Our Approach: IET

Our Approach

In 1995, faculty members in Initiatives in Educational Transformation wrote the following "Teaching Team Document" which described their approach to teaching our "school-based" Master's Degree program. It was intended to provide information for new faculty and students, but also to act as a basis for continuous improvement of IET practice.

The document describes the ideological core of IET as a learning community. Since matters of governance are not separable from practice, the document thereby becomes an explicit and comprehensive statement of beliefs and principles, a modus operandi, and a set of standards against which improvement can be measured, and individual and collaborative conduct judged.

The document is constantly subject to revision as IET seeks its continuous improvement.

Innovation and New Direction in Professional Development for Teachers Introduction

Since 1990, members of the faculty have been developing a new conception of a Master's Degree, one which seeks to create a structural partnership between school-based practitioners and university faculty. We aim to end the disconnection between degree programs and the teacher's work, to find a way to improve dramatically the intellectual quality, and to create new standards of teacher commitment in the task of professional development. This document has been written by the faculty involved as a position paper at the beginning of 1995.

The degree is dedicated to the examination of four central questions:

How do we understand ourselves as people and as teachers?
How do we create knowledge of our world through the forms and genres of language?
How do we seek knowledge and understanding of our world, of students, classrooms, and schools?
How do we build learning communities and reflective practice?

The degree program is grounded by seven seminal features:

Curriculum and pedagogy as primary intellectual and practical interests
Work in teams
Reflective practice
School-based inquiry
Intensive scheduling
Integrated technology
Continuous improvement

Each of these features of professional development has to be articulated, not just in terms of what is offered as curriculum to the teachers who study with us, but as matters in our own development, direction and inquiry. For example, because we require teachers to do research in teams, we seek to develop and understand collaboration, in part, by experiencing work as a faculty research team. For each of these seven features we have chosen to articulate what we think and how we work through describing the beliefs and principles of procedure to which we are committed as a faculty teaching team, and the varieties of experience that flow from those commitments. A description of our progress so far follows. We have indicated implicitly that the document is not a blueprint. It is a statement of present position and an invitation for critique by those who study with us, those who might wish to come and work with us, and any other professionals interested in the task of innovation and finding new directions in professional development.

Features in the Master's Degree

Establishing a Direction

What do we believe? How do we act? What experiences follow - for ourselves and those who study with us? To make our program coherent it is necessary that each feature establish the contemporary ground on which we find ourselves.

Our beliefs, which we see as "essentially contestable", are stated as clearly as we know how. We formed them based upon evidence drawn from our work since 1990, and together they form a strong ideology of professional development.

Our principles of procedure are not goals. They describe, rather like guidelines, the ways in which we intend to think, plan and work, both in teaching and management of the whole program.

The experiences we describe are not intended to be exclusive, but illustrative of what a teacher will enjoy as he or she engages in the program as a learning commitment within professional development.

While we emphasize the provisional status of our present ground and also constant critique and evaluation, we realize that this document may be seen by some as more of a manifesto calling for changes in programs of professional development of teachers. We would not be disappointed by such a comment, or cavil at such a perspective.

