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Monday, February 03, 2003

By Eleanor Chute, Post-Gazette Education Writer

At first, Clairton teacher Joan Livingston found the idea intimidating.

An outside "coach" would visit her classroom and that of every other elementary teacher once a month to help each teacher with a new program to teach spelling, reading and language arts.

	Former Pittsburgh school superintendent Helen Faison now directs the Pittsburgh Teachers Institute, a partnership of the city school district, Chatham College and Carnegie Mellon University. (Martha Rial, Post-Gazette)

But after more than a year of such visits -- combined with workshops, monitoring and other training -- Livingston welcomes the coaches.

Livingston, who has a dozen years of experience and came to Clairton last school year, said the coaches help to personalize what she needs to know to be a better teacher in the highly scripted program, called Direct Instruction.

The coaching program is an example of "professional development" -- ongoing training for working teachers.

Professional development has come a long way since schools would herd all the teachers into an auditorium to hear a speaker talk for an hour or two.

Yes, there still might be sessions in the auditorium for information that all teachers need to know or to hear an occasional speaker.

But many districts are now targeting professional development time to meet specific needs, such as preparing teachers to handle a new curriculum or helping them learn how to use the latest brain research to increase student learning.

"Teacher professional development is a key to teacher quality," said Vicki Phillips, Gov. Ed Rendell's choice as the new state secretary of education.

And while professional development may not improve every teacher, it can make a difference, said Sylvia Wilson, assistant to the president of the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers, the teachers' union in the city district.

City schools have instructional teacher leaders who work with other teachers to help them hone their techniques. This has helped to cut down on unsatisfactory performance ratings, she said. "Sometimes a person just needs a little help."

Open critique

Clairton, one of the state's 12 low-performing or "empowerment" districts, is spending about $140,000 a year in state funds for workshops and coaching in Direct Instruction for kindergarten through eighth grade. Clairton also hired an in-house facilitator.

On one visit, consultant Maggie Boozer told Livingston, in front of her fourth-graders, "Your presentation is excellent. Your technical skills are right there."

But Boozer also advised her to tell students not to raise their hands, so that all of them would get ready to answer a question instead of just the ones who wanted to, and encouraged her to make a chart of solar system facts.

Boozer also reviewed students' tests to see if the teacher needed any strategies to help particular students.

Professional development may be more important than ever because of changes in education, ranging from the need to handle more diverse abilities within a single classroom to educational research into what works.

"What you learned 25 years ago or 10 years ago when you prepared to be a teacher will not make it today," said Marilyn Cochran-Smith, education professor at Boston College and co-chair of the American Educational Research Association's Consensus Panel on Teacher Education.

In recent years, more and more states have been requiring teachers to continue their education throughout their careers.

In every five-year period, Pennsylvania's teachers now must get 180 hours of professional education, six credits of collegiate study or six credits of continuing education courses, or a combination. Coaching in the classroom doesn't count, but many workshops and in-service days on company time do.

The professional development law, called Act 48, only went into effect in 2000. Before Act 48, there were no real requirements.

Some have questioned whether the law goes far enough.

One proposal had called for twice as many hours as were ultimately approved, but teachers opposed it as unreasonable, in part because of the difficulties fulfilling the requirement in rural areas.

Even so, the approved allotment of 180 hours over five years is three times as much as the 12 hours per year Pennsylvania lawyers are required to have.

And some districts and teachers go far beyond the Act 48 requirements.

One of the most extensive professional development programs is in Quaker Valley School District, which serves 11 municipalities in the Sewickley area.

It gives teachers 90 hours a year of professional development time as part of their regular schedules -- 30 minutes a day every day -- plus nine professional development days.

Other programs

Both major teacher unions, the Pennsylvania State Education Association and the Pennsylvania Federation of Teachers, offer professional development classes.

The state Department of Education offers 10 free "canned" online courses (there's no instructor). They are worth 15 hours, and over the first two years, 9,921 educators took them.

The state also offers weeklong governor's institutes for educators, which have attracted more than 7,000 participants over about five years.

The Mon Valley Education Consortium annually sponsors "Mon Valley Learns," a day that attracts about 2,000 teachers from about a dozen districts for programs designed by teachers.

Colleges and universities are part of the picture, too. For example, the Pittsburgh Teachers Institute, a partnership of Chatham College, Carnegie Mellon University and the Pittsburgh Public Schools, offers academic seminars on a wide range of topics, from Latin America to genetics. Teachers develop curriculum units using the content.

Helen Faison, former city school superintendent and director of the institute, said the seminars emphasize content because experienced teachers probably need that more than they need teaching techniques or sessions on adolescent psychology. "Content changes so fast in some of the areas," Faison said.

Not all professional development activities count for Act 48 credit, but the state has approved 1,289 providers for such credit, including school districts, intermediate units, universities and other organizations.

So far, any evidence about the quality of Act 48 offerings -- good or bad -- is anecdotal.

Ron Cowell, president of the Education Policy and Leadership Center and a former state legislator, said he has heard of "excellent" offerings as well as those that do not "rise to the level of any meaningful academic experience."

Lorraine Tyler, executive director for the city schools' Division of Instructional Support, thinks reinforcement is the key to any training experience.

The Pittsburgh Public Schools include two in-service days: one at the building level and one that groups teachers by content area and grade level. But the district also enhances that with voluntary workshops after school and on Saturdays; and literacy and math coaches are assigned to schools so that teachers can ask questions and receive guidance in their own classrooms.

"You can't give a person one shot of something and no follow-up and expect that to change things," Tyler said.

"When you have someone on site, in your classroom as you're teaching, who can give you immediate feedback, that makes all the difference in the world."

Mikki Terry, deputy executive director for program development of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, said some teachers in the '70s didn't think they needed any more training, but now the culture of the school demands it.

"For a while, you would hear the lament, 'I'm still a good teacher. The kids have changed. I'm teaching the kids the same way as 20 years ago. I don't know why the kids aren't getting it.'

"You can tolerate that for a while. Pretty soon, your colleagues start saying, 'Maybe the kids have changed, but you're going to change, too.' "