The Professional, Personified

The professional, personified

Districts find results by combining a vision of professionalism with the use of common tasks and goals

Current high school reform often focuses on small schools, small learning communities, and alternative paths to post-secondary education. While these reforms are necessary, recent evaluations of improving high- poverty high schools in urban districts (American Institutes for Research & SRI International, 2004 & 2005) suggest these changes are not sufficient. What will it take to substantially improve high school teaching and learning at scale? In some cases, high school reforms have failed partly because they do not give enough attention to instruction, leaving over- whelmed teachers on their own to do the difficult work of developing curriculum, determining their own professional development needs, and creating other tools to improve instruction (David, Shields, Humphry, & Young, 2001). In other cases, teachers have resisted top-down, prescriptive approaches to improving

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Tenets of teacher professionalism

Drawing from well-established norms in teaching and other fields, a new vision of teacher professionalism rests on at least six tenets:

1. A professional owes her primary duty to her clients — in the case of educators, to students.

2. Professionals are accountable to the profession for results. In teaching, this means the profession should identify and prepare its members in the knowledge, skills, and standards of practice most likely to lead to increased student learning. The profession also must hold its members accountable and discipline or eject from the profession those unable to improve student learning.

3. A professional has a duty to improve her own practice. Thus, professional development, coaching, classroom observation, and continued learning are essential parts of the job, not optional activities. Teachers should adhere to a core value of publicly owning student learning data and opening their own classroom practice to work with other teachers.

4. A professional has a duty to improve common or collective practice in the profession. In medicine, a death in the hospital triggers a morbidity/mortality conference in which the staff responsible for the patient and others in the hospital meet to determine whether professional protocols were followed, how to improve adherence to protocols, and whether the protocols should be reconsidered in light of new evidence. In teaching, the parallel is working with other teachers in an effort to learn from them, to help them learn, and to contribute to the collective knowledge about what works for students.

5. Professionals adhere to a body of specialized knowledge, agreed-upon standards of practice, and specific protocols for performance. In teaching, these standards of practice and protocols should be based either on evidence about effectiveness in improving student results or, in areas where the evidence is weak or unclear, agreement by the profession about the practices and protocols most likely to benefit students. In addition, the profession has a duty to organize teachers’ work lives and responsibilities in ways that enable them to develop, refine, apply, and share knowledge of effective practices.

6. Professionals are expected to exercise professional judgment. While professional practice is governed by standards and protocols, professions require professionals to consider the specific characteristics and needs of their clients. In teaching, this means varying instruction to take into account individual students’ background knowledge and strengths.