Every year, nine in 10 of the nation's three million teachers participate in professional development designed to improve their content knowledge, transform their teaching, and help them respond to student needs. These activities, which can include workshops, study groups, mentoring, classroom observations, and numerous other formal and informal learning experiences, have mixed results in how they effect student achievement.
Research shows that professional learning can have a powerful effect on teacher skills and knowledge and on student learning. To be effective, however, it must be sustained, focused on important content, and embedded in the work of collaborative professional learning teams that support ongoing improvements in teachers' practice and student achievement.
A comprehensive new report released today by researchers from Stanford University and the National Staff Development Council (NSDC) finds that while the United States is making progress in providing support and mentoring for new teachers and focusing on bolstering content knowledge, the type of support and on-the-job training most teachers receive is episodic, often fragmented, and disconnected from real problems of practice. The report also reviews promising strategies in high-performing nations and U.S. states.
The report is part of a multi-year effort that will track state's progress over time and identify model policies and practices.
The report -- "Professional Learning in the Learning Profession: A Status Report on Teacher Development in the U.S. and Abroad" -- includes analyses of newly available data sources, including the National Center for Educational Statistics' Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) database for 2003-04. SASS is a nationally representative sample of more than 130,000 public and private school teachers across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Researchers also examined the NSDC Standards Assessment Inventory (2007-08), which has been administered to more than 150,000 teachers in more than 5,400 schools across 11 states and one Canadian province. Researchers examined data from 4 states (Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, and Missouri) that had administered the survey statewide.
The report documents some progress but many serious problems in teacher development today:
- Improvement in support for new teachers. According to the report, U.S. public schools have begun to recognize and respond to the need to provide more support for new teachers. Nationally, in 2003-04, more than two-thirds (68 percent) of public school teachers with fewer than five years of experience reported participating in a teacher induction program during the first year of teaching, and 71 percent reported being assigned some kind of mentor teacher. A decade earlier only 56 percent of teachers had experienced teacher induction in their first year of teaching.
- Workshop overload. Research shows that professional development should not be approached in isolation as the traditional "flavor of the month" or one-shot workshop but go hand-in-hand with school improvement efforts. The report finds that teachers still take a heavy dose of workshops and do not receive effective learning opportunities in many areas in which they want help.
- Little intensity, short duration. While rigorous studies indicate that intensive professional development efforts that offer an average of about 50 hours of support a year can make a significant impact on student achievement, raising test scores by an average of 21 percentage points, the majority of teachers in the United States (57 percent) receives no more than about two days (16 hours) of training in their subject areas. Fewer than one-quarter (23 percent) of all teachers receive more than 36 hours of professional learning in their subject areas.
- Working in isolation. U.S. teachers report little professional collaboration in designing curriculum and sharing practices, and the collaboration that occurs tends to be weak and not focused on strengthening teaching and learning.
- Major blind spots. Teachers are not getting adequate training in teaching special education or limited English proficient students. More than two-thirds of teachers nationally had not had even one day of training in supporting the learning of special education or LEP students during the previous three years, and only one-third agreed that they had been given the support they needed to teach students with special needs.
- Lack of utility. Teachers give relatively high marks to content-related learning opportunities, with 59 percent saying this training was useful or very useful. But fewer than half found the professional development they received in other areas, such as classroom management, to be of much value, despite the fact that they want more support in this area.
- Out-of-pocket payments. U.S. teachers, unlike many of their colleagues around the world, bear much of the cost of their professional development. While most teachers were given some time off during the work day to pursue professional learning opportunities, fewer than half received reimbursement for travel, workshop fees, or college expenses.
- Variation in support and opportunity among schools and states. A lower percentage of secondary school teachers reported participating in district-planned professional development than did elementary school teachers. Among states, Arkansas, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Vermont had significantly higher proportions of teachers participating in professional learning than the national average.
- Limited influence in decision-making. In many high-achieving nations where teacher collaboration is the norm, teachers have substantial influence on school-based decisions, especially in the development of curriculum and assessment, and in the design of their own professional learning. In the United States, however, less than one-fourth of teachers feel they have great influence over school decisions and policies in seven different areas noted in the SASS surveys. A scant majority feel that they have some influence over curriculum and setting performance standards for students, though fewer than half perceived that they had some influence over the content of their in-service professional development. And very few felt they had influence over school policies and decisions affecting either teacher hiring and evaluation or the allocation of the school budget.
