for teachers. The effect size was 0.5 or less (down to zero with some populations).

Joyce and Showers found successful programs (with higher student achievement) all had

Educators studying curriculum and instruction

Extensive ongoing staff development Goals set for student learning Formal study of implementation Formative and summative measures of

progress toward goals

What Programs Produced a Suitable Effect Size?

Just Read in Panama among DoDDS Meeting of parents, teachers, principals uncovered

disagreement on the amount of books read by students Task force gathered information: lit search, then reading

logs for 14 weeks. Average fifth grade male read 4 books per year, based on the number read in 14 weeks. Settled on Just Read.

Aggressive campaign: parents and teachers, newsletters, T-shirts, book clubs, trading fairs, writing projects, celebrations, statistical charts, etc. Effect size 2.0 on CTBS comparing to similar students at another school. Fifth grade mean from 48 to 66. This was about changing culture.

Other effects: Nonreading was reduced from 11.4% to 3 %. Effective with native English and native Spanish speakers.

Other Successful Programs Cited

Second Chance/Read to Succeed, a safety-net literacy initiative for upper elementary, middle and high school students with literacy problems.

Success for All, to improve reading achievement in low-achieving inner city, but Gus said it did not work in Miami

River City SIP, district-wide staff development directed at low-achieving students

University City, improvement of reading and writing in a high-achieving district

Schenley School Project, outstanding teachers provide extensive support to the rest of faculty

Schenley School Project, Pittsburgh

Why did Alabama fire all the staff at 4 perpetually low-performing high schools? Possibly influenced by Schenley

Other district teachers rotated into the low SES, low performing school.

Immediate rise in achievement Students scoring at or above the national

average on std. tests rose from 13 to 41% in biology; from 21 to 63 % in physical science; rose in 8/9 areas.

Of possible interest to some:

Calderon (1994) – Successfully involved large groups of teachers in the improvement of bilingual teaching in El Paso. (Staff development model)

What did not work repeatedly: projects unrelated to curriculum (scheduling changes, parent involvement initiatives, discipline codes, etc.)

What Else Has Not Changed the Achievement Picture

Title I ESE

McGill-Franzen, A. & Goatley, V. (2001). In S. Neuman & D. Dickinson (Eds.), Handbook of early literacy research (pp. 471-484). New York: Guilford Press.

Another Thumb Down

Joyce and Showers studied a large California school district where 2/3 of students were in pull-out programs (removed from regular classroom to receive special attention for something).

“Cure rate” was almost zero.

What Models of Teaching Are Tied to Higher student achievement?

Mnemonics (link-words, pictured action, acoustics) {1.91, 1.5,1.3}

Scientific Inquiry (Joyce and Showers list this, but the effect sizes are very low for information achievement {.27 for high school; .10 for elementary?})

Cooperative learning (.48-1.0 on criterion referenced)

District Level Staff Development (J & S opinions)

If a district has a dozen initiatives, none will be systematically supported enough to make a difference.

We should pick 1 or 2, through careful study

Coaching

Positive data from Showers and her colleagues (several studies)

All about retention by teachers, degree of explication to students, cognition of purposes of new strategies (no data on student achievement associated with this)

Define coaching: The one teaching is the coach. Watchers want to learn from colleague’s efforts with the innovation.

Aside?

Huffman, Thomas, & Lawrenz (2003) found no link between mentoring, coaching, or classroom observations and student achievement in mathematics and sciences (big meta-analysis).

Comparing SD at high- and low-achieving schools

Harkreader and Weathersby (1998) Similar pools of professional development

offerings and providers Teachers at schools with consistently high state

assessment scores exhibited a higher degree of implementation of training strategies

Principals at the high-performing schools also provided more support for staff development initiatives

Teacher motivation for training in those schools generally more directed toward being part of a group solution than toward earning stipends or certification credit

Juxtaposing: Thomas Kuhn and Image Processing

Do we really have scientific progress as the “scientific method”and Strand H suggest? Or do we merely replace a paradigm every so often with another one?

Same offerings, same providers, different outcomes means….?

Possibility: Kids have rejected the recitation paradigm. Sometimes teachers replace the paradigm with something else, and sometimes they just take staff development and “Revert to Saved.”