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School leaders can improve instruction by addressing these issues
In most discussions of "what works" in education, the focus is on rules (such as class size limits) or on programs and their various components. These are clearly important. But no matter what the reform, implementation is key.
Five challenges to achieving and sustaining social and intellectual engagement in implementing professional development for school improvement are:
1. Introducing new activities in ways that inspire buy-in;
2. Balancing principal control with teacher autonomy;
3. Committing to ambitious goals;
4. Maintaining industriousness in pursuit of those goals; and
5. Effectively harvesting and sustaining the gains.
For each of the five challenges, school leaders take strategic actions and hope people will respond in ways likely to foster success.
Ask the leaders what they did in any school or district where test scores have risen dramatically, and some part of the answer will often resemble these strategies. What determines whether teachers are receptive to a strategy and whether they work hard to make an initiative successful? Leadership is a major part of the answer. Failure to successfully address the first three challenges is among the reasons professional development programs fail.
ANALYZING PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
For the past several years, the Tripod Project for School Improvement has surveyed students and teachers regarding the five challenges.
Generally, there is nothing in the answers to suggest most teachers tried to make the programs work and failed or believed that the programs could not have affected teaching and learning in their classrooms if implemented well. Instead, it appears programs had little or no effect because they were never really implemented. The teacher surveys suggest that professional development fails not primarily because the ideas do not work when implemented or because teachers reject the approaches outright, but because the ideas are not implemented. (see survey results above.)
The implications are straightforward. Programs that have minimal impact have not been implemented because leaders have failed to:
* Select and introduce ideas in ways that foster trust (feelings of security) and interest, not mistrust or lack of interest.
* Assign responsibilities and manage accountability in ways likely to achieve a balance of leadership control and follower autonomy, not too much or too little of either control...