The Seven Seminal Features

ON PEDAGOGY AND CURRICULUM
1. Beliefs
  - Development and innovation in teaching and curriculum are at the core of continuous improvement.
  - All teachers should use various approaches to teaching and curriculum and provide examples of reflection on teaching.
  - Pedagogical and curricular variety is essential to a stimulating learning environment if it is to foster a shift from an instrumental to an intrinsic view of the worth of what is being learned.
  - Team members are both experts and apprentices in the continuous improvement of pedagogy and curriculum.
2. Principles of Procedure
  - Deploy approaches to teaching, curriculum and reflection which emphasize a search for insight, not a quest for truth.
  - Continuously develop new forms and styles of teaching as part of a need for more interesting pedagogies, and articulate their rationale.
  - Integrate curriculum through the two years of study, promoting both lateral and recursive examination of the material across courses.
  - Plan curriculum and pedagogy so that in concert they are complementary rather than contradictory.
  - Build the assumption that reflection and study are of noninstrumental, intrinsic worth.
  - Enable team members to become both experts and apprentices in teaching and learning.
3. Varieties of Experience
  - Conversations, discussions, analyses and debates among teachers studying with us.
  - Extensive thought and reading, writing and disseminating of new understandings and perspectives.
  - Learning in seminars with colleagues, through electronic connections, and through new work and discussion with children.
  - Experience ambiguity, uncertainty, challenge and difficulty as a necessary mode of learning, within contrasting pedagogical and curricular experiences.
ON WORK IN TEAMS
1. Beliefs
  - Individuals benefit from working together and learning how to do so.
  - Working together is complex, difficult and requires considerable energy and dedication.
  - Collaborative communities have mutual perspectives as well as multiple individual perspectives with separate, sometimes competing or conflicting interests. But individual perspectives also frequently have overlapping interests, areas of expertise and unique strengths and weaknesses.
2. Principles of Procedure
  - Negotiate shared issues, a common agenda, and a vision for the future of the team's work.
  - Celebrate and appreciate those issues, agendas, and visions which are an individual prerogative.
  - Create and employ a significant regular schedule to foster a meaningful team experience and the development of collaboration.
  - Develop the exercise of a complex set of skills to enhance collaboration (e.g., listening, clarifying, building on, asserting; avoid blocking and dismissing).
3. Varieties of Experience
  - Regular weekly meetings with agreed agenda.
  - Mutual acceptance of changing roles, e.g. facilitator, note keeper.
  - Diplomatic persuasion; controlled anger; mystification; stress; intense dialogue; contrasting emotion; self-discovery; discovery of deep dissent; learning through criticism; flashes of insight linking dissimilar issues; anxiety and concern over responsibilities to team, all arising from a team functioning collaboratively as well as independently on matters of teaching.
  - Rigor in team research; relating and critiquing a single collaborative project or individual projects related to the program; working as a response or problem-solving group in support of writing and publishing individual or the team's research.
  - For program faculty: teaming with current faculty; working as a partner with school-based team of practitioners.
ON REFLECTIVE PRACTICE
1. Beliefs
  - Effective and moral teaching requires deliberate, ongoing reflection and careful articulation of the moral and epistemological assumptions made by individuals, ourselves as well as the various researchers and theorists we read and discuss.
  - Reflective practitioners strive to uncover and critique their own values, assumptions and biases, examining constantly their day-to-day strategies, intentions and decisions.
  - Reflective practice demands individual contemplation and collegial dialogue.
2. Principles of Procedure
  - Articulate and critique practical knowledge, emergent theories, deeply held beliefs and values.
  - Inquire into the interactions among practice, theory, belief and cultural influences.
  - Move beyond consideration of "what works" to imagine, invent and enact "what is possible."
  - Create an agenda moving constantly beyond cultural constraints to reclaim personal professional perspectives.
  - Build the capacity to view schooling from multiple perspectives.
3. Varieties of Experience
  - Write journals and autobiographical narratives about experiences in learning and teaching.
  - Articulate, analyze, and debate practical knowledge, emergent theories, deeply held beliefs and values in conversational, seminar, and forum settings.
  - Experience uncertainty and indeterminacy as valuable concomitants in reflection along with discovery.
  - Think and act as a member of a learning community with questions: What has this society made of me that I no longer want to be? What has this society made of teaching and learning that I no longer want them to be?
ON SCHOOL-BASED INQUIRY
1. Beliefs
  - The needs of students and the potential and limits for school change become more visible when teachers study education in the context in which they work.
  - When school is a naturalistic base for teacher's inquiry and research, problems in teaching or curriculum are not idealized, but grounded in the complexity and difficulty in which teachers present themselves in schools.
