Watson and Konicek (1990), as well as others, have published
articles showing that thinking and trying out new observations and ideas in multiple
contexts is essential if students are to "make connections" and develop new
conceptual understandings – i.e., if hands-on investigative experiences are to have a
"significant effect" and be viewed as more than "a series of unrelated
episodes." Other researchers (Lemke, 1990; Minstrell, 1989; Saunders, 1992) have also
written about the importance of such learning opportunities, explaining that they are
necessary if students are to experience and thereby learn about "the nature of
science as a human activity," and not just learn about science as a subject.
To provide students with the kinds of experiences emphasized by these researchers, we envisioned, for VINE Follow-Through, a new kind of professional development effort that was problem-centered and team-based. The "problem" was clear. While community groups were offering outdoor, hands-on learning experiences to schools, these experiences were not built into the ongoing curriculum in ways that enabled students to do more science or to construct meaning from the additional experiences.
To address the problem, the VINE Follow-Through Project offered a team-based approach, with each team composed of people from diverse organizations. Many of these people — teachers, staff from nonformal education institutions, university faculty, curriculum administrators — were not used to the collaborative nature envisioned in the term "team-based." Thus, through VINE Follow-Through, they would learn skills not only to integrate outside inquiry into the classroom curriculum but also to work together as an ongoing collegial team.
The literature drawn upon in designing VINE Follow-Through came from the business and education worlds. The business world provided information on teams and how they work. The education world provided information on how best to enable students to construct meaning from their science experiences. Both disciplines informed us about how individuals change.
First, Michael Fullan’s explanations
of the Eight Basic Lessons of the New Paradigm for Change (1993) helped us to understand
further what we were aiming for as we designed this different kind of professional
development project.
In addition we took to heart the words of Fullan and Steigelbauer in The New Meaning of Educational Change on the role of professional development in improving schools and reforming education (see box above). The authors were talking about teachers as learners who need to work out their own meaning to change what happens with students in their classes. But to us, they were also describing what school district specialists, university faculty, and nonformal educators need to leave their positions of authority and work with teachers as colleagues and what children need in order to learn new concepts and skills. The philosophical base of the VINE Follow-Through Project depends on the similarity in what educational experts know at this time about the "process of change" in educational systems and individuals’ "learning" by way of constructivism. Our goal was to create a problem-centered professional development experience that would enable participants to develop concepts of teaching and learning in the same way that project-based learning gives children opportunities to actively acquire new concepts and skills.
From education research, we also relied on the Concerns-Based Adoption Model (CBAM) set forth in Taking Charge of Change (Hord, et al., 1987), which identifies seven kinds of concerns expressed by individuals involved in change. The authors’ studies showed that as people implemented an innovation, their concerns tended to shift from self-concerns to concerns regarding the innovation they were implementing and finally to concerns regarding the impact or effectiveness of the innovation. These findings guided us in providing the kinds of information and interventions that might be most useful to participants as the project progressed. In the VINE Follow-Through Project, the innovation is the professional development experience itself. As you continue through this publication, you will read about the strategies and interventions we used. The concerns expressed by participants at various stages are summarized in the table on pg. 100.
For insights on ways to deal with the kind of challenge we aimed to address and the kind of collegial problem-solving we hoped to promote, we turned to the business world. We drew upon Peter Senge and his work on the use of teams to solve complex problems in business. In The Fifth Discipline (1990), Senge points out that solving problems requires systems thinking, a mind shift to break out of old ruts, and trusting teams learning together. According to Senge,
In dialogue, there is the free and creative exploration of complex and subtle issues, a deep "listening" to one another and suspending of one’s own views. . . Dialogue can occur only when a group of people can see each other as colleagues in mutual quest for deeper insight and clarity. . . Seeing each other as colleagues and friends, while it may sound simple proves to be extremely important. We talk differently with friends. Treating each other as colleagues acknowledges the mutual risk and establishes the sense of safety in facing the risk.
Three years after we began planning VINE Follow-Through, the National Science Education Standards (NSES 1996) were published. It was gratifying to see that our approach was aligned with the assumptions made by the Standards about the nature of professional development experiences. These assumptions include:
- The traditional distinctions between targets, sources, and supporters of teacher development are artificial.
- The conventional view of professional development for teachers needs to shift from technical training for specific skills to opportunities for intellectual professional growth.
- The process of transforming schools requires that professional development opportunities be clearly and appropriately connected to teachers’ work in the context of the school.
Developing teams and changing styles of teaching and learning would require a long-term change effort. To be successful, VINE Follow-Through needed to address individual and group concerns, enable colleagues to work together as equals and friends, involve participants in evolutionary planning, and provide both pressure and support. By combining constructivist teaching and learning for professionals and elementary-age students with an approach that was grounded in the work of Fullan, CBAM, and Senge, we hoped we could successfully meet our challenge.
From Changing What We Do by Karen Hollweg and Carole Kubota with Phyllis Ferrell, copyright 1998 by NAAEE