WHAT OTHER NATIONS DO
The report notes that U.S. teachers participate in workshops and short-term professional development events at similar levels as teachers in other nations. But the United States is far behind in providing public school teachers with opportunities to participate in extended learning opportunities and productive collaborative communities. Those opportunities allow teachers to work together on instructional planning, learn from one another through mentoring or peer coaching, conduct research on the outcomes of classroom practices, and collectively guide curriculum, assessment, and professional learning decisions.
Data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and other sources indicate that other nations provide:
- Extensive opportunities for formal and informal in-service development.
- Time for professional learning and collaboration built into teachers' work hours.
- Professional development activities that are ongoing and embedded in teachersâ•’ contexts.
- School governance structures that support the involvement of teachers in decisions regarding curriculum and instructional practice.
- Teacher induction programs for new teachers that include release time for new teachers and mentors, and formal training of mentors.
One of the reasons opportunities for teacher development are superior in other nations is that teachers in those countries don't spend all of their hours in the classroom. U.S. teachers average far more net teaching time in direct contact with students (1,080 hours per year) than any other OECD nation. By comparison, the OECD average is only 803 hours per year for primary schools and 664 hours per year for upper secondary schools. U.S. teachers spend about 80 percent of their total working time engaged in classroom instruction, as compared to about 60 percent for these other nations' teachers, who thus have much more time to plan and learn together, and to develop high-quality curriculum and instruction.
In most countries, about 15 to 20 hours per week is spent on tasks related to teaching, such as preparing lessons, meeting with students and parents, and working with colleagues. By contrast, U.S. teachers generally have from 3 to 5 hours a week for lesson planning, which is done independently.
Following are some examples of approaches to professional learning that provide lessons for states and the federal government.
- In South Korea -- much like Japan and Singapore -- only about 35 percent of teachers' working time is spent teaching pupils. Teachers work in a shared office space during out-of-class time, since the students stay in a fixed classroom while the teachers rotate to teach them different subjects. The shared office space facilitates sharing of instructional resources and ideas among teachers, which is especially helpful for new teachers. Teachers in many of these countries engage in intensive lesson study in which they develop and fine-tune lessons together and evaluate their results.
- In Finland, teachers meet one afternoon each week to jointly plan and develop curriculum, and schools in the same municipality are encouraged to work together to share materials.
- More than 85 percent of schools in Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland provide time for professional development in teachers' work day or week, according to OECD.
- In Singapore, the government pays for 100 hours of professional development each year for all teachers in addition to the 20 hours a week they have to work with other teachers and visit each others' classrooms to study teaching. With the help of the National Institute of Education, teachers engage in collective action research projects to evaluate and improve their teaching strategies. Â
- England has instituted a national training program in best-practice literacy methods, using videotapes of teaching, training materials, and coaches who are available to work in schools. Â This effort coincided with a subsequent rise in the percentage of students meeting the target literacy standards from 63 percent to 75 percent in just three years.
- Since 2000, Australia has been sponsoring the Quality Teacher Programme, which provides funding for curriculum and professional development materials used in a trainer of trainers model to update and improve teachersâ•’ skills and understandings in priority areas and enhance the status of teaching in both government and non-government schools.
The experiences of these countries, the report says, "underscore the importance of on-the-job learning with colleagues as well as sustained learning from experts in content and pedagogy. The diversity of approaches indicates that schools can shape professional learning to best fit their circumstances and teacher and student learning needs."
Copies of the report are available online at http://www.nsdc.org/stateproflearning.cfm . The report summarizes a more in-depth research report, the complete version of which can be found at http://www.nsdc.org/stateproflearning.cfm and at http://www.srnleads.org
NEW REPORT FINDS THAT STATES SQUANDER OPPORTUNITIES WITH NEW TEACHERS
A new report released by the not-for-profit, non-partisan National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) finds that the laws and regulations of a majority of states discourage promising new teachers from sticking with the profession, while doing little to identify and move out ineffective teachers.
The report finds that states: 1) do not require sufficient support and evaluation of new teachers, a problem since most districts rarely opt to exceed state requirements; 2) do not require or even allow a teacher’s effectiveness to be considered when granting tenure, although states control how and when tenure is awarded; 3) cling to anachronistic compensation schemes rather than advancing differentiated pay systems; 4) are lagging in the development of the systems necessary for identifying effective teachers; 5) place a disproportionate emphasis on providing pension benefits to retiring teachers at the expense of providing benefits that would appeal to younger teachers; and 6) allow far too many ineffective teachers to remain in the classroom and gain tenure, including teachers who repeatedly fail to meet the state’s own licensing standards.
