What Have We Learned About Teachers' Participation, Persistence, and Practices in a Javits Project?

• In Event: Federally Funded Projects in Gifted and Talented Education: Findings, Challenges, and Lessons Learned

Abstract

Effective teachers are critical to innovative interventions. School leaders and policy makers provide audible support and tangible resources for professional development (PD). States may legislatively mandate PD hours annually. In one such state, a Javits project focused on PD for two cohorts of elementary classroom teachers and gifted education specialist teachers.
Tiered, personalized professional development. The project PD component adopted a tiered approach with intensive summer institutes for onboarding teachers and job-embedded coaching during the academic year including classroom demonstrations, “try-out” lessons, and personalized digital interface. Guided by the literature on dosage needed to change teacher practice, PD occurred over a two-year cycle. Summer institutes were cumulative; the second institute was developed around teachers’ stated needs following participation in the first summer and subsequently implementing strategies in the first year of direct service to students. In the spring of Year 1, an external evaluator surveyed teachers for formative feedback. The project coach also informally gathered information about teacher preferences, concerns, and needs to inform choices in the second institute. A pattern of teacher requests for increasingly specific instructional support was observable across both cohorts. For example, rather than the general engineering design process presented and practiced in the first institute, teachers requested the specific design challenge for their grade level (classroom teachers) or their district gifted services model (gifted education teachers).
Patterns of persistence. Teachers varied widely in persistence. At the teacher level, variability could be traced to the level of comfort with science and engineering instruction. At the school level, persistence patterns developed in two ways. First, a committed principal affected teacher buy-in and genuine integration into the school instructional plan. For example, in an exemplar school in a high-poverty, highly diverse school district placed under state control in the first year of the Javits project, not only did individual teachers reach out to the coach, but the principal requested PD “booster” sessions. She continues to work with project staff in the fifth year of implementation. Second, a pattern of barriers to persistence was evident when teacher attrition was so severe that data sources were re-imagined. An extreme example was an interim superintendent’s decision to close a specialty gifted/talented school in a low-income, neighborhood despite vocal community objections. Trained teachers were moved from grade level assignments (they were responsible for implementing curriculum on which they had not been trained) or from a project school to another school not served by the project. Teachers also voluntarily moved to different employers in a city served by three metropolitan and a ring of suburban and rural districts.
Incentives and Outcomes. The lessons learned from implementation include the importance of curricular materials incentives to educators, the influence of contexts varying from contentious media coverage of a district take-over to community cohesiveness around the project in a remote area, and commitment to an aggressive professional development schedule for new and replacement teachers. Despite the challenges of variable teacher participation, persistence and attrition, the project increased student achievement outcomes in all but one grade level.

Author

• Ann E. Robinson, University of Arkansas at Little Rock