An Evaluation Of Florida’s Education Professional .

One-Size-Fits-All Professional Development OfferingsDue to vast differences in preparation and placement of teachers, the professional learning needsof teachers vary greatly, from basic certification needs to the need for advanced pedagogy andcontent knowledge. Unfortunately, professional learning tends to be delivered in a one-size-fits-allapproach, and rarely meets the needs of learners. Too often, teachers describe a serious disconnectbetween professional learning experiences and the real work of teachers. They also report havinglittle choice in the topics or structures of those experiences. In fact, 64 % of Florida teachersreported having little to no influence in determining the content of their inservice professionaldevelopment programs.85% of teachers in Florida report participation in a professional learning communityfocused on improving student achievementSchools and districts use student data and teacher evaluation results to generate broad thematiccategories for adult learning, often providing faculty learning activities at the beginning of a schoolyear and assuming all teachers can benefit equally from the presentation of generic concepts—classroom management or cooperative learning, for example. Although a few general principlesmay apply to teachers across all disciplines and grade levels, those principles are significantlylower priorities for teachers when compared to knowledge and skills that are content-specific.The more nuanced applications of generic concepts emerge from a teacher’s deep understandingof the lesson content and the classroom context in which it is being taught. There are crucialaspects of important, discipline-specific pedagogical content knowledge that go unaddressed andunacknowledged in generic professional development. Teachers themselves consistently reportthat their top priority for professional development is learning more about the content they teachand how best to teach it. Leaders give too little consideration to those priorities and too few choicesto teachers for addressing them. It is this lack of relevance and choice that contributes to thenegative teacher satisfaction ratings for most professional development models.3 Indeed, only 26%of Florida teachers strongly agreed that their training helps them to do a better job2.“Spray and Pray”: Problems with Design and Delivery of Professional DevelopmentThe work of teaching has intensified, and there is very little time for adult interaction andcollaboration during the school day. Time is a valuable commodity in schools, and leaders havedetermined that the teacher-student connection is the priority. Thus, teachers are given little tono time for collaboration or professional learning with colleagues during their contract hours.Still, Florida teachers report mixed results. A significant majority (85%) of teachers in our statereported participation in one or more professional learning communities focused on improvingstudent achievement – a point to celebrate. However, only 16% of teachers strongly agreed thatprofessional development is developed and organized by teachers in their school. This disconnectmight be due to the fact that ongoing PLC work within schools is rarely counted as professionaldevelopment toward (re)certification and thus rarely considered “professional development” byteachers. When asked about professional development, most teachers consider the one-shot,time-limited workshop model, as this persists as the primary delivery mechanism for professionaldevelopment. In fact, 64% of Florida teachers reported that their professional developmentexperiences are a series of single experiences with little or no follow-up2.64% of Florida teachers report that their PD experiences are a series of singleexperiences with little or no follow-up.Page 3

Within workshops, professional development designers and presenters typically pay little attentionto adult learning theory. Teachers report that they quickly become disengaged when workshopdesigns are unimaginative and deliveries are dominated by presenter talk at the expense of teacherdialogue, hands-on activity, and collaborative problem solving. In general, teachers find workshoplearning to be overly passive, cursory, and shallow; participants feel disrespected when presentersare not well prepared and show little empathy for the challenges of current classrooms. Teachers,just like students, need to be engaged, need to practice what they are learning, and need to havefeedback on the implementation of new learning. Yet, many professional development sessionsare designed as efficient delivery of content through PowerPoint and lecture, ignoring all that weknow about adult learning principles and active, engaged learning. In fact, 39% of Florida teachersdisagree that the professional development available to them is a good fit for what is wanted orneeded within their current teaching assignments2.Finally, professional learning design and delivery rarely involves innovative and substantiveintegration of technology. Although many districts have made significant investments in computertechnology, too many administrators see such technology as a classroom teaching tool, offeringlittle training to teachers on how to use it as an adult learning support and enhancement. Onlinecomponents are predominantly used as resource libraries rather than asynchronous learning tools.As such, technology use during typical professional development still overemphasizes PowerPointto deliver content during face to face sessions. Furthermore, communities without online accessrisk insulation of ideas and a paucity of imagination that maintain the status quo and limit learning.Systems Focused on Measuring Performance, Not Improving PerformanceLearning supports are usually provided during a particular workshop; however, there are nomechanisms for meaningful follow up with participants struggling to connect multiple workshopexperiences and then implement new learning in their own classroom context. Indeed, just 16% ofFlorida teachers strongly agreed that the professional development available to them is sustainedover time with adequate follow-up and teacher support2. Site-based coaches do provide limitedsupport, but they often have little time for observation, modeling and real coaching conversations,Page 4

