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Observations for the Future
by Iris Weiss , presented at the 1996 NISE Conference
Iris Weiss addresses the following questions:
As often happens when Mark and I speak, we have this Bobsey Twins routine. We start out at different places and reach the same conclusions. I'm going to talk about the way I was looking at some of the things we've done. Yesterday we were given a way of thinking about the design process where we choose professional development strategies to accomplish a particular goal in light of our knowledge and beliefs and the context in which we are operating.
I've been toying around with that heuristic since yesterday morning and thinking that our professional development designs can also tell us a lot about our underlying beliefs and knowledge and what things in the context we think matter. Kind of solving the equation for a different set of unknowns. It's kind of fun thinking about this.
When we choose to involve principals in our professional development, we're saying that we believe administrative support matters. And if we choose not to have a scheme for involving administrators, then we say that that part of the context isn't important.
I was thinking about the concept of teacher leaders, and I'll come back to that in a few moments, but who selects the teacher leaders says a lot about our beliefs about the way systems operate. I suspect that if we went in and asked the entire faculty in a school to select the teacher leader for that school, it would be the same person that we as PI's identify, but the culture would be very different. It would show a different belief on our part.
When we set up a design that is very heavy on imparting knowledge to teachers, it shows that we believe that the problem is that teachers don't have enough content knowledge. If we set up something where it's "make and take"-- a lot of activities without the conceptual glue for holding those concepts together, holding those activities together--we're showing that what we think is the problem is that teachers don't have enough comfort with activities that are out there. When we exhort teachers to do hands-on in our workshops, we're saying that we think the problem is teachers' attitudes.
That's all well and good if we got the problems right, but just as we say to teachers that you have to start by having a good understanding of where your kids are, we have to start with a good understanding of where our teachers are, and I suggest that we often don't.
And one of the reasons that I think we don't is we're very comfortable with our conventional wisdom and we feed it to each other, even when there's data that contradicts. I'm going to show Andy Porter that I read and remembered his work. In the Reform Up Close document one of the things that he found, and that I have found in my own work and others have as well, is that teachers' self-report data under low stakes conditions seem to be pretty good. But I heard yesterday people talking about how you can't believe what teachers say because they'll give you the socially acceptable responses. In the 1993 National Survey of Science and Mathematics Education that NSF sponsored, high school teachers were much more likely to say that they were aware of the NCTM standards, but they were also much more likely to disagree with things that were in the standards.
They said, for example, that kids have to master arithmetic computation before going on to algebra. They said that in high school science and math both, kids learn best when grouped with other children of similar abilities. That they didn't believe, in the case of mathematics, that the use of manipulatives was appropriate. That they didn't think that cooperative learning was an important part of science and math instruction.
Elementary teachers, on the other hand, were very much in agreement with the underlying strategies of reform. Their notions of science and mathematics, and their comfort with science and mathematics were the problem in those cases. Elementary teachers told us that they were afraid of science, and in particular the physical sciences. Elementary mathematics teachers said we are very well qualified to do mathematics, but the mathematics they were well qualified to do was not probability or any of those other newer things that are being called for, it was arithmetic.
So I believe that, again in low stakes situations, you can get a lot of information from teachers. Another example from Andy's work, and I didn't hear this one yesterday but I hear this all the time. You know with the new requirements people say that we're watering down courses? The best research we have available says that the new courses that have been developed in response to the requirements are not watered down.
If we don't understand the problems that we're trying to solve, it's very unlikely that our solutions are going to get us where we want. I suggest that we need to, in planning teams, specify our beliefs. Make them explicit, where they can be challenged and examined.
I recently went to a reform project that we are evaluating that is in its fifth year. And the professional developers talked the same "talk". They speak with one voice. But when we watched video tapes together of teachers' classroom practice, the way they reacted to those video tapes was completely different. And since our visions affect all of our design decisions, it's worth the effort to fight our way through to get below the words.
I think our language gets in our way often. [Take] the notion of "teacher leader". I listened yesterday and we used teacher leader for everything on the spectrum going from teachers that we work with for a very long time, provide continuing support to them, both intellectual and logistical as they go out to work with other teachers, and we also called teacher leaders the ones that we give two weeks worth of experience and then 'hope' that they can go out and work with other teachers in their school.
What I have found happens is that we all imbue these words with the meaning we think they should have. We think we're communicating, but we're not. I had the opportunity to sit in on a group of physicists in a project where they were trying to come up with some recommendations for curriculum. And when they started, I like to say that there were seven physicists speaking with 14 voices. By the end of two days of very hard work, it didn't matter who spoke. One person would start and another one would complete the sentence.
It was beautiful. When they said "electricity", now, at the fourth grade level, everyone knew that they weren't talking about advanced physics, that they meant the beginning concepts. That group then went out to describe to another group, the earth science group, what they thought should be taught at the various levels. And they said words like "electricity" and the earth science people went bonkers because they were imbuing it with their understanding of all the nonsense that we sometimes teach.
My personal favorite is a third grade teacher, who had a class that she'd been working with for both second and third grade, and she was reminding them to think about what they had learned last year about water as the Mickey Mouse molecule. Now, I have visions of second graders drawing the Mickey Mouse molecule with the eyes and the nose-- what can a molecule mean-- what can that concept mean to a second grader?
