Free to teach, free to learn: A model of collaborative professional development that empowers teachers to reach diverse student populations
The Journal of Negro Education; Washington; Summer 1999; Judith M Kelly
Issue: / 3
Start Page: / 426-432
ISSN: / 00222984
Subject Terms: / Professional development
Educators
Quality of education
Teaching
Academic achievement
Abstract:
This article describes the National writing project's (NWP) professional development approach, asserting that it reflects a shift from the traditional paradigm of theory dictating practice. The NWP model maintains instead that engaging teachers in teaching teachers empowers teachers to meet the challenges of educating an increasingly diverse student population.
CopyrightHowardUniversity Summer 1999
This article describes the National Writing Project's (NWP) professional development approach, asserting that it reflects a shift from the traditional paradigm of theory dictating practice. The NWP model maintains instead that engaging teachers in teaching teachers empowers teachers to meet the challenges of educating an increasingly diverse student population. By providing supportive, risk-free settings where teachers can come together for extended periods of time to reflect on their practice and build on their knowledge and experiences, the NWP encourages teachers to collaborate as educational leaders, researchers, and writers, and to make pedagogical decisions that positively influence achievement for all students.
The real challenge of teaching is finding human capacity (in our students, in ourselves) while working in systems that routinely highlight deficits and deficiencies. This means beginning with an assumed and unshakable faith that all students bring strengths and abilities with them into the classroom. (Ayers, 1997, P. ix)
The increasing diversity of our nation's student population has put significant pressure on teachers and school administrators to ensure that they have the knowledge and skills to successfully educate students from a wide variety of racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds (Denbo, 1994; Kuzmeskus, 1996; Shanker, 1996). Unfortunately, the current U.S. educational workforce, controlled and predominated as it is by the White American majority, may have little direct knowledge of or experience with children of different minority groups, thus rendering existing hierarchical systems of professional development unsuitable for the rich cultural diversity found in today's schools. Issues of race and ethnicity further compound this dilemma. Racism and ethnic discrimination take many forms. Indeed, they repeatedly manifest themselves in U.S. classrooms through the ignorance, albeit frequently unintentional, of individual teachers and administrators. This unconscious prejudice is often evident, for example, when teachers who are members of the dominant culture assume that their group's ways of thinking and behaving are the norms by which other groups must be gauged (Donaldson, 1996). Although teachers are often verbally encouraged by school administrators and policymakers to offer and embrace cross-cultural education, their individual racist attitudes sometimes persist, and often covertly so.
Yet, schools cannot provide equity of educational opportunity in the absence of a teaching corps that is philosophically and pedagogically equipped to teach all students (Denbo, 1994). According to Tatum (cited in O'Neil, 1998), despite the increasing Whiteness of the U.S. teaching ranks and the increasing racial/ethnic diversity of the U.S. student population, it is not impossible for majority-group teachers and administrators to become both more culturally sensitive to minority educational concerns and be educationally proactive in antiracist ways. Appropriate professional development is essential to improving the bulk of today's-and tomorrow's-classroom teachers' abilities to provide equal and unbiased learning opportunities to all of their students.
THE FALLACIES OF TRADITIONAL STAFF DEVELOPMENT
The inadequacies of the traditional approach to staff development is widely evidenced by the lack of change in teacher behaviors that it sustains, especially with regard to those behaviors that relate to the teaching of diverse student populations. Yet, whether they are responding to state or federal mandates or in search of teacher-proof ways to guarantee student learning, school administrators continue to dictate conventional in-service programs for practicing teachers. Fundamentally, such programs are distinguished by their penchant for presenting knowledge in piecemeal and disconnected fashion-thus, theory is viewed as unrelated to practice; content knowledge is seen as disconnected from teaching methods, and instructional methods are beheld as detached from learning and development (Shanker, 1996). To make matters worse, upon exposure to such presentations, teachers are expected to teach isolated lessons solely in response to directives filtered down to them through a bureaucracy. Worse still, teachers are sometimes deemed incompetent when the lessons evolving from this highly disjointed orientation fail.
Given that it is designed chiefly to focus on and fix up teacher weaknesses, traditional teacher training also has many inherently negative overtones. Typically, traditional approaches do not work because teachers do not relish being humiliated as a prerequisite to learning and development (Clark, 1995). Additionally, in many districts, staff development is characterized by professional trainers offering prepackaged success formulas that do not take into account the teachers who must implement the programs or the students who are supposed to benefit from them. Notably, with few exceptions, expert teachers are excluded in the decision making about staff development and are seldom deemed qualified to teach other teachers (Sykes, 1996). In this regard, Shanker (1996) pointed out, teaching may be the only "profession" in which regular opportunities for colleagues to engage in professional dialogue is not the norm.
