Article courtesy of Phi Delta Kappan, September 1995

Can Teachers Be Trusted To Improve Teaching? By Dale Mann,  professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, NY.

Public policy with regard to school reform remains stuck on aggressive, expensive, and often untested strategies. And the results remain pretty much what we have always had. Hothouse demonstrations aside, public schooling is the one sector of public life that remains fundamentally unchanged since the last century. Why, unlike communications or transportation or medicine or even agriculture, has the school remained a slice of 19th century life?

Part of the answer lies in technology, but part of it is in people and how they are treated. Virtually everyone agrees that, unless reform reaches the classroom teacher, not much is gained. Yet many "school improvement" strategies target everything but what teachers do in classrooms.

Trusting Teachers

IMPACT II The Teachers Network marches to a different drummer. As Ernest Boyer put it in describing IMPACT II, "The key word is trust." Built on 15 years of proven results, IMPACT II continues to trust classroom teachers, to mobilize them in support of school improvement, and to refine and extend the agenda of teacher leadership.

Founded in 1979 as an experimental pilot program, IMPACT II today is a nationwide nonprofit organization that supports innovative teachers who show professionalism, independence, and creativity within the public schools. IMPACT II provides teachers with grant money for the dissemination of fresh and creative in school programs.

Why is trusting teachers so important? One of the field visits conducted as part of the continuing improvement cycle of IMPACT II makes the point. Four California teachers had gathered one summer morning to listen to the principal of it neighboring school talk about yet another new "program from the state." Ordinarily things are done to teachers; they get developed in serviced, observed, evaluated, and regulated. All four of these teachers had survived dozens of other people's ideas. Snatches of their conversation included, "Are you sure no suits' will come and stand in the back of my classroom?" "There'll be no outsiders at all? No stupid requirements?"

Classroom teaching is an unremittingly lonely profession that is by and large untouched by reform.¹ A solo performance before 25 children and behind a closed door is still the norm for most American teachers. Such experience breeds loneliness and uncertainty.
Teachers ask themselves, "How good (or bad) am I really?" The isolation of the typical classroom cuts teachers off from the sources of improvement and from the habits of experimentation they might otherwise develop. It also divides a school's faculty, which might make teachers easier to control but does not make them more productive.

Manipulated, isolated, and infantilized, teachers get angry. As one put it, "Get a life! I've got 200 teenagers a day with problems their parents and the whole city have created but can't or won't solve, and this morning I have to teach all of them. So you want me to do what else about what pet project?" Those feelings are legitimate, particularly at an average annual salary (in 1993 94) of $35,958.² Moreover, angry, suspicious people resist change. The response of policy makers has been not to trust teachers more but to press them harder.

The Paradox of Soft Interventions
One of the current fashions in educational improvement is "systemic intervention:' meaning that reform must involve the entire organization, all its functions and planning, In this full court press for reform, it is common to go after changes in assessment, in curriculum, in financing, and in governance all at once and with all the resources and authority that can be marshaled.

Could such "soft interventions" be effective? What if someone asked teachers how they thought improvement should proceed? When that question was put to IMPACT II participants, 68% said their chosen strategy would be to "participate in a teacher network with small grants to teachers"; 39% said "hold in-service days"; 38% said "pay teachers to try [methods of improvement]"; 16% said "work through teacher centers or similar places"; and 14% said "have administrators require change."

IMPACT II is one of American education's premier soft interventions. In 15 years IMPACT II has awarded grants to 20,000 teachers in 2,000 schools. Those professionals have, in turn, reached out to another 500,000 teachers, using the programs research documented, teacher to teacher development techniques.

How does IMPACT II work? It begins with a teacher's good idea. Through its small grants it then helps the teacher package that innovation; connects that teacher with other interested colleagues; and then recruits all the interested teachers into a continuing professional and social network.

1. The better idea. Anyone who is any good at any job figures out ways to do it better. IMPACT II designates teachers who have developed better mousetraps for their own classrooms as "developer/disseminators" and awards them grants of from $300 to $500.
2. Packaging the idea. Teachers use the grant money to package their ideas and to connect with other interested teachers, known as "adapter" teachers, who receive slightly less money to cut and fit the original ideas to their classrooms. The developer/disseminator teacher , want to help others improve their work: the adapters are more likely to want to make their own classrooms better.
3. Connecting good people. Rather than simply assuming that all teachers are the same or that adult to adult teaching and learning happen magically, IMPACT II manages the process. Those innovative faculty members who are located in the first two steps are then recruited into a professional/social network of like minded individuals. Here, IMPACT II departs from the conventional "small grants" practice, which typically awards one time money the effect of which runs out when the money runs out.

However rare it may be to treat teachers so thoughtfully, IMPACT II's trainer/trainee processes and network building are consistent with what is known about the effective dissemination of new ideas. IMPACT II goes far beyond the "suggestion box." It harnesses for schools the productive energy that business has found in"quality circles," in "team management," in kaien cycles, and in gain sharing productivity awards. It trusts teachers.

Results

From the beginning, IMPACT II accepted the discipline that comes from thorough evaluation and accountability. The program was founded in 1979 80, and the results of the first evaluation began to appear as early as 1982.³ Because of its unusual dedication to self improvement. IMPACT II has an equally unusual database covering its outcomes. The questions originally asked in 1981 were revisited in 1992 93. That survey of more than 1,000 sites in five states showed that, after 10 years, the main effects of IMPACT II's networking remain strongly in place.

Recognizing outstanding teachers. IMPACT II grantees identify themselves as master teachers and their colleagues agree. Seventy five percent of the grantees cite recognition, especially beyond their own schools as a benefit.

• Connecting outstanding teachers. More than half of the teachers studied endorsed the program's ability to reduce their isolation and increase their sense of collegiality.
• Improving classroom instruction. The ability to get behind the classroom door was one of the original achievements of IMPACT II. Current grantees remain enthusiastic about their access to new ideas through IMPACT II, especially ideas for presenting materials and managing classrooms.
• Disseminating good ideas. One frustration of traditional small grants programs is that their good work is done in isolation. Because IMPACT II is consciously managed as a network. the average IMPACT II teacher talks to an average of 24 other teachers about his or her idea for a better mousetrap.
• Improving diverse sites. The early research showed similar effects in Houston and in New York City. Since then, IMPACT II has grown to 26 sites, but it remains equally effective across urban and rural locales and in big and little schools.
• Keeping good teachers in teaching. IMPACT Il continues to provide opportunities for leadership and professional growth within teaching. The absence of such opportunities often pushes frustrated people out of the classroom - into administration or other careers.
• Providing lasting effects. The half life of improvement projects is notoriously short. IMPACT II has proved itself different. At the local level its former grantees continue to contribute to improvement efforts, and at the national level IMPACT II has become the dean of staff development programs.
  
  

The Exxon Education Foundation, The DeWitt Wallace Reader's Digest Fund and the National Diffusion Network of the U.S. Department of Education have supported research and evaluation of IMPACT II The Teachers Network.