In this article, we presuppose that administrators, teachers, and learners
have several things in common: they are all learners, they don't ever completely
know how to go about their jobs, and they can learn from each other. While
they are similar in these respects, we also find it useful to realize the
extent of their responsibility and the power they have to create learning
opportunities for each other. While it is generally agreed that learners
(at all levels) have to do most of the work when learning, there are certain
structures (top-down) and certain ways of organizing education that will
help or hold back these endeavors. That is the bet of education. Unfortunately,
we sometimes lose this bet, and people find they learn and grow more easily
outside of school than in.
Teacher development (td) is greatly influenced by the organizational
decisions administrators routinely make, which in turn determines how much
students will learn. Recent research suggests that the administrator's part
in td is crucial, as it helps to construct the social, political, emotional,
and intellec-tual working environment for teachers. What teachers do within
these contexts, however, largely depends upon their iniffatives to take
action and use the opportunities offered to them. While neither party alone
can completely make or break the efforts of the other, they can make great
strides when they work together.
(In a sense, of course, all teachers are administrators to some degree.
In our own small ways, whether it be directing a school, a teacher education
program, a small group of teachers, our own classes or simply contributing
our voice in a faculty meeting, we administer.)
We learn continually to administer and manage from role models around
us. Moreover, we too,are role models for others, and what we do may impact
generations. Thus td is administrator development as well. Or put another
way, we can't do one without the other: like a car pool, one person may
be driving at a particular time, but all have to communicate to reach their
respective goals.
With reference to the new kinds of leaming that are informing the field,
Lieberman (1995) summarizes the limitations of traditional approaches to
teacher development which shape administrative decisions.
She lists the following concerns:
- Teachers' professional development has been limited by lack of knowledge
about how teachers learn. - Teachers' definitions of the problems of practice have often been ignored.
- The agenda for reform involves teachers in practices that have not
been part of the accepted view of teachers' professional learning. - Teaching has been described as a set of technical skills, leaving little
room for invention and the building of craft knowledge. - Professional development opportunities have often ignored the critical
importance of the context within which teachers work. - Strategies for change have often not considered the importance of support
mechanisms and the necessity of learning over time. - Time and the necessary mechanisms for inventing, as well as consuming,
new knowledge have often been absent from schools. - The move from "direct teaching" to facilitating "in-school
learning" is connected to longer-term strategies aimed not only at
changing teaching practice, but at changing the school culture as well.
(pp. 595-596)
These concems highlight a need for a paradigm shift in education. We
do not anticipate agreement on all these points; however, discussion alone
will go a long way toward clarifying goals and encouraging flexibility and,
hopefully, collaboration. We believe administrators can have an especially
beneficial impact upon teacher development when they (a) update theories
and metaphors of learning, (b) clarify and verbalize mission, vision and
beliefs, (c) act coherently with flexibility and respect, (d) encourage
a community of learners, and (5) create structures that allow excellence
to emerge and highlight the excellence.
Update theories/metaphors of learning: switching from transmission to
construction
Recently, Freeman and Johnson (1998) argue for a reconstruction of the
knowledge base of teacher education, accounting for the teacher as learner,
for the social context, and for the activities of both teaching and learning.
This is in stark contrast to the old transmission metaphor in which university
theorists do research, create theory, and then tell teachers how learning
happens and how teaching should be done (and in which teachers simply Utell"
information to students and test their learning). Instead, those at the
forefront of educational change advocate a constructivist paradigm
(Barfield, 1995) in which teachers are seen as constructing their own knowledge
of teaching through their own "apprenticeship of observation"
(Lortie,1975). Their apprenticeship consists of their past experiences as
students observing their teachers and their own experiences teaching.
In this new metaphor, speakers do not simply transmit information from
their brains to ours; rather we perceive the information in our own way
and construct our own understanding of it using our past experiences. In
fact, the more ways that we can experience this information the better we
are able to construct a robust representation of it in our own minds, using
our past knowledge (cf. schema theory, multiple intelligences, modalities
of learning).
So for example, in drivers' education students may read materials and
listen to lectures, but they also might see videos, drive in simulators,
and then drive in safe zones before venturing out on the highway with a
teacher. Learning gradually and through many different modalities obviously
enriches and speeds up the learning much more than uni-dimensional "telling
about" could ever hope to. Most school learning can afford to be inefficient
because failing to learn there is not immediately life-threatening (as in
driving), it is merely life-stagnating.
