Teacher-Guided Professional Development

A central component of Pathways to Success will be Teacher-Guided Professional Development (Knight, 1998; Knight, in preparation), a new model developed at the Kansas University Center for Research on Learning to shape all professional development activities so that they authentically respond to individual teacher needs as well as group needs. Such an approach is needed to ensure that school staff learn about and use research-based instructional methods. This approach involves four inter-related components:

• Partnership Learning, a methodology for facilitating professional development sessions;
• Instructional Collaboration, a process for structuring one-to-one staff development relationships;
• Group-Process Structures, a collection of methods for structuring group professional development; and
• School Wide Strategies, methods for reconstructing school roles, structures, processes, and cultures.

Partnership Learning

Partnership Learning is a simple, powerful approach to professional development, involving both a mindset and six easy-to-learn learning structures, instructional methods that can be woven into any training session. The partnership mindset is based on six core principles that represent the foundation of the Partnership Learning approach to staff development:

• Equality--each partner's thoughts and beliefs are held to be valuable even though each individual has unique talents;
• Choice--partners make their own individual choices and make decisions collaboratively;
• Dialogue--partners do not impose, dominate, or control; they engage in conversation, learning together as they explore ideas;
• Praxis--each individual is free to reconstruct and use content the way he or she considers it most useful;
• Voice--partnership is multivocal rather than univocal, and all individuals in a partnership require opportunities to express their points of view;
• Symbiosis--partners all benefit from the success, learning, or experience of each partner.

These principles are embodied in six easy-to-use learning structures for delivering staff development sessions.

Instructional Collaboration

The Teacher-Guided Professional Development sequence begins with one-to-one, face-to-face interactions that are conducted in a manner consistent with the Partnership Mindset. KU-CRL studies show that more that 90 percent of teachers who work with Instructional Collaborators make significant changes in the way they conduct their classes (Knight, in preparation).

Instructional Collaboration involves the following components:

1. Meeting with Departments or Teams of teachers to explain Pathways to Success, the Partnership Mindset that pervades the project, and asking everyone to fill in a brief form to indicate whether they are interested in being involved in the project;
2. Meeting One-on-One With Interested Teachers in a series of short meetings to identify the teacher's major concerns or problems and research that can address the problems or concerns and to adapt the research to fit the teacher's classes;
3. Identifying Appropriate "Classroom-friendly" Materials that should enable the teacher to address her or his problem;
4. Immediately Planning real applications for the lessons that the teacher can use to solve the problem;
5. Rewarding Teachers for Their Time by having the teachers receive pay incentives when they work with Instructional Collaborators;
6. Making Implementation as Easy as Possible by, primarily, acting as a steward and thus going to great lengths to facilitate teachers' use of the practice;
7. Responding Quickly to Teacher Requests; and
8. Providing Support & Coaching by modeling teaching practices, providing peer coaching, or offering resources that help teachers become proficient at new teaching practices.

Group Process Structures

After at least one teacher from one school department or grade-level team has established an ongoing relationship with the Instructional Collaborator and positive results have been achieved, a short meeting will be held with the department team. During the meeting, the Instructional Collaborator and the teacher(s) with whom the collaborator has been working will explain the work they have been doing together and ask the group whether they would like to engage in a process designed to address their needs collectively. At the end of the meeting, the group will make a decision about whether or not they want to pursue group goals.

Once a group decides to pursue group goals, Group Process Structures, strategies and mechanisms that are used during group professional development so that it is guided by the specific needs of teachers, are then used. Instructional Collaborators would choose from the following Group Process Structures to make the sessions responsive to individual and group needs:

• Interviews. Before professional development sessions, Instructional Collaborators conduct short interviews with all teachers to identify the needs and major concerns they hold. The data from interviews is reported back at the start of professional development sessions to ensure that the group has an open and shared understanding of their most pressing concerns.
• Group Decisions. Since this form of staff development is authentically guided by teachers, opportunities are required for voting on issues such as the topics for professional-development sessions, when they will be offered, and how and when "classroom-friendly" lessons will be implemented.
• Force Field Analysis. During sessions, teachers' perceptions about opportunities and difficulties presented by the lessons are recorded and discussed.
• Problem Solving. Research-based practices are further contextualized during Teacher-Guided Professional Development when teachers collaboratively create strategies that enable them to adapt practices so that they better fit their classrooms and meet their students' needs.
• Dynamic Planning. This is an easy-to-use planning procedure that enables all participants to create a detailed plan for implementation of "classroom-friendly" contextualized lessons.
• Measures of Success. At the end of any stage of Teacher-Guided Professional Development, teachers may identify specific, measurable goals that they will set as outcomes they want to achieve as a result of their implementation of "classroom-friendly" contextualized lessons.
• Schoolwide Teacher Guided Professional Development. In schools where a majority of teams successfully complete group staff-development activities, Instructional Collaborators can then advance the focus of the school-improvement effort to broader concerns such as improving cultural or structural elements in schools. Schoolwide reform efforts might involve:
  • visioning
  • role definition
  • restructuring personnel positions in the school
  • restructuring school schedules
  • altering bureaucratic structures
  • developing mechanisms to better utilize community resources.

During this phase of Teacher Guided Professional Development school personnel also will reconsider the roles and responsibilities of special educators as the school moves closer to becoming an inclusive school.