  - Teachers appear more enterprising and autonomous in the conduct of school-based inquiry, providing an opportunity for students to see teachers, and to see themselves, as people who construct knowledge and critique knowledge.
  - When teachers' inquiry and research projects are based in their own practices, they are more likely to lead to action.
2. Principles of Procedure
  - Contextualize work with teachers, legitimating and fostering thick description of cases, individuals and circumstances.
  - Develop relationships in and promote evidence-based knowledge about school communities.
  - Build ethical criteria for the conduct of inquiry across institutions and among individuals.
  - Provide examples of university-based inquiry and theorizing to demonstrate alternate conceptualizations.
3. Varieties of Experience
  - Discovering how far we can see institutional and individual weaknesses and strengths.
  - Appreciating the contributions children make to understanding the context of school.
  - Confronting interpersonal and professional tensions arising from new perspectives on one's work.
ON INTENSIVE SCHEDULING
1. Beliefs
  - Time for study and reflection is needed which fits the rhythm of the teachers' work and family life.
  - A professional community can arise only from intensive and profound experiences together.
  - New complex material cannot be easily mastered without continuous study over a long period.
2. Principles of Procedure
  - Create forms of scheduling which maximize opportunities for prolonged study and community building.
  - Make an individual's family commitments an essential component in constructing learning experiences, within the context of an individual's commitment to the program.
  - Consonant with purpose, be open to frequently reordered schedules.
  - Publicize schedules and changes responsibly and as early as possible.
  - Create opportunities for examination of priorities.
3. Varieties of Experience
  - Intensive study in full-day summer workshops, school-day release and Saturday sessions in addition to regular individual study and site-based work in school teams.
  - Constructing a way to do scholarly, social, and political work on educational issues within the heavy demands of family and teaching (e.g., anxiety and tension arising from work-family commitments and the complexities of their resolution, discovering the extent of personal support from family members).
  - Enjoying the exhaustion provided by determined intellectual rigor.
ON INTEGRATED TECHNOLOGY
1. Beliefs
  - An increasingly technological world requires integration into the program of technology issues and its practice.
  - Access to and through technology raises issues of equality and changes relationships between faculty and teachers on the program and between the teachers and their students.
  - Only compulsion in the use of technology will bring many teachers into the technological world.
2. Principles of Procedure
  - Employ computer and telecommunications technology as an integral feature of pedagogy and curriculum and as a conspicuous and continuous medium for communication among faculty and teachers on the program.
  - Seek regular and continuing instruction to improve expertise.
  - Provide opportunities for all to learn from those who know, e.g., children.
3. Varieties of Experience
  - Intellectual discussion through electronic conferences.
  - Communication by electronic mail.
  - Periodic in-service training for faculty and teachers on the program to stay abreast of the potential for learning through technology and of the most recent developments in distance learning and communication.
  - Surfing the Internet.
  - Changed relationships with children.
ON CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT
1. Beliefs
  - Conventional systems of testing and grading are enemies of change.
  - Continuous Improvement must be viewed as an educational commitment by all educational institutions and individuals as teachers and learners.
  - Multiple forms of experience and inquiry are vehicles for continuous improvement.
  - Public accountability is a critical element in designs of continuous improvement systems.
  - Public statements of standards and targets of quality should be seen as stages in the development of quality by an individual not benchmarks defending the purity of an academic offering.
  - Standards and targets of quality are essential for orienting teachers and learners and should be kept under constant review.
2. Principles of Procedure
  - Negotiate, publish and use agreed standards and targets of quality as criteria in working with teachers.
  - Devise and foster innovative forms of presentation as indicators of continuous improvement.
  - Install practices celebrating continuous improvement across the organization of teaching and learning.
  - Publicize the rationale for the commitment to continuous improvement.
  - Engage external reviewers for each program as part of a strategy of benchmarking across institutions.
3. Varieties of Experience
  - Constructing illustrative portfolios including for example, writings, tapes, and descriptions of team experiences to demonstrate quality.
  - Shifting from "assessment" to "accountability" as a framework for improvement.
  - Coming to see work done in the program as public and as having implications for the workplace.
  - Examining how principles of continuous improvement can be applied to work with children and expressed to parents.

Initiatives in Educational Transformations

helping teachers change the world

A George Mason University Program