being tasked too frequently to monitor compliance and evaluate teacher performance. Principalsand district leaders view professional development as a logical consequence of teacher evaluationsystems, but the main focus of policy and practices is on ranking and rating teacher performanceto eliminate low performing teachers, not addressing the critical question of how best to improveteachers’ knowledge and skills for raising the achievement levels of their students. As a result,teachers consistently report that typical professional development is an experience “done to them,”but one totally disconnected from their real needs for helping students succeed in school.Further, an overarching concern with recent systemic reforms is an overemphasis on “counting”and the reporting of what is counted rather than the measurement of quality and a simultaneousemphasis on how to improve scores. Current teacher evaluation systems often focus on ratingteachers based on a value-added formula that weights observations as well as the teacher’s impacton student test scores. In Florida, each district was tasked with creating their evaluation system,which resulted in 67 different evaluation systems with 67 different instructional frameworks withslightly different language to refer to similar instructional tasks. While there is a great need forevaluation systems that measure teacher impact on students, these systems must be paired withsimultaneous improvement systems that support rather than punish based on results. Part of thechallenge may be that there is not a shared understanding that teacher expertise can be developedsystematically over time, or how that best occurs. However, a mere 12% of Florida teachers stronglyagree that teacher evaluation outcomes guide PD activities at their school, and 64% of teachers(and 40% of school leaders) believe the teacher evaluation system is more effort than it is worth5.Furthermore, current evaluation systems do little to differentiate quality: the vast majority (77-95%)of teachers in the recent TNTP study were rated as effective or meeting expectations,4 resultswhich may not give teachers a true indication of areas for improvement. In fact, a majority of Floridateachers (52%) reported that their observer identified no areas as needing improvement. In short,despite best intentions, the current system is not set up to push continuous improvement.In addition to teacher evaluation systems, the State of Florida also has a history of evaluatingstate-wide professional learning efforts. The Florida Department of Education recently completedover a decade of assessing and analyzing professional learning at the educator, school, and districtlevels through what was called the Florida Department of Education Professional DevelopmentProtocol system. Through this system, the FDOE assessed adherence to professional developmentstandards related to the planning, delivery, implementation, and evaluation of professionallearning designed to align with national standards from Learning Forward and approved by theFlorida legislature. On the protocol’s 4-point rating system, scores range from excellent (4.0) tounacceptable (1.0). Over time, Florida districts’ scores improved, with averages hovering around a3.2 for all 65 standards, with scores generally highest at the district level and lowest at the educatorlevel.5There were no standards that averaged below a 2.5, but the lowest ranked standards tended to bearound implementation of learning and supports for learning at the educator level (coaching andmentoring). While these results seem promising, a look at the system as a whole raises questionsabout whether this measurement of standards is the best way to improve the system. While it isimportant to understand how professional learning standards are being implemented, it may bemore important to shift emphasis toward how to help districts actually improve their scores oncethey are measured. This overemphasis on measuring the system may not result in substantialimprovement over time. For example, in the decade that learning standards were being measured bythe FDOE, the scores moved from an average of 3.1 in the first cycle of all 67 districts, to a 3.3 in thesecond cycle, and back down to a 3.2 in the third cycle.5Page 5

Lack of impact on teacher and/or student learningAlthough teachers regularly participate in a variety of professional development events, in general,the majority of the p

more job-embedded professional learning throughout their career. The problem is most intense in high poverty communities where under-certified teachers are often placed in the classrooms of students who most need high quality teachers. Outlined below are the FIVE most common complaints about professional development from the