Why Look Elsewhere?: Improving Schools From Within

School Administrator, Feb, 1998 by Richard P. Dufour

Consultants don't hold all the answers for professional growth and school Renewal

In my third year of teaching, I was put in charge of the "teacher institute day" for my school district. I was certain of my goal--to find a humorous, motivational speaker who could entertain more than 200 diverse elementary, junior high school and high school teachers.

The speaker was a huge hit, and I basked in the kudos I received from the administration and my colleagues. The fact that nothing changed when teachers returned to the classroom the next day did not trouble me. I never had expectations that anything would change.

Six years later, as the young principal of a comprehensive high school with more than 100 faculty members, my perspective changed. I realized that a consultant should do more than entertain. He or she also should inform about best practices. A genuine staff developer would present content that was research based, substantive and significant.

So for the next teacher institute, I arranged for a consultant to address the entire faculty on the topic of effective teaching. He presented a wonderful, concise synthesis of the current research and even demonstrated some of the techniques he referenced. I expected to see significant change in teacher practices, and in a few instances I did. But when most teachers returned to business as usual in their classrooms, I was more inclined to vilify the complacency of teachers than to consider the possibility that my approach to professional development was flawed.

By the time I was hired for my second principalship, I had recognized that content alone was insufficient to alter practice for most teachers. Even if the content was timely and the consultant was able to generate some initial enthusiasm, teachers were unlikely to gain mastery of the new knowledge and skills without frequent opportunities for practice and feedback. Armed with that bit of insight, my focus shifted from the content of training to the process of training.

The All-Important Context

My search for a consultant focused upon finding someone who could develop and implement an ongoing training process that would help administrators and teachers benefit from a clinical supervision model. I then worked with the consultant to develop a program that trained department chairs and representative teachers simultaneously, called upon them to observe one another in the classroom and gave them the opportunity to practice their emerging skills in clinical supervision upon one another.

This program continued for two years and had a significant impact on the mechanics of instruction and the relationship between teachers and administrators.

It wasn't until later still that I realized the most significant factor in determining the ultimate impact of a staff development initiative is neither the content of the topic nor the process used to provide the training, but rather the context of the school in which it is presented.

Content and process are critical elements of a professional development program, and certainly schools should be attentive to those elements. But in the final analysis, the major determinant of any professional development program's effectiveness is school context. It is context--the beliefs, expectations, behaviors and norms that constitute the culture of a given school--that plays the largest role in deciding whether a professional development program will make a difference in that school.

Any consultant or facilitator who has attempted to help a school launch some aspect of school improvement has observed the phenomenon of school context at work. Two schools initiate major professional growth programs designed to improve conditions for teaching and learning. The consultant, content and presentation strategies are identical, but the faculty in one school embraces the concept and works to implement it while the teachers in the other respond with total indifference.

These different reactions can only be attributed to the context or culture of the schools themselves. It is becoming increasingly clear that in the right school context, even flawed staff development activities (such as the much-maligned single-session workshop) can have a positive impact.

Conversely, in the wrong school context, even well-conceived and delivered activities are likely to be ineffective. While schools certainly should be attentive to the content of the ideas presented to staff and the process of the strategies used to help teachers master that content, they should focus primarily on creating a context or culture conducive to professional growth and development.

Not a Magic Pill

What is the "right" school context? Researchers both inside and outside of the educational establishment offer remarkably similar conclusions regarding the best path for sustained organizational improvement. Schools are most effective when they function as professional learning communities characterized by shared vision and values, collective inquiry, collaborative teams, a willingness to experiment, a commitment to continuous improvement and a results orientation. In the absence of these attributes, initiatives are likely to fall flat.