The Superintendent as Staff Developer

School Administrator, Sept, 2000 by RICHARD P. DuFOUR

Leadership of school personnel is the key to sustaining academic improvement

What is the fundamental challenge facing those who hope to lead contemporary organizations? Peter Senge, one of the pre-eminent authorities on organizational leadership, argues the development of a structure and culture that encourage learning is the "primary task of leadership [and] perhaps the only way a leader can genuinely influence or inspire others."

It follows then that superintendents who hope to fulfill their responsibilities as leaders must make the development of school personnel a priority. But before superintendents can contribute to quality staff development in their school districts, they must embrace two realities.

First, they must recognize that the most powerful form of professional development is job embedded. Many school districts continue to distinguish between teacher work and teacher learning. The assumption that drives these districts is that teachers work (that is, teach) 176 days each year and they learn (that is, engage in professional development) during the four or five days the district devotes to in-service programs or when teachers leave the campus to attend workshops or college courses.

Yet if learning is always an on-the-job-phenomenon, as Senge contends, the challenge facing school districts is to embed opportunities for learning so deeply in the routine practices of the school that it becomes impossible to tell where the work ends and the learning begins. This can only be accomplished if superintendents help schools create the collaborative cultures that enable teachers to work together, engage in collective inquiry and learn from each other's experience.

The second fundamental reality that superintendents must accept if they are to contribute to quality staff development is simple: The collaborative culture and collective inquiry essential to job-embedded staff development never happen by chance or even by invitation. Teacher isolation is so deeply ingrained in the traditional fabric of most schools that leaders cannot simply invite teachers to create a collaborative culture. They must identify and implement specific, strategic interventions that help teachers work together rather than alone.

Training Suggestions

Here are some specific suggestions schools should consider to foster quality staff development in their districts.

* Redesign the structure of the school so every teacher is a member of a team.

Schools have been structured in ways that reinforce teachers' perceptions that their job as teachers is to concern themselves only with their own students. Individual teachers work in their individual classrooms and attempt to determine and achieve their own goals within the limitations of what each knows or does not know.

Contemporary research, however, consistently concludes that developing a collaborative culture and collective responsibility are essential to an improving school. Superintendents create opportunities for quality staff development when they insist that teams, rather than individuals, serve as the main units for implementing curriculum, instruction and assessment. Teams can be designed by course, by grade level, by shared students or any other configuration that provides members with a common focus.

* Provide teacher teams with time to collaborate during the school day.

Organizations demonstrate that an initiative is valued when they devote resources to support it. The most important resource that schools can provide to support quality staff development is time for teachers to work together in collaborative teams engaged in significant collective inquiry. Once again, the artificial distinction between working and learning serves as a barrier.

If superintendents cling to the notion that teachers are only at work when they are standing in front of a classroom of children and that more time for collaboration means less time for working with children, they will be reluctant to provide teachers with time to work together. With some creative thinking, however, the time problem can be solved quickly and effectively.

When the board of education and teachers' union of Adlai E. Stevenson High School District 125 engaged in negotiations a few years ago, they agreed teachers and students could benefit if teachers had more time to work together. However, some concerns had to be addressed first.

The community might object if the collaborative time had an impact on their family routines--students arriving to school later or leaving school earlier than usual. Teachers already confronting the ongoing battle of "coverage" were reluctant to trade instructional time for team time. The district's financial situation did not allow for a major infusion of new dollars to support time for teachers to work together. Thus, both the school board and the teachers' union agreed to search for a strategy that would allow for regular, ongoing teacher collaboration that met three specific criteria: It did not require the school to keep students off campus, it did not have a significant impact on instructional time; and it did not increase costs to the district.