E-based professional development (e-pd) for effective teaching and  (Page 4/8)

With professional development, we often expect a great deal of change for a minimum amount of effort (Caldwell, 2001). Whether it is increased leadership competency or other significant behavior changes, principals are sometimes expected to exhibit changes in leadership ability or habits by simply being exposed to new ideas and motivational speakers. In the past two decades, it has been common practice to expose principals to short-term, topic-specific in-service sessions held out of the district, which in essence ended up being appropriate for only awareness-level development. These experiences have not usually had an ongoing, consistent nature, which is needed to build leadership skills and result in substantive behavior change.

Recent research indicates that principals need continuous professional development to support their efforts to improve their schools and to revitalize their commitment to maintaining positive learning communities (Foster, Loving and Shumate, 2000; Evans and Mohr, 1999; Neufeld, 1997). Today’s increasingly complex society requires that principals learn to guide their schools through greater challenges than ever. The federal legislation No Child Left Behind, for example, has changed the landscape of accountability for all children’s learning, and principals, more than ever are being held accountable for how well teachers teach and students learn.

Traditional views of professional development for principals essentially took on the assumption that transferring knowledge from“experts”to practitioners would suffice. This, however, has proven to be disappointing and insufficient to principals, negating the assumption that periodic in-service, offered in a remedial manner, was most effective and that the most effective way for principals to learn was to be exposed to a speaker. Past practice assumed that professional development involved acquiring new skills, instead of building the capacity for reflective practice (Evans and Mohr, 1999).

The research on best practices in professional development outlines another set of assumptions, which serve to empower the principal not only as a school leader but as an adult learner. These assumptions include: that ongoing professional development is needed for substantial change to occur; that school change is partly due to personal change; that a goal of professional development is to support the inquiry into and study of teaching and learning; that principals learn as a result of training, practice, feedback, and reflection; that professional development is essential to school development; and that professional development should be primarily school-focused and job-embedded (Mann, 1998).

If we view principals as key figures in the effort to improve schools, we begin to understand the special professional development needs they have. Principals are pivotal to creating conditions that lead to effective schools, and this is well-documented in the research literature on school improvement. According to Ron Edmonds’work in the 1970’s, strong leadership in the person of the school principal is one of the Correlates of Effective Schools. Studies show that in schools with high student achievement and a clear sense of community, good principals can make a significant difference (Boyer, 1983; Center for Educational Policy Analysis, 2003; DuFour, 1991). Improved professional development not only gives principals the confidence to take on their roles as leaders, it gives administrators the competence to be successful and motivated through job satisfaction (Howley, Chadwick, and Howley, 2002).