NCTQ President Kate Walsh said, “The third through fifth years of teaching represent an opportunity lost for teacher quality. That’s certainly when teachers begin to add real value, and it’s also when they tend to make decisions about staying or leaving. States can help districts do much more to ensure that the right teachers stay and the right teachers leave."
The 2008 State Teacher Policy Yearbook finds that state regulations are in need of significant reforms in order to improve teacher quality and offers states specific guidelines for rectifying substandard policies. Each state’s Yearbook, as well as a national summary, is immediately available for free download at www.nctq.org/stpy.
Low Rate of Participation in School Breakfast Means More Hunger, Less Learning, and Weaker State Economies
FRAC Calls for Congressional Steps to Increase Participation in the Program; Encourages States and Schools to Start Classroom Breakfast Programs
Participation in the School Breakfast Program grew to include 8.5 million children during the 2007-2008 school year, an increase of four percent over the previous school year, but the program still misses more than half of America’s eligible low-income children. Only 46 percent of eligible low-income children started the day with a healthy morning meal in 2007-2008, according to the Food Research and Action Center’s annual School Breakfast Scorecard.
All of the child nutrition programs, including the School Breakfast Program, are set to be reauthorized this year as part of Child Nutrition Reauthorization. Congress is anticipated to start reviewing the programs as early as February.
FRAC measures the reach of the School Breakfast Program by comparing the number of low-income children receiving school breakfast to the number of such children receiving school lunch. Nationally, if the number of low-income children who participated in the School Breakfast Program increased from 46 to 60 for every 100 who participated in the lunch program, almost 2.5 million more children would eat a healthy school breakfast every day, and states would receive an additional $561 million in child nutrition funding.
Two states, New Mexico and South Carolina, demonstrate that this is an achievable goal. New Mexico reaches 63 percent of eligible low-income children, and South Carolina reaches 60 percent. FRAC points out that this goal is reachable even in difficult budget times, since nearly 100 percent of breakfast costs for low-income children are paid by the federal government.
FRAC also issued a separate report, Breakfast in America’s Big Cities, which took the same approach to measuring breakfast participation in 19 large urban districts. Participation during the 2006-2007 school year ranged from a high of 89 percent in Newark to a low of 29 percent in Chicago. FRAC estimated that if each surveyed district was able to reach 70 low-income children with breakfast for every 100 that received free and reduced-price lunch, a goal reached by numerous cities, more than half a million additional students would have eaten a healthy school breakfast and the urban districts would have collected an additional $123 million in federal child nutrition funding.
According to the city report, school districts that offered breakfast free to all students, served breakfast in the classroom at the start of the school day rather than in the cafeteria, or offered bagged “grab and go” breakfasts from carts in the hallway generally experienced higher rates of breakfast participation. In fact, the three top performing school districts – Newark (N.J.), Boston (Mass.), and Minneapolis (Minn.) – all operated programs that served breakfast in the classroom at no charge to the students.
FRAC outlined a series of recommendations that the new Administration, Congress, states, and school districts can take to improve participation in the School Breakfast Program, including:
• Increasing federal investments for the program in the coming Child Nutrition Reauthorization in ways that help expand participation, bolster outreach efforts, and improve nutrition quality;
• Enacting, or strengthening, state law mandates that require schools, especially those with significant numbers of low-income students, to operate School Breakfast Programs, as well as providing state funding to support programs that offer breakfast free to all students and provide breakfast in the classroom, a strategy more and more districts are using to get the educational day off to a good start; and
• Encouraging school districts to operate programs that offer breakfast free to all students and to start in-classroom breakfast programs.
About the reports: _The full report, School Breakfast Scorecard, is available at www.frac.org/pdf/breakfast08.pdf. To measure the reach of the School Breakfast Program in each state, FRAC compares the number of schools and the number of low-income children that participate in breakfast to those that participate in the National School Lunch Program. FRAC also sets a participation goal of reaching 60 children with breakfast for every 100 receiving lunch as a way to gauge each state’s progress and the costs of underparticipation in the program.