Some of our terms are loaded. We've learned about the term "training". Everybody's very sensitive about the term training, and we don't use that. One word that I heard yesterday started me chuckling when I thought about the implications of it. You know how we used to do one-shot stuff and then we got on to follow-up as important? I invite you to think with me for a moment about what the term follow-up implies.
While you're thinking about that, I want to give an example from President Reagan's term in office. When he said we need to be "tolerant of other religions", which at first blush seemed like a very inclusive statement. One level down you say, wait a minute, that says there's a right one, a central one, and we have to tolerate everything else.
"Follow-up" implies that there was a main event. That it was the summer thing that mattered and now we're continuing to reinforce that. We don't believe that, but our words imply that.
Now, a new topic entirely. Lest I be misunderstood, I think professional development is essential for enabling teachers to gain new knowledge and skills, to stay fresh, engaged and enthusiastic in working with young people. But, I think we're trying to use professional development as a solution to problems it shouldn't have to solve and as a solution to problems it can't solve. In the former category, I submit that we are doing -- I'm preaching to the choir and forgive me -- but we are doing an abysmal job in pre-service education. Just like Mark's airplane analogy, and I'm the one that always groans because I've heard it a thousand times, I apologize in advance because anyone who has ever heard me speak has heard the following statement. And that is a colleague of mine once said, "We're sending teachers out of pre-service in immediate need of a 50,000 mile tune-up." And I think that's correct, and I think that the vision of science and mathematics teaching that we send people out of colleges and universities with is what we spend the rest of our time in professional development trying to undo.
Why do we need a paradigm shift? Why must we do the expensive interventions, like immersion and placing teachers in a lab for the summer? If we could do the pre-service experiences right, we could use scarce professional development resources for continuing development which every professional needs and deserves. Not for remediation. And that's part of our problem.
As someone who works with a number of reform projects, I think we're doing what we know how to do. [But] professional development, no matter how well designed, can't compensate for a poor curriculum. It can't compensate for inappropriate assessment where a teacher goes back and says I know what I wish to do but I can't do that because I have to prepare my students for x and y test.
It can't compensate for lack of equipment. It can't compensate for lack of administrative support. I think we're concentrating on professional development because we don't know how to tackle some of these other problems, but we're wasting our effort if the teachers aren't able to use their enhanced understanding to do anything differently in their classrooms.
It may be hard, but we have no choice but to tackle those other difficult problems. That's what systemic reform means. I'm absolutely delighted to hear in this conference that we're moving away from model programs. That's a fiction.
I believe that just like teachers at the college level enter into a conspiracy with their students where they pretend they're teaching and the students pretend they're learning. I submit that funders and grantees enter into a similar conspiracy. When we say model programs, that this project has the potential to be a model for other projects, da da da. I call this the "cross your fingers" strategy. It has the potential to do that. It [also] has the potential not to do it. It's about as likely as having a room full of monkeys typing and they're going to get to Shakespeare eventually.
I like the notion that came up in the work of this forum, and the work that preceded it, of not trying to pretend that we can take models full blown and put them in somewhere else where the context is different. I think there's a lot of promise in the combining of smaller chunks of things that are well done.
The problem is the capacity, as Mark says. I call this the "out there" fallacy. When I need something for my work, like right now video tapes of effective practice and Thank God for [The] Annenberg [Foundation], I have finally lit on it.
I started a teacher enhancement project years ago and called around to all these other teacher enhancement projects to find what they had that might be useful to me. And I had this vision of a 100 other teacher enhancement program officers calling around. And then I had a worse vision of 100 other people not calling around.
We make it too hard. We need ways of learning from each other. I heard a brilliant idea yesterday in a session. Something I absolutely had never thought about. A teacher enhancement project that is bringing in undergraduate science majors to work with teachers. I thought, how brilliant. You're bringing in a learner, not a 50 year old Ph.D. that as far as kids are concerned -- there's no relation. Not a "finished product." Some of those people may go on to teach. Imagine influencing their practice by them dealing with kids, curious learners.
Well, it's too hit and miss. I happened to be in a session where I heard that idea. We need an organized way of having those ideas. We need mechanisms. I know journals are supposed to do that, but unless you have more time than I do, you don't delve into journals as much as you'd like to.
We need images of professional development to solidify our notions of vision. We need rich sources of dialogue. In some work that I'm doing, we came across a professional development video that actually exemplified "not good" professional development. It was wonderful for us to talk about-- it was a great video because it looked like inquiry but it wasn't. Wonderfully rich discussions that helped all of us. And then, because this is my field, we need evaluation tools and we need evaluation results so we can all learn from each other. Thank you.
References:
To order the"1993 National Survey of Science and Mathematics Education" contact Horizon Research Inc. at: phone: 919-489-1725; fax: 919-493-7589; email: horizon@nando.net . The cost is $15.
To order "Reform of High School Mathematics and Science and Opportunity to Learn" by Andrew Porter, contact Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE), Carriage House at the Eagleton Institute of Politics, Rutgers University, 86 Clifton Avenue, New Brunswick NJ 08901-1568; phone - 908-932-1331. Single copies are free.