A resounding theme throughout the interviews was the limited confidence principals possessed in providing teachers with professional development on literacy instruction. The limitation they revealed was through two lenses. Some principals acknowledge what they perceived as their inability to conduct professional development for teachers and the need to rely on other agencies or staff members to lead the professional development. The other limitation was due to limited professional development time for literacy instruction. Every principal mentioned that there are other initiatives within the districts that require professional development time, and the fragmentation of professional development left little time to improve content teachers’ awareness of the new literacy standards or their ability to embed literacy standards across the curriculum.
Principals B, D, and E use other agencies and or staff members to lead professional development in their buildings. Principal B’s school has a newly created literacy committee that he foresees leading most of the professional development for teachers via best practice sharing. He is responsible for aligning the professional development around specific building themes, but he is confident that his staff will learn more from their peers than from him. He stated:
I mentioned earlier before about the learning targets, literacy, and the literacy project. I have every department present … what they do instructionally, so instructional strategies around literacy. So, I’m probably going to shift gears and have the new literacy committee start to do those things. Present their strategy of the month and what it is [and] what they want to do based on how they define literacy.
Principal D explained that many of his school’s in-service trainings are based on the “train the trainer type deal,” which means the district sends one employee to professional development training and then relies on that one person to disseminate the information to the faculty members. Additionally, Principal D’s district is bringing in the outside professional development of Lead to Learn. He stated that through Lead to Learn, the whole English department will participate in the in-service they provide:
We have all of the English teachers 9-12, two science, two math, and two social studies. And it’s all about strategies, and they will come in and assess the staff and give them a report back to them and they’ll be in 14 times with each teacher. We’ve been doing it in the elementary for about five years. We finally said, please bring it to the secondary campus, and we’re doing just wholesale in the English department, and then we’ll get it out to everyone. That one is going to be a big change for staff.
Although Principal D did not clearly describe a professional development program centered on the implementation of the Core literacy standards, he did describe the need to provide outside training for his staff. Principal E was also candid in his need to pull outside resources to provide professional development. He stated, “I would have to rely on someone else. And I wouldn’t necessarily see it because, again, it goes back to, how well are our kids doing on tests.” Although he is unable to provide the professional development his staff may need to implement
the new literacy standards, the district’s willingness to provide professional development is stifled by student achievement on one standards based test.
The increasing demand to implement state mandated initiatives and aspects of grant requirements limits the available professional development time allotted to improving literacy instruction across the curriculum. All of the principals mentioned that some professional development time has been used for the new Teacher Effectiveness model that the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) is planning to institute for the 2013-2014 school year. Principal A seemed to be the most affected by grant requirements. He said, “So much of what we do is driven by our grant requirements. For example, we are a KtO district PreK-8, but if I share teachers, I would lose those teachers. So now we’re Race to the Top with Teacher Effectiveness, and now I have to pull those teachers into that. There’s a fragmentation that goes on in a small district.” Additionally, Principal A stated that the professional development he instituted covered “the big-ticket things,” such as discipline and teacher evaluation. Similarly, Principal B also focused on other concepts for professional development, which he conducts through best practice sharing based on certain themes. For the past few years, the teachers in Principal B’s high school have focused on instructional practice through lesson study—they film one another teaching and then critique the lesson together. However, Principal B did comment “it is a challenge sometimes when you focus professional development because something will come along that you read or you love, and you’ll think there is something they need to see, but there’s no room for them to see it because it’s not aligned with the theme.” His realization that they are inundated with potential professional development opportunities illustrates his awareness that as principal it is easy to minimize the amount of time spent on improving teachers’ abilities to embed literacy instruction across the content areas.
Much like the other principals, Principal E recognized the limited confidence he had in providing teachers with professional development on literacy instruction, mainly because of time constraints and a focus on preparing students for the new standards based assessment. He stated, “you have x-number of professional development days with teachers, which isn’t enough, and then you say, we can keep people after, but they want to be compensated for their time, then time becomes a factor.” Additionally, he elaborated on other professional development topics he feels are important to present to teachers: School Performance Profile and curriculum mapping. With the limited amount of professional development time and the many topics to cover throughout the year, there is a limited amount of professional development time to spend on literacy instruction. Furthermore, throughout our conversation, he talked about how teachers need to “get away from the fiction aspect of [text] and incorporate more non-fiction into what their instruction is.” He referenced that the push to focus more on non-fiction text comes from the eligible content tested on the Keystone Literature Exam, which is the assessment Pennsylvania uses to measure student achievement. The Keystone Literature Exam has two tested modules: fiction and non-fiction. Principal E stated that the onus of preparing students for the Keystone Literature Exam is not solely the English teachers’ responsibility:
… it’s having the conversation with teachers across the board to have teachers change from content to the skills and the application of the skills. So really your non-English people should be using the skills [students] are learning in the English department: talking about text and text analysis and interpretation in those classes. So that’s the shift to get those people to, who are the core instructors, to get away from appreciation, that is good, but to skills, and that’s the conversation you now have at department meetings. They don’t necessarily like to hear it, but skills, skills, skills, skills.
Principal E recognizes that all teachers must prepare students for the literature exam; however, his confidence in preparing them is weak based on what he perceives to be a limited availability of time and the need to satisfy other professional development needs.