One obstacle confronting schools with large numbers of children of color is that the manner in which knowledge and ideas are distributed frequently mirrors the social and economic stratification of the broader society (Silva & Kucer, 1997). For instance, the U.S. educational system recognizes African Americans as a racial group but not as a distinct cultural or ethnic group. This results in the erroneous presumption that Black children are exactly like White children but just need a little extra help (Ladson-Billings, 1994). Similarly, inappropriate staff development for teachers impedes their progress toward meeting the needs of students from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. As Strickland (1998) noted, when a curriculum fails to value each learner's unique background, the risk increases that important individual characteristics may never be revealed as potential building blocks for instruction. According to Latham (1997), the existence of persistent learning gaps between Black and White students in the United States suggests that a major change is needed in how teaching and learning are viewed. Such gaps further point out the need for teachers to expand and refine their understanding of culturally responsive teaching. Yet, as Brooks (1985) asserted, the teachers of minority learners, based on their intimate knowledge of their students, may be the best source for identifying successful and culturally responsive teaching behaviors.
Most in-service training programs for teachers in the United States continue to rely on narrow and harmful deficit models of learning for minority students. More often than not, these programs reflect and incorporate White, middle-class norms. Increasingly, however, the expectation that schools should adapt to the students, not the students to the needs of the schools, has begun to shape the philosophy of modern education (Cameron, 1996). Some school districts are beginning to acknowledge the diversity of students, even though they are a long way from cultural affirmation. More and more, today's schools include some form of multicultural education and equity emphasis in their curricula.
Yet, troubling trends present powerful challenges to this movement toward educational inclusiveness as some legislators and educators continue to embrace the notion of academic excellence while overlooking the need to link high standards with the means that enable students to reach them (McKenzie, 1993). Absent the provision of adequate support and assistance, expectations of excellence pose an obstacle to rather than a springboard for equity-minded reforms. According to Darling-Hammond (1996b), thousands of poor and minority schoolchildren are taught, year after year, by teachers who are neither fully qualified nor prepared to teach the subjects to which they are assigned or who are inexperienced beginners with little training and no mentoring. However, in many restructured schools, she reported, the standards reflect the view of teaching as collegial work and take into explicit account the multicultural, multilingual nature of students. Furthermore, the teachers at such schools frequently conduct school-based inquiry, evaluating school programs and studying their own practices.
As McKenzie (1993) maintained, the real measure of the success of education is what educators do for all students to help them meet performance expectations, and those expectations include acknowledgment of the multicultural heritage of all the diverse groups that students represent. If teachers in the United States are to be prepared to help all their students meet high standards of excellence, the creators of professional development programs for teachers must consciously examine the expectations embodied in the new curriculum frameworks and assessments (Darling-Hammond, 1996a). Trainers of teachers must understand what these expectations imply for the teaching profession. They must also realize the importance of including within their programs effective strategies for preparing teachers to teach under conditions that are much more demanding due to the increased diversity in the classroom.
THE CHANGING FACE OF PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
One of the most promising trends in education is one that will move U.S. schools beyond token acknowledgment of multiculturalism. That trend is evidenced by the changing face of professional development. Whether organized by school systems, by national reform groups, or by small groups of teachers within schools, this new trend involves teacher-led, focused dialogue and inquiry-based techniques. When teachers come together in this way to reflect on their practice, they frequently examine delicate or controversial issues. They discuss and research which voices are valued and not valued in education, what is working and what is not working, and how to change negative teaching behaviors. Donaldson (1996), for example, found that focused dialogue on racial issues helps teachers to address and attempt to change racist attitudes within themselves, their students, the curriculum, and the total school environment. Donaldson's research investigated how groups of teachers from two different regions of the country (Iowa and Massachusetts) perceived racism in schools by exploring and comparing the degree to which teachers demonstrated changed thinking and behaviors when exposed to different levels of antiracist materials. Surveys were used to determine racist attitudes and through a series of staff development workshops, participating teachers were able to confront their own notions of racism in schools. The collected data provide evidence of the effectiveness of professional development in promoting growth in race awareness and changes in instructional behavior.