For Breakfast in America’s Big Cities, FRAC surveyed 19 large urban school districts across the country on school breakfast participation rates and policies. The school districts included in the report are: Baltimore City Public Schools (Md.); Boston Public Schools (Mass.); Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (N.C.); Chicago Public Schools (Ill.); Clark County School District, Las Vegas (Nev.); Columbus Public Schools (Ohio); Denver Public Schools (Colo.); District of Columbia Public Schools (D.C.); Houston Independent School District (Tex.); Los Angeles Unified School District (Calif.); Miami-Dade County Public Schools (Fla.); Minneapolis School District (Minn.); Newark Public Schools (N.J.); New York City Department of Education (N.Y.); Oklahoma City Public Schools (Okla.); Omaha Public Schools (Neb.); Seattle Public Schools (Wash.); School District of Philadelphia (Pa.); and Wichita Public Schools (Kan.). For urban school districts, FRAC sets a higher participation goal of 70 percent. The full report is available at www.frac.org/pdf/urbanbreakfast08.pdf.
Results of the third school nutrition dietary assessment study published
Journal of the American Dietetic Association presents study findings and policy implications for improving the health of US children and adolescents
A special Supplement to the February 2009 issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association presents findings from the recently released Third School Nutrition Dietary Assessment Study (SNDA-III), conducted by Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., as well as research from other studies using SNDA-III data. Sponsored by the Food and Nutrition Service of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), SNDA-III assesses the quality and contributions of the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) and the School Breakfast Program (SBP), longstanding government efforts to bring good food to the children of America.
The National School Lunch Program (NSLP), created in 1946, currently operates in nearly all public and many private schools in the United States, providing subsidized meals to more than 30 million children each school day. More than 10 million children also take advantage of the School Breakfast Program (SBP), which became a permanent federal program in 1975.
SNDA-III examines the school food environment, children's dietary behaviors at school and outside of school and child overweight/obesity. SNDA-III was based on a nationally representative sample of 130 public School Food Authorities (districts that offer federally subsidized school meals), 398 schools within those districts and 2,314 public school students in grades 1-12 in 287 of these schools. Data were collected in the second half of school year 2004-2005 from district foodservice directors and their staff, school foodservice managers, principals, students and their parents. In addition, field interviewers who were collecting data from students and parents observed and recorded the types of competitive foods available in visited schools.
Supplement Guest Editor Mary Story, PhD, RD, School of Public Health, University of Minnesota, emphasizes the importance of the SNDA-III study. She writes, "Results of SNDA-III show that many schools have improved the nutritional quality of the NSLP and SBP school meals and foods sold outside of the reimbursable meal programs (competitive foods). However, there is much more room for improvement. Schools need to do even more to reduce the availability of high-calorie, low-nutrient foods and make school meals more nutritious. Although the majority of US schools offer breakfasts and lunches that meet the standards for key nutrients (such as protein, vitamins A and C, calcium and iron), reimbursable school meals remain too high in saturated fat and sodium, and children are not consuming enough fruits, vegetables and whole grains. Many public schools are constrained in providing better meals because of limited funds. It is time to reexamine the formulas used to set national reimbursement rates with reference to the costs of producing and serving school meals that meet the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2005."
"As an Institute of Medicine expert panel considers revisions to the meal patterns and nutrition standards for USDA's school meal programs and Congress takes up reauthorization of the school nutrition programs again in 2009, the SNDA-III findings are particularly important," commented Anne Gordon, PhD, a senior researcher at Mathematica in Princeton, NJ, who led the SNDA-III analysis. "Future studies will look back to SNDA-III to examine how school meals and school food environments have changed after implementation of subsequent federal policy initiatives. SNDA-III data could also be used to estimate the potential effects of proposed changes in policy on schoolchildren's diets."
Clare Miller, MS, RD, a nutrition consultant and member of the American Dietetic Association School Nutrition Dietetic Practice Group, offers a commentary on the key findings of SNDA-III, and identifies many areas of concern for food and nutrition professionals, as well as for policymakers and parents. She notes, for example, that few schools provided lunches that met the recommendations in the 2005 Dietary Guidelines for fiber and none of the schools met the recommended sodium limitations. Also, she discusses the availability of competitive foods in public schools and how, regardless of whether children ate a school lunch, the competitive foods purchased were generally low-nutrient, energy-dense foods, including candy, desserts, salty snacks, french fries, muffins, donuts, sweet rolls, toaster pastries and caloric beverages other than milk or 100% fruit juice.
