Posted by:
Sally Harrison
K-12 Classroom teacher
Lynnwood, WA

Topic:
Longterm Process with Many Variables

Message:

In 1994 we were fortunate to receive a five-year NSF grant to enhance teachers' understandings of mathematics. As part of the requirements of that grant, we contracted outside evaluation services. Dr. Jane David of Bay Area Research has worked with us for the past four years, chronicling our journey to improve our understanding of mathematics. I've learned a great deal from Jane about the links among professional development, changes in teachers' classroom practices, and changes in student performance. We've made a joint commitment to sustain the professional development work for several years and focus on evidence that teacher practice is enhanced, rather than on evidence that student performance is increased. We've built sustainable support through school-based math leadership teams composed of teacher leaders and the building principal.

Now, five years later, Jane, as well as leaders in our schools and the district, can document a new perspective on the part of teachers, as they help students increase their mathematical power. Teachers are more confident in teaching mathematics, allowing students to create their own meaning in mathematics through manipulating objects, writing out their thinking, and engaging in classroom discourse. As a result, more mathematics is taught. That creates more need for teachers to understand even more about mathematics by becoming learners of mathematics themselves, which leads to increased teacher confidence.

And now, five years after receiving the grant that allowed us to develop our small local pilot into a widespread district change effort, we are seeing slow, steady increases in student math performance, most notably in things like reasoning and probability and statistics. However, for us and for others across the state, we continue to have problems with student performance in the area of number sense.

So...does this professional development focus "work"? The only fair answer is that we believe it works for increasing pedagogy skills, content knowledge, and an overall understanding of how students learn and that these increases correlate to student performance increases. However, we also know that other initiatives, such as collegial conversations about what students should know and be able to do and about how to assess student work, also have impacted teacher practice and increased student achievement. The extent to which either could take credit for "working" is unknown. And, in addition, the system's ability to sustain an intense focus on mathematics is being tested, because literacy skills are screaming for attention, both in terms of student skills and teacher skills in dealing with the diverse range of student needs, or because school safety and students' character development are emerging as new points of focus.

Professional development is the continual, lifelong pursuit of increased effectiveness, which may see sustained improvement at times. But at other times, the professional development may be influencing deeper changes, not observable in practice for a time, but which eventually provide the context for an educator to emerge from a time of reflection with a leap in learning-- an "ah-ha". It's what we know about the learning process itself that makes answering the question "Did professional development work?" often difficult.

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