Unless there is a radical change in the structure of school leadership, few schools will be able to rise to the challenge of enabling all students to meet high standards, says Anrig Professor of Educational Leadership Richard F. Elmore. With accountability standards creating more public scrutiny than ever before, educational leaders must focus their efforts on instruction if they are to thrive and survive in the current conditions. Based on the essay "Building a New Structure for School Leadership," from Professor Elmore's book, School Reform from the Inside Out: Policy, Practice, and Performance (Harvard Education Press, 2004).

Building a New Structure for School Leadership.

This article adopts a complexity theory framework to review the literature on teachers’ professional development practices, the generative systems of these practices, and the impact that learning experiences have on their knowledge and changes in classroom practices. The review brings together multiple strands of literature on teacher professional development, teaching and learning, teacher change, and organizational learning. In doing so, it illustrates that process–product logic has dominated the literature on teacher professional learning and that this has limited explanatory ability. The review demonstrates the ways the elements of three subsystems (the teacher, the school, and the learning activity) interact and combine in different ways and with varying intensities to influence teacher learning. The limitations of studies focusing on specific elements or subsystems are highlighted. The article concludes that to understand teacher learning scholars must adopt methodological practices that focus on ex...

Conceptualizing Teacher Professional Learning

This paper addresses two questions: What is involved in bringing about significant and worthwhile change in teaching practices? How can or should research aid in this process? In order to do so, two related literatures will be explored—teacher change and learning to teach. These literatures will be used to develop a third perspective, which will be grounded in examples from a teacher change research project which is funded by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education. This perspective suggests that empirical premises derived from research (Fenstermacher, 1986) be considered as warranted practice, which, in combination with teachers's practical knowledge, become the content of reflective teacher change. It also suggests that practice should be viewed as activity embedded in theory. The paper concludes with suggestions for ways of approaching the introduction of research into teachers' ways of thinking.

Significant and Worthwhile Change in Teaching Practice

The purpose of this study was to examine previously unexplored relationships among the organizational contexts of schools and classrooms, teachers’ psychological states, and change in individual teacher practice through staff development unassociated with school or district innovation. A path model, based on theories of individual behavior and change within organizations, is presented and tested using a sample of teachers who voluntarily participated in a staff development program aimed solely at improving individual teacher practice. The findings from the path analysis suggest that, in the absence of organizational foci and pressures for change associated with school or district innovation, individual change is a direct function of personal teaching efficacy. The findings suggest indirect influences on individual change of teachers’ certainty about practice, the concentration of low-achieving students in teachers’ classrooms, and the interactions teachers have with their colleagues about instruction. The...

The Enhancement Function of Staff Development: Organizational and Psychological Antecedents to Individual Teacher Change

This study contends that the alienation of teachers in high schools can be reduced through improvements in school organization. Using the High School and Beyond Administrator/Teacher Survey, the study explored the impact of 10 organizational features on efficacy, community, and expectations in 353 public high schools. When school size, urban location, the students' ability at entry, and the percentage of disadvantaged and minority students were controlled, school organizational features had a major influence on all three teacher-climate variables. The most powerful organizational effects were students' orderly behavior, the encouragement of innovation, teachers' knowledge of one another's courses, the responsiveness of administrators, and teachers' helping one another. Direct causality cannot be inferred, but the results suggest the potential of changing organizationalfeatures in high schools for reducing the alienation of teachers.

Kathy Hoover-Dempsey

Papers

Organizational conditions of teacher learning