In a second commentary, Nancy Montanez Johner, Undersecretary, Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services at the US Department of Agriculture, emphasizes the need for studies such as SNDA-III to address critical challenges that remain to make the programs as effective as they can be in meeting the needs of participating children. Although more than 70% of schools serve meals that meet standards for many nutrients that contribute to healthful diets, few schools (6% to 7%) met all nutrition standards in school year 2004-2005, primarily because most meals served contain too much fat, too much saturated fat or too few calories. Although most schools offer the opportunity to select a balanced meal, few students make the more healthful choice.
The Special Supplement continues with nine research contributions coauthored by staff from Mathematica that expand on the findings of SNDA-III. The first describes the background and study design including complete details of the sampling methods and study limitations. "Because the SNDA-III study is comprehensive, recent and nationally representative, it provides not only a clear picture of the meals currently eaten by many of our nation's children, but also a strong foundation for future policy development and research," said Mary Kay Crepinsek, a senior researcher at Mathematica who oversaw the compilation of the special supplement.
Four articles present the central SNDA-III results regarding the nutrient content of school meals as offered and served, students' nutrient intakes on school days, foods offered in school meals and in breakfasts and lunches consumed by students and the availability and consumption of competitive foods in school.
Two further articles examine students' consumption of low-nutrient, energy-dense foods at home, school or other locations and the relationship of the school food environment to their dietary behaviors. Two final articles tie the SNDA-III results to the data on children's body mass index to assess the effects of the school meal programs, the school environment and dietary behaviors on children's weight status and child obesity. The Supplement closes with a summary of the findings and policy implications.
These articles appear in a Special Supplement to the Journal of the American Dietetic Association entitled "The School Food Environment, Children's Diets, and Obesity: Findings from the Third School Nutrition Dietary Assessment Study," published in February 2009 by Elsevier. Access to the Supplement is available at www.adajournal.org.
Six States RANKS HIGH FOR EDUCATIONAL DATA COLLECTION
The Data Quality Campaign (DQC) recently named six states in the nation as having all 10 essential elements of a robust state longitudinal data system for education. States meeting the criteria are Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Louisiana and Utah.
The DQC report is available here: http://www.dataqualitycampaign.org/
The aim of the DQC is to improve the quality, accessibility and use of data in education, specifically longitudinal data that is gathered on the same student from year to year. This data allows states and districts to follow the academic growth of individual students from Pre-K to 12th grade. It also allows states and districts to determine the value of specific programs and identify performance consistencies in schools and districts.
When the survey was done in 2005, 2006, and 2007, the Department lacked one of DQC’s 10 essential criteria. It did not provide for student-level college readiness test scores. This measurement, along with several other data collection elements, gives state education leaders the ability to pinpoint specific students who lack needed skills to progress to the next grade level or to succeed after high school. When the data indicates students require additional support, instructional staff can intervene with appropriate resources and assistance.
The education data rankings were part of the 2008 DQC Survey Results: State of the Nation’s Data Systems released earlier this month. According to the findings, in 2005 no states reported having all 10 essential elements, but this year six states have them. Forty-eight states now have five or more of the 10 elements and 42 states, compared to 14 in 2005, have the data systems necessary to calculate the National Governors Association longitudinal graduation rate.
The 10 essential elements of state data systems, as determined by DQC, are a unique student ID that connects data across key databases across years; student-level enrollment, demographic and program participation information; the ability to match individual students’ test records year to year to measure growth; information on untested students and the reasons why they were not tested; a system to match teachers to students; student-level transcript information; student-level college readiness test scores; student-level graduation and dropout data; the ability to match student records between a state’s Pre-K – 12 system and its higher education systems; and a state data audit system.
The Data Quality Campaign (DQC) has also published a case study focusing on Louisiana. It is available here:
http://www.dataqualitycampaign.org/files/publications-louisiana_dqc_site_visit-110108.pdf
Another case study focuses on California:
http://www.dataqualitycampaign.org/files/publications-california_dqc_site_visit-110108.pdf
You have read this article with the title February #2. You can bookmark this page URL http://universosportinguista.blogspot.com/2009/02/february-2.html. Thanks!
No comment for "February #2"
Post a Comment