The most robust representation that teachers have of teaching is usually
what happens in their own classes and in their own contexts, mainly because
they are the ones who are acting multi-modally (speaking, writing, moving,
acting, planning, etc.). Theory and methods that do not take teachers own
experiences of teaching into consideration have little chance of changing
what they are doing.
When administrators realize that teachers don't learn to implement new
information simply by being told (transmission), the need for a period of
exploration and experimentation in the teachers' own classrooms becomes
apparent. In discussing innovations and curriculum changes, administrators
may also become aware of constraints and capacities in the specific contexts
that allow or inhibit change (Sato, 1996).
Switching metaphors for education entrains several other ideas which
when adopted together can lead to a more coherent shift in educational culture:
Teachers are life-long learners. Teaching is not simply
learned and then done. We can, and need to continually, adapt to new classes
and students, new times, and our own personal and professional developmental
time-lines. This continual fine-tuning nudges us to strive for better and
to keep our teaching exciting.
It is OK not to know it all. Nobody does. We aren't perfect.
We never will be. Accept it. Get into the habit of adjusting and cultivating
flexibility and collaborating with others.
Involve students in a search for better ways to learn and enhance
their learning and our learning at the same time. Allowing students
to collaborate in the effort to better educate them provides teachers and
administrators with valuable information and learning which can greatly
enrich the learning-lives of all. It develops student autonomy and collaborative
desire. Education too often follows the "one size fits all" myth.
Like some irresponsible doctors who don't examine clients, some educators
simply prescribe the same treatment for everybody without a concern for
past history, present beliefs and practices, and follow-up reports. Developing
a community-of-learners perspective (see below) places learning at the center
of the social interaction for everyone.
Clarify mission, vision, and belies
When administrators verbalize a mission of on-going "exploratory
teaching" (Allwright, 1991) and action research in order to adapt to
changing situations, teachers feel supported and dare to experiment and
find improved ways to add to their repertoires. Stanovich and Jordon (1998)
found that of all the variables they looked at, a school principal's expressed
beliefs in certain classroom procedures was the greatest determinate of
teachers' classroom behaviors. Teachers might espouse certain currently
popular beliefs, such as communicative language teaching, but their performance
more often than not followed the expressed beliefs of their principal.-Sato
and Murphey (1998) also found that teachers espoused beliefs were not only
in conflict with institutional beliefs, but that teacher behavior more often
than not followed the latter.
While we strongly believe in bottom-up initiated teacher change, we also
realize that without top-down changes in coherently expressed missions,
visions, and beliefs, many teachers are unlikely to seriously embrace change
on their own.
Act coherently with flexibility and respect.
Clarke et. al. (1998) showed how three teachers with very different methodologies
could still create excellent learning environments in which students made
extraordinary progress. What these three teachers had in common was typified
as "coherence." They were consistent, organized and showed respect
for their students. Their respect and belief in their students was transparent.
Because they established certain consistent rules and routines in their
classes, students and teachers felt freer to experiment and be flexible
when it served their purpose.
Kleinsasser and Savignon (1992) describe two distinct types of cultures
of teachers in their research. One was "routine/uncertain cultures,"
where teachers were uncertain about their instructional practice and thus
engaged rigidly in routines. They had few conversations about instruction,
and relied on traditional approaches. The other was "non-routine/certain
cultures," where teachers were confident about their instruction, and
their daily practices were not predictable. Teachers collaborated across
departments and incorporated more communicative activities. In short, these
two groups revealed the strong relationship between school contexts and
teachers' practices.
Both these strands of research emphasize the importance of secure environments
for exploration, in which learners and teachers are not simply implementing
a method or routine, but rather using their security to dare to explore
with flexibility, to establish extraordinary learning cultures.
Idealistically, whatever administrators can do to help construct a coherent,
consistent framework which teachers can count on for support, without overly
constraining them, will help teachers feel secure enough to experiment and
use the flexibility necessary for the improvement of teaching. Perhaps one
of the most important contributing elements is the development of rapport
and respect between people engaged in communities of learners.
Encourage the construction of communities of learners
Rogoff (1994) clearly outlines the problems with models of purely adult-run
or children-run learning situations and proposes a middle road in which
all can collaborate in a community of learners. Using Lave and Wenger's
(1991) concept of legitimate peripheral participation, in which new participants
gradually move into widening fields of participation, Rogoff describes several
contexts in which
Learning involves the whole program in a continual process of renewal
and change within continuity, as new generations come to play the roles
of newcomers and old-timers in the community. . . one is never 'done' learning."
