TIME FOR PROFESSIONAL LEARNING SERVES STUDENT LEARNING

By Dennis Sparks, Ph.D.

Creating schools in which everyone learns and performs at high levels - students and staff alike - requires extended conversation in three major areas: the results a school intends to achieve, the most powerful strategies for achieving those ends, and the school's assessment of its progress in achieving its intentions. Such conversations, however, must move beneath surface features of reform to the development of shared meaning on the part of all participants and to a deeper appreciation of the school' existing strengths. These conversations take a great deal of time, thought, and not just the time provided by periodic "inservice days."

A recent report on this subject from the new American Schools Corporation (http://www.newamericanschools.org), Rethinking School Resources by Karen Hawley Miles, is noteworthy. "When teachers share responsibility for all students learning to standards," Miles writes, "they need time together to learn new strategies, look together at student work and develop or integrate new curriculum material." While citing the importance of extra professional development days during the summer and school year to jump start new practices, Miles contends that regular periods of time of longer than 45 minutes in duration for teaching teams is "central to the job of teaching in today's schools."

"Researchers find that teachers need at least three hours a week together in groups that collectively share the responsibility for student learning," Miles points out. These longer blocks of time are found in schools, she says, by using the following strategies alone on in combination:

Creating double planning periods;
Combining planning periods with other non-instructional time;
Combining classes for special subjects;
Rethinking the use of student time by creating time for learning activities not supervised by core teachers; and
Reducing teacher administrative assignments to non-teaching duties.

Rethinking School Resources offers examples of schools that provide time for professional learning, and additional examples can be found at NSDC's website (www.nsdc.org/library/time.html).

The logic for providing additional time for teachers to plan lessons together, review student work, analyze data, and find ways to assist low-performing students in meeting standards seems straightforward and compelling. And while making such changes may not be easy and requires navigating substantial barriers, it is eminently doable as the many schools that have already done it indicate.

While schools, districts, and unions play a critical role in addressing various barriers, structural changes are insufficient unless those in schools are committed to high levels of learning for all students. What is ultimately required is that principals and teachers link professional development and collaboration to their attainment of their most important goals and recognize that sustained, substantive conversations are essential if significant and lasting changes in instruction and student learning are to occur. If it is to be well used, additional time for professional learning must serve powerful fundamental choices (see www.nsdc.org/library/results/res9-01spar.html) and unleash the creative capacity that exists within virtually all schools (see www.nsdc.org/library/results/res10-01spar.html).

Fundamental choices, stretch goals, and creative energy are the ultimate sources of the heightened commitment that must be present if educators are to sustain their efforts over the long haul. While commitment cannot be sustained without resources, such resources will be of little value unless they serve larger purposes. The success of standards-based reform ultimately will be determined by whether hundreds of thousands of principals and teachers find compelling purposes for their work and by their ability to create the time to sustain conversations about those purposes and how they will be achieved.