Building the knowledge and skill necessary to carry out a schools improvement goals requires an array of professional development experiences. Teachers in all eight schools learn in a variety of ways, both formally and informally, from outside experts, building trainers, and from each other. All forms are necessary for continuous growth.
Formal learning is often the place schools start, in order to focus on specific content or to benefit from a well-established learning structure. But in our interviews, teachers repeatedly stressed that while formal training sets the stage, its really through more informal modes that new ideas take root, spread, and become part of daily practice, and that the crucial habits of collegial sharing become ingrained.
As part of their improvement plans, all these schools have tapped outside expertise through traditional learning opportunities workshops, district or school inservices, coursework, training sessions, and conferences. These usually involve a defined learning group, such as a team, department, or grade level, and have pre-determined outcomes and prescribed learning processes, each designed and facilitated by an expert.
A four-day introduction to Literacy Learning Network, for example, gave Montview Elementary teachers the early tools they needed to begin whole-school implementation. As part of their plan to improve student literacy, teachers at Ganado Intermediate attended Northern Arizona Writing Project summer institutes. Samuel W. Mason teachers got extensive training in using Math Investigations and Early Literacy Learning Initiative (ELLI). Teachers at Woodrow Wilson attended workshops to gain more instructional strategies to teach problem solving in mathematics. Several schools had inservice technology courses. Teachers most appreciated on-site training designed to meet the specific needs of their school. These workshops were presented by outside consultants, district experts, and, occasionally, the schools teachers or principal.
Formal learning opportunities like these can strengthen teachers content knowledge, introduce them to new instructional approaches, and explain the theories or principles underlying them. Moreover, these regularly scheduled sessions can also help get things moving. When school staff engage in training together, they come away with a shared set of ideas to try out and a common understanding of problems to grapple with as a team and they discover all the while a natural focus for beginning a collaboration. Yet as comprehensive change efforts teach us, its not enough to be exposed to new ideas, we have to know where they fit, and we have to become skilled in using them. These formal professional development structures cant ensure that the new knowledge will translate into strong classroom practice, that the skills will be honed in ways that lead to achievement of schoolwide goals.
Joellen Killion compares formal training to the first steps in constructing a house: gathering the materials, blueprints, and tools needed to build it. But assembling the plan, equipment, and supplies is only part of the construction process. Actually building the house requires applying these tools and materials in highly collaborative ways, working together to produce results that match the plan. But here, adapting the analogy to school improvement, its a question of building on what you know, learning new techniques for house framing and roofing as you go. In other words, informal approaches expand professional development to include, as Michael Fullan says, "learning while doing and learning from doing."