(p. 220).
Far from being either authoritarian dictators or permissive teachers
lacking structure, teachers within communities of learners provide structure
and flexibility and allow themselves the space to learn. Rogoff's key points
could very well be applied to administrators and teachers as well as adults
and children:
- adults serve as leaders and facilitators rather than direct instructors,
- instruction emphasizes the process rather than just the products of
learning, - teaching builds on inherent interest in activities and responsibility
for making choices, - evaluation of student progress occurs through working with the child
and observing, and - cooperative learning occurs throughout the whole program. (p. 220)
Kleinsasser and Savignon's (1992) research showed hat there were indeed
communities of teachers who were able to work together securely with flexibility.
Rogoff's work contributes more to a fuller description of the characteristics
of such communities and provides points of departure for administrators
as they replace a desire to control results with a desire to collaborate
with teachers and learners and improve education together.
Create structures that allow excellence to emerge and then highlight
the excellence
Within classrooms, Murphey and Woo (1998) found that when they provided
ways for students to contribute more to the program, the students invested
more of themselves in learning. Like employees who have stock in their employing
company, students invest more in doing a good job because they understand
that their actions do have an impact on the direction of the whole group.
When teachers also feel they can contribute to administrative decision making,
they also feel more part of a community and want to contribute even more.
Finding ways to highlight the different voices also seems crucial to
developing the feeling that one is not "subject to" the administrative
discourse but rather "subject of" and a shaper of this discourse
(Peirce, 1995). Small-group discussions, reports, newsletters, and open
email discussion lists are just a few of the ways that this can be done.
With more voices and ideas available, our choices expand, and we have more
flexibility in the directions we take. It is obviously crucial to acknowledge
the source of these ideas and to let participants know that they are influencing
administrative directions and their peers. Access forums for the elaboration
and celebration of new ideas might also take the form of school mini-conferences
and larger publications that publish teachers action research reports and
shorter work (Murphey & Sasaki, 1998; Murphey, in press).
- Darling-Hammond and McLaughlin (1995) pose a set of questions which
themselves can be "interviewed" (i.e. subjected to further questions),
to determine how much administrators are concerned with td when making
policy decisions. For example: - Does the policy reduce the isolation of teachers, or does it perpetuate
the experiences of working alone? - Does the policy encourage teachers to assume the role of leamer, or
does it reward traditional "teacher as expert" approaches to
teacher-student relations? - Does the policy provide a rich, diverse menu of opportunities for teachers
to leartn, or does it focus primarily on episodic, narrow "training"
activities? - Does the policy link professional development opportunities to meaningful
content and change efforts, or does it construct generic in-service occasions? - Does the policy establish an environment of professional trust and
encourage problem solving, or does it exacerbate the risks involved in
serious reflection and change, and thus encourage problem hiding? - Does the policy pronde opportunities for everyon involved with schools
to understand new visions of teaching and learning, or does it focus only
on teachers? - Does the policy make possible the restmcturing of time, space, and
scale within schools, or does it expect new forms of teaching and learning
to emerge within conventional stmctures? - Does the policy focus on learner-centered outcomes that give priority
to learning how and why, or does it emphasize the memonzation of facts
and the acquisition of rote skills? (p. 604)
Were administrators to consult such a list regularly when forming policy,
td might stand a better chance of integrating itself into the routine running
of schools.
Conclusion
Obviously we still don't know everything about how we can facilitate
the forming of communities of learners, and much research remains to be
done. However, we do know such communities exist in a variety of forms and
that they are possible. We have indications of some of their ingredients:
mutual respect, structures for open communication, permission to explore
and fail, security that voices will be taken seriously, the encouragement
of experimentation and improvement. The endemic isolation of educators is
probably a major cause of burnout not only for many teachers, but for administrators
as well. Forming mutually supportive collaborative relationships in the
workplace can go a long way to alleviating these problems and exciting professional
and personal development. Administrators are well positioned to help create,
contribute to and participate in communities of learners when they choose
to inform themselves and to enlist collaboration from teachers and students.
Editor's note: Due to budget constraints, this artid e did not appear
in its intended venue, the November 1998 special issue on TeacherDevelopment,
TLT23, (11). We wish to thank Tim Murphey forgraciously agreeing to the
artide's appearing in a later issue.
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