Research
Summary
The Questions:
If professional development is to be meaningful
and valuable to teachers, it is necessary to know
what teachers want to learn, from whom /how they
want to learn it and give them a part in creating
it. When teachers see themselves as active participants
in a variety of school governance issues ranging
from advisement to planning to leading workshops,
they are more likely to buy into professional development
activities, strategies, and implementation.
Using grant funding and consultant support, the
school established a Design Team comprised of faculty
and administration. The Design Team helped to set
goals within the school in terms of school-wide
student activities and professional development
planning. With this in mind and spurred by the decision
in my school to develop a Design Team, my research
question became: How does a teacher’s level of involvement
in planning or facilitating professional development
impact his/her view of him/herself as a teacher/leader
in a school and level of teacher involvement in
PD creation/facilitation impact the culture of a
school?
Draft of Action Research
Over the last three years, my pre-kindergarten
to eighth grade school in the Bronx had been implementing
a Comprehensive School Reform (CSR) grant. The goal
of the CSR Program is to ultimately raise student
achievement in the school by making changes and
improvements in the way certain aspects of the school
are organized. Among the reforms implemented to
positively affect student achievement and school
improvement has been a commitment to “distribute
educational leadership” within the school building.
This strand of school improvement includes having
teachers take on more active leadership roles irrespective
of whether they have specific “leadership” titles
within their school building.
In my school, we chose to focus on greater involvement
of teachers and staff in choosing and planning for
professional development. Our rationale for this
approach was that when a someone takes a personal
interest in what he is learning and sees relevance
in it, he is more likely to become engaged and active
in that learning process. For teachers, this means
deciding which topics are for study as relevant
professional development. Student achievement is
impacted because teachers bring information or instructional
practices that they have sought to help them meet
student needs and reach standards and goals.
In order to see how teachers perceive leadership
and professional development in my school, I developed
a survey. After looking at the survey format, I
made some changes that I believed would make the
survey shorter and data analysis easier. The survey
was then shared with the school principal. The survey
and principal feedback were then shared with the
Design Team. The Team made decisions about wording
and about questions that might be added in order
to gauge what teachers felt about on leadership
and involvement in planning. Once the survey had
been updated and approved by the principal it was
given to the school’s teachers during a faculty
conference. |