New Schools of Thought

The College of Education was one of the first to establish professional development schools. Today, the schools provide models for the nation.

Robbie Steward remembers well her defining experience in a professional development school.

It was a few years ago when the associate professor in the Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology and Special Education was teaching students in an urban high school about academic success. During the lesson, a group of her students began playing cards.

After the initial shock and a little pleading, she convinced the students to stop playing. "They put their cards away," she says, "and one of the guys looked up and said, ‘It’s not going to do any good because I’ll be dead in the next few years.’"

It is an episode Steward tells not so much for the inherent drama, but more as an illustration of a powerful formative experience made possible by the unique opportunity provided in a professional development school (PDS).

Photo caption - Teacher Teresa VanStratt says her PDS work has given her a new perspective on teaching her first- and second-graders.

"The PDS experience has changed me as a scholar," Steward says. "It has changed me as a teacher. It has changed me as one who sees service delivery in a very different way."

Change is exactly what the college had sought to create when it established the first PDS in 1989. Over the years, work in professional development schools has remained a pivotal aspect of the college as the nascent reform effort of the 1980s emerged in the 1990s as one of the most powerful-and rapidly growing-movements in teacher education.

Put simply, professional development schools are partnerships between universities and local public schools. Teacher education programs have long had close working relationships with public schools.

Photo Caption - Associate Professor Robbie Steward's involvement in a professional development school has changed the way she looks at her work.

But PDSs are different. Indeed, to a certain extent, they can trace their roots to what were known as lab schools, which were staples of teacher education programs of generations passed.

But a PDS is much different from a lab school, says Perry Lanier, co-director of the college’s PDS program. A lab school, he says, operated under the auspices of a university and often enrolled the children of faculty and the university community.

Professional development schools are not run by universities. At MSU, the PDS relationship means the College of Education has made a commitment to engage in action research to generate knowledge about K-12 teaching and learning, the education of educators and organizational support for innovation.

Much of the intellectual underpinning of the PDS relationship comes from the Holmes Group, an influential consortium of deans of the nation’s colleges of education that was based at MSU. The Holmes Group believed in the medical school model in which schools would serve much as teaching hospitals do.

The college’s nine professional development schools are guided by three principles.

The first is an emphasis on teaching, learning and inquiry. Both Lanier and P. David Pearson, Hannah professor of education and co-director the PDS program, agree that this aspect is the driving force behind the relationship. At MSU, the PDS relationship between a faculty member and a school or teacher is different from that of the traditional consultative role. The relationship is oriented toward the long-term and is much more collaborative.

The projects tend to evolve out of a teacher’s own experience or need and they also tend to cross over several academic years. For instance, Tim Little, professor in the Department of Teacher Education, has spent seven years at Holt High School working with the same group of teachers.

The nature of the inquiry, too, tends to be more action oriented, and the researcher will stay with the project through the implementation stage.

Professors like Steward and Little will also often have the opportunity to teach a course or unit during a school year.

"I think the PDS experience is valuable in several ways," says Associate Professor Cheryl Rosaen, who has done her PDS work at Elliot Elementary School in Holt. "It contributes to learning and knowledge developed in a classroom environment, and it provides a place to collaborate with teachers and try out new ways of teaching and learning.

"From that I am able to share with preservice teachers in my methods courses how those teaching methods have played out in school. It isn’t just something I’ve read about. It helps me stay grounded in the theories of teaching and practice."

Photo Caption - Teacher Judy Ruddock shows her Flint Northwestern High School students some rock formations. Ruddock was part of a PDS project that led to improved classroom management and student behavior.

For the schools, the benefits are many. Often it means the opportunity for teachers to take a closer look at their own practice or school-wide problems, and it provides the time away from the classroom to work on those issues.

The school also benefits from other more traditional professional development activities, such as inservice workshops and conferences.

For a number of teachers involved in PDS projects, there is another benefit: the opportunity to break the isolation that sometimes develops over years of classroom teaching.

"The benefit is simply the ability to continue learning, to develop as a professional," said Teresa VanStratt, who has been a teacher at Elliot Elementary School in Holt for more than 20 years. "I am an entirely different teacher than I was before I started working with university people. A sense of teaching and practice is always there. You are always thinking about teaching and learning."

The second component of all professional development schools is the preparation of preservice teachers. For MSU students, the yearlong internship is the culminating experience leading to provisional certification. Interns assigned to PDS schools benefit by exposure to the research projects and mentor teachers.

The PDS environment fosters closer relationships among teachers and interns. Pat Zwiebel, who teaches math at Northwestern High School, a PDS site in Flint, says her intern gained experience and exposure to innovative teaching practices while she was also trying out new teaching and communication strategies with parents.

Teacher Education Professor Joyce Putnam, who has been involved with the PDS program from the beginning, found that when she started a study group for teachers who work with MSU interns, the teachers requested that the MSU students be included in the staff development component.

"The relationship starts to build and not just between professor and teacher and administrator, but also with the student interns," she says. "With that closer relationship, the teachers develop a greater concern for the intern in the learning process."

The final principle underlying the PDS is dissemination.

Photo caption - Associate Professor Cheryl Rosaen speaks to a student at Elliot Elementary School. Rosaen says PDS work keeps her "grounded in the theories of teaching and practice."

The idea, Lanier says, is not to turn every school into a PDS, but to make what is learned in these schools available to as wide a network of educators as possible.

"Dissemination is important for the university, but also for the individual school district," Putnam says. She points to a literacy project at Gundry Elementary School in Flint. The Flint school district set up mini-sabbaticals for teachers at another school in the district to spend time at Gundry learning about the literacy project and how to implement it.

Little says the PDS teachers at Holt have hosted numerous teams of educators-one group traveling from as far as Poland-interested in their global studies program.

In fact, Little and the group of teachers wrote a book for educators chronicling their project.

"The nice thing about PDS is that there is a two-way exchange between university faculty and the public school teachers," he says. "We get to test out ideas and find out what really works as opposed to what just makes theoretical sense, but in practice might not work."

How professional development schools will evolve is difficult to say. What is clear is that it is a reform initiative that has caught on. According to the National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools, and Teaching, professional development schools are an increasingly popular movement in teacher preparation programs.

As of the late 1980s, there were fewer than 40 professional development school partnerships in the country. Today, there are more than 300-many of which were created after 1992.

Some states’ licensing boards (Michigan among them) are reviewing proposals to require that all beginning teachers have experience in professional development schools.

The college’s program was a pioneer in 1989 when it established its first PDS partnership, and it remains an important part of the teacher education program, along with other reform initiatives such as the fifth-year internship.

"Public school teaching is a reality test, and that’s the bottom line," Little says. "It’s very easy to stay in Erickson Hall and say ‘Here’s a real great idea.’ It’s another thing to take it out and find out that it may be a pretty good idea but there are problems with it, and you need to fix those problems."

And for those involved in testing their theories in real school contexts, PDS involvement is an essential part of their teaching and learning.

"What keeps me going back (to the PDS program) is the satisfaction of the interaction between what’s learned at the university and what’s learned at the public schools," Little adds. "School folks are learning from us, and we are learning from school folks and we’re all learning from experiences we’re having from students. That’s irreplaceable."

Want to Know More?

Learn all about the College of Education’s Professional Development Schools. Read a detailed description of all nine schools, a compilation of published papers, and much more. It’s all at http://ed-web3.educ.msu.edu/cspds/