Resources
Book Review
Teachers Caught in the Action:
Professional Development that Matters.
Edited by Ann Lieberman and Lynne Miller.
New York: Teachers College Press, 2001.
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Maxine Greene, in the opening chapter, challenges us as educators to use our "imaginations in order to perceive the alternatives." This collection of essays by some of the leading researchers, scholars, and thinkers about professional development and school change provides an inspiring array of hopeful alternatives for the field. Several of the chapters are written by LASW Collaborative members and/or draw on the work of their home organizations; some explicitly address the role of collaboratively examining student work in staff development.
Of special interest for LASW practitioners is Joe McDonald's chapter, "Students, Work and Teachers, Learning," in which he considers the range of protocols for looking at students, work and identifies three categories: 1) protocols for suspending judgment, such as the Collaborative Assessment Conference and the Descriptive Review; 2) protocols for tuning judgment, such as the Tuning Protocol and the NYS Peer Review; and 3) protocols for extending judgment schoolwide, such as the Slice and School Quality Review models. McDonald notes that partisans for these protocols have sometimes been at odds with each other. He argues for "an effort undertaken across reform efforts--whether those of states, networks, intermediary organizations, or districts and schools--to put aside ideological concerns in the interest of promoting different protocols for different needs."
In their chapter, "Going Public: The Imperative of Public Education in the 21st Century," Carl Glickman and Derrick Alridge argue that in order to develop more democratic schools we need more public demonstrations of student learning. In their view, professional development for teachers should includes setting and implementing learning goals with students as well as working with colleagues, for example, in a Critical Friends Group, in which, among other things, teachers share and assess work from their classrooms.
Judith Warren Little, in "Professional Development in Pursuit of School Reform," reports on research from a high-visibility demonstration project. She describes a range of "conceptions" of reform held by teachers in the sites studied, including: professional development as inspiration and goal setting; professional development as knowledge and skill development; professional development as inquiry; and professional development as collaboration. She argues that we must attend not only to the capacity for reform, but the meaning or significance teachers attach to any specific initiative. She also notes that teachers have felt that opportunities for teacher learning are often displaced by accountability demands.
Marilyn Cochran-Smith and Susan Lytle, in "Beyond Certainty: Taking an Inquiry Stance on Practice," discover that "teachersâ work in inquiry communities generates knowledge that may be thought of as both local and public." In their report on the BASRC (Bay Area School Reform Collaborative), Milbrey McLaughlin and Joel Zarrow consider the "trajectories" of teachersâ involvement in inquiry, including participation in collaborative groups.
Chapters by Jackie Ancess and Laura Stokes look closely at inquiry-oriented staff development in individual schools, and Lynn Miller considers how a school-based partnership (Southern Maine Partnership) can act as a "venue" for professional development with lessons on how to inclusively create and sustain such venues. Bev Falk continues her exploration of the place of teacher learning in assessment, especially in standards-based contexts.
Chapters by Ann Lieberman & Diane Wood, and Sarah Warshauer Freedman, consider, respectively, networks of teachers as writers and as researchers.