two full years. Connie was excited about this assignment. She believed in the benefits of an integrated curriculum. She felt that the long-term relationships with students would be beneficial, and she welcomed the idea of working closely with two colleagues who shared the same students. She was also enthusiastic about the fact that the teachers were free to schedule the three-hour block as they saw fit. Free from the limits of a 50-minute period, Connie thought she could offer some interesting simulations and mock trials for her students. She spent the rest of the day working with her colleagues to strengthen their first interdisciplinary unit. She appreciated the fact that they solicited her opinion and were receptive to her questions.
On the next day, Connie worked with her other team—the United States history team. All teachers responsible for teaching the same course were members of a team for that course. The teams developed common course descriptions, articulated the essential outcomes for the course, established the criteria for assessing the quality of student work, and developed common assessment instruments. The history team spent considerable time reviewing and grading ex-amples of essays that students had written the year before. Connie found this practice particularly helpful in both understanding what the department emphasized and identifying the criteria for evaluating student work. By the end of the morning, the teachers were very consistent in the way they applied the departmental criteria to grading student work.
That afternoon the team analyzed student performance according to the common assessment instruments from the previous year, identified areas where students did not meet the desired proficiencies established by the team, and discussed strategies for improving student performance. The discussion helped Connie understand what students were to accomplish, how they were to be assessed, and where they had experienced difficulties in the past. She found the discussion to be invaluable. She spent part of the third day of teacher preparation working with her teams and discussing with her mentor a few ideas she planned to use in her opening comments to students the next day. Finally, she spent the rest of her day examining profiles of her new students.
Once the school year was underway, the new teachers continued to meet at least once each month for ongoing orientation. Sometimes teachers with particular interests or skills would talk to the group on activities in their classes. One of these sessions helped Connie solve a problem she was having structuring individual accountability into cooperative learning activities. Other times, the principal provided new teachers with an article or case study and asked them to react to the item in their personal journals. These reflections then became the basis for the group’s discussion. The sessions always included an opportunity to ask questions. As the year progressed, Connie found that her meetings with the other new teachers helped her develop a sense of camaraderie and shared experience with them.
By the third week of school, Connie had become concerned about one of her history students who seemed unwilling to work. Although he was not disruptive, Matthew seemed detached in class and rarely turned in any work. Connie spoke to him after class one day to express her concerns and to discuss possible ways of engaging him in the classroom activity. When the conference failed to bring about any change, Connie discussed the problem with Jim. He suggested alerting Matthew’s student support team (SST). Connie learned that teachers were not the only ones in the school to work in teams. A counselor, dean, and social worker also shared responsibility for the same group of students. When Connie explained her concerns to Matthew’s counselor, the SST decided to seek information from all of his teachers. It soon became evident that the behavior pattern that Matthew demonstrated in Connie’s classroom was evident in all of his classes. The SST decided it was time to convene a parent conference to review Matthew’s status both with his parents and teachers. At the conference, the teachers jointly developed strategies that would enable Matthew’s parents to be aware of his assignments. The parents promised to monitor their son carefully to ensure he would keep up with his work.
Jim trained Connie in the school’s approach to classroom observation and teacher evaluation before the department chairman and principal began the formal process with her. She became comfortable having Jim observe her teaching and found her debriefing sessions with him to be very helpful. He explained that all the mentors had been trained in analyzing teaching and providing constructive feedback.
Connie expected the principal to be more directive in the teacher evaluation process and anticipated she would receive some kind of rating at the conclusion of her conference with the principal. She was wrong on both counts. The principal asked probing questions: Why did you decide to teach this content? How does it fit with the major outcomes of the course? How did you know students had the prerequisite knowledge and skills to be successful in this unit? Why did you use the instructional strategies you selected? How do you know if students achieved the intended outcomes? What patterns do you see in your teaching? What worked and what did not work in this lesson? If you were to teach this lesson again, would you do anything differently? By the end of the conference, Connie realized that she had done most of the talking and that the principal was simply providing prompts to encourage her to reflect on and articulate her conclusions about her teaching.
Connie was surprised to discover the number of action research projects in progress in her department. For example, teachers were divided on the question of ability grouping. Some argued that remedial classes created a climate of low expectations and were harmful to students. They called for students to be grouped heterogeneously. Others argued that remedial classes offered the best strategy for meeting the special needs of students who had experienced trouble with social studies in the past. The teachers subsequently agreed to put their respective theories to the test. Remedial students were randomly assigned either to heterogeneous classes or to remedial classes, and the teachers agreed on the assessment strategies they would use at the end of the year to see which approach was more effective. In another project, some teachers volunteered to increase their class size by 25% in order to reduce their teaching assignment from five sections to four, thus leaving more time for joint planning. Once again, teachers in the experimental and traditional classes agreed on the criteria they would monitor to determine the effectiveness of each approach.
Connie learned that action research was not limited to her department; in fact, each department had various action research projects underway. She also learned that the school had established a special entrepreneurial fund offering teachers opportunities to develop grant proposals for projects to improve the school. After a review by a faculty committee to determine which proposals offered the greatest promise, the school board provided funding for the implementation of those proposals. It was obvious to Connie that experimentation played an important part in the culture of her new school.
Reflection and dialogue were also essential to the workings of the school. For example, all teachers benefited from peer observation. Teachers created reading clubs that reviewed and discussed books and major articles on teaching and learning. Faculty members participated in a portfolio development project based on the criteria identified by the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards. Department meetings typically opened with a teacher sharing a strategy or insight with colleagues and then responding to questions. Connie was impressed with the lively give and take of these discussions. She noticed that teachers felt comfortable probing and challenging one another’s thinking.
It was soon very evident that ongoing professional growth was expected at this school. The district offered three different areas of concentration—authentic assessment, student-centered learning, or multiple intelligences. Teaching teams agreed to pursue one of these three professional development initiatives for at least three years. Connie’s interdisciplinary team had already opted for authentic assessment. Each school year, five half-days and two full days had been set aside for concentrated focus on these topics.
The faculty members had committed themselves to making a concerted effort to integrate technology into the curriculum. They had agreed to adjust other budget areas in order to fund a full-time technology trainer. This trainer not only offered a regular schedule of technology classes for all staff during their preparation periods; she also provided one-on-one, just-in-time training when individual staff members identified a need. With