Kuzmeskus (1996) described how teachers could be empowered to address and resolve diversity issues by focused dialogue. Prompted by the belief in the extricable connections between writing and thinking and in the power of writing as a tool for learning, the MassachusettsFieldCenter for Teaching and Learning supported a writing retreat for teachers to write and talk about diversity in the classroom. After the retreat, the teachers became united in their acceptance of the great richness availed by diversity.' Weissglass (1997) reported that over a period of 13 years, she and her colleagues looked directly at issues of racism and inequity through a series of professional development projects involving focused dialogue. Their research explains the varied and complex ways that bias and prejudice have become assimilated into U.S. educational institutions, and describes the personal transformations that occurred as a result of this approach to professional development.
According to Ray (1996), teachers who see inquiry and change as central to their professional role construct their own questions and develop courses of action that are valid in their own contexts. From a professional development standpoint, inquiry includes the following: dialogue and critique within professional communities; experience with new materials; practice in writing, videotaping, and peer observations; and opportunities for interaction across teacher, administrator, and policymaker roles. Thus, Sykes (1996) contended, it is better suited to the uncertainties of changing practice.
A MODEL PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM: THE NATIONAL WRITING PROJECT
Teacher-led professional development models, such as those upon which the National Writing Project (NWP) is based, have brought about a major change in the ways teachers advance their professional knowledge in response to student diversity. The NWP is a nationwide professional development network that offers a variety of teacher-led programs to serve the needs of diverse students and teachers. Further, because NWP sites are hosted by universities, they promote ongoing collaboration between K-12 and university professors. Over the 26 years of its existence, the Project has expanded from a single site to more than 165 throughout the United States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. Because of its success, the NWP model has been used for numerous other professional development programs such as the California Mathematics Project, the California Science Project and the National Reform Faculty (Olson, 1998).
School-year NWP continuity programs include parent partnerships, conference series, action research projects, and new teacher support groups. Each NWP site also offers intensive summer institutes for kindergarten through university teachers. These institutes focus on identifying and examining exemplary classroom practices and supporting model strategies with research studies. Participants are led to develop their own writing and use writing as a tool for reflective practice while serving as mentors and facilitators of professional development sessions.
The NWP demonstrates that when change is needed in education, it happens when teachers come together for an extended period of time and collaboratively pursue solutions and answers (Healy, 1994). The Project's mission statement clearly articulates its commitment to both the development of teacher expertise as well as the affirmation of the value of diversity (NWP, 1998). Although the NWP focuses primarily on the improvement of writing and writing instruction, its influence extends to all areas of instruction. Indeed, it serves as one of the foremost models of professional development for other content areas.
The NWP has achieved notable success. For example, 67% of the students of teachers who participated in the Acadiana Writing Project, based at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, earned A or B grades in English in 1996 compared to 38% of all other firstyear college students (NWP, 1999). Students of Los Angeles-based Writing Project teachers were found to score an average of 41% higher than students of non-Project teachers on holistically scored writing samples in 1994 (NWP, 1999). Pritchard and Marshall (1994) found that NWP teachers at all levels of instruction implemented more varied composition activities than did teachers who did not receive writing instruction.
An example of the kind of collaborations that the NWP brings about between K-12 teachers and university professors can be found at HowardUniversity. There, the District of Columbia Area Writing Project (DCAWP) worked together with the Howard University School of Education's African American Males Into Teaching Program (AAMT), the Prince George's CountyPublic Schools, and Prince George's Community College to provide professional development activities for AAMT participants. The AAMT was designed as a three-year program to increase the number of minority men entering the teaching professions by providing improved recruitment and training opportunities (Brown, 1997/ 1998). Participants conducted action research projects on literacy and examined successful theoretical and practical perspectives in literacy studies. After three years, the DCAWPAAMT collaboration was revised such that its professional development activities became more intentional and focused, for example, on content-area instructional strategies appropriate for students whose reading and writing abilities were too low for their curricula and textbooks. Participating teachers conducted sessions on reading and writing in content areas, learning styles, and performance-based education. They also made themselves available for telephone conferences with AAMT teachers.
The need for teacher collaboration is especially profound in poverty-stricken urban settings where large numbers of children are failing to achieve and where schools persist in blaming both teacher and student deficits, but neglect to look at institutional racism in schools (Denbo, 1994). In response to the needs of urban teachers and students, the NWP created the Urban Sites Network in 1988 as a support mechanism for teachers seeking to improve urban teaching and learning and as a means of encouraging teachers of color to participate in Project activities. Initially funded by the DeWitt Wallace-Reader's Digest Foundation and currently operative at more than 20 NWP sites nationwide, the this Network's members have developed and articulated an agenda focused on the realities of schools in large urban areas (Sterling, 1996).