Does Policy Influence Teachers’ Participation in Professional Development?

Does Policy Influence Mathematics and Science Teachers' Participation in Professional Development?

We continue to learn more about what makes professional development effective. Qualities like job embedded, sustained, subject specific, and interactive are highly important. However, a next step is to explore what drives teachers to participate in "effective" or "ineffective" professional development opportunities, and how policy decisions impact this process.

Researchers at Vanderbilt and Brigham Young Universities surveyed high school math and science teachers to determine how policy decisions influence teachers' professional development choices in high stakes (mathematics) and low stakes (science) subjects. They characterized four attributes of the policy environment: (1) authority-the extent to which a policy is persuasive; (2) power (or accountability)-rewards and sanctions attached to a policy; (3) consistency-how aligned a policy is with other elements in the policy system; and (4) stability-how stable actors and ideas in the policy environment are:

Significant findings were:

. Teachers who report having more of an influence on school policy are more likely to engage in interactive professional development

. Consistency was unrelated to the teachers' choices in professional development activities.

. When professional development was used as a power device to evaluate teachers, science teachers were less likely to take professional development. (The findings were marginal for math teachers.)

. The persuasiveness of the policy and the stability of the teacher in the school played the most important role in influencing a teacher to engaged in professional development that focused on content or teacher strategies, and/or that involved interactive learning.

. The only notable difference between math and science teachers was teacher involvement in school policy and teachers planning and presenting during professional development were related to math teachers (but not science teachers) taking more content-focused professional development. The researchers surmise that high stakes testing drives math teachers to focus on professional development most likely to impact student achievement.

To read Does Policy Influence Mathematics and Science Teachers' Participation in Professional Development? by Laura Desimone, Thomas M. Smith & Kristie J.R. Phillips - 2007 click on the link below:
http://www.tcrecord.org/content.asp?contentid=12896