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Posted by:
Shirley Hord
K-12 Classroom teacher
Austin, TX
Topic:
Shirley Hord's Position Statement
Message:
The bottom line is that professional development is expected to change its participants' understandings, insights, attitudes, values, behaviors, skills, and/or other aspects--dependent upon its intended outcomes. Such change of individuals occurs through deep and sustained learning. Concisely, then, professional development is professional learning that leads to change. And, NSDC and its membership are interested in changes of the professional staff (administrators and teachers) that are directly linked to and result in desired student gains.
We can "backward map" this process by starting with the end result. First, we must identify the desired student results. Next, we can specify the knowledge and skills required of the professional staff that will achieve the student results. Then, we are able to provide the conditions and structures, content and processes of professional development that will produce the required professional behaviors. This looks linear which, of course, it is not. The components of the process are in continuous interaction and are circular.
What is important about this approach is that it specifies clearly what the professional staff, who are responsible and accountable for students, need to do to generate the student gains. This also gives the providers of professional development clarity about what they need to do to produce the necessary learning in the school's professionals. Intuitively, professional development espouses the theory that the school's staff are the first learners. Let us make this idea more explicit.
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