Growing Teachers: Partnerships in Staff Development
by Elizabeth Jones

Chapter 9
Looking Back: What We've Learned About Partnerships

Differences among the projects: Individualized or collective

The projects about which we have told stories have both common themes and significant differencesamong them. Standing out among the differences is the question, Does the partnership focus only on individual teachers, or does it work to empower them collectively?

All of the partnerships brought groups of teachers together. Some groups were already members of a collective-a school, a school system's preschool programs, or a ruralcommunity. Others were, sometimes by design, individuals from different teaching settings meeting temporarily as part of a class or seminar. Typically, participation by teachers in the individualized projects was voluntary; participation in the collectively structured projects was, to some degree, coerced. On a continuum the projects distribute somewhat as the illustration below indicates.

In Boulder and Palo Alto, participation relied on individual teacher initiative. In the Australian projects participation was invitational, and in Darwin several uninvited volunteers were turned away. In Palo Alto a few intern candidates were pushed into the project by their directors, through whom the invitations were distributed; however, such coercion was seen as reducing their potential effectiveness in the project. In the same project, when three staff members from one classroom applied as interns, two of them were deliberately screened out.

Each of these projects included seminars that built a mutual support group, but this group was separate from teachers' work settings. Teachers could, of course, continue to meet together after the project if they chose, but the probability of that actually happening is low unless building a support network is a conscious part of the project design. It is easy for project designers and facilitators from an individualistic, liberal tradition to overlook the collective side of teacher empowerment.* Most teacher participants in these individualized projects were predictably middle class, White, and relatively secure as individuals in institutional settings.

In Four Corners and Alaska, teacher-participants were individually responsible for preparing CDA portfolios. As members of close-knit Native American communities, however, they worked together as a matter of course ("When Amy and I were working on our portfolios, we encouraged each other. We stayed up all night a few times. . . . "-see Chapter 1). Their work was not undertaken independently; instead, it represented an important contribution to the tribal agency's need to meet national Head Start requirements. The project facilitator did not organize agency staff toward collective action, nor would it have been appropriate for a nonmember of the local community to do so; but cooperative efforts were recognized and encouraged.

In Seattle advisors were assigned to child care centers at the request of center directors and were generally expected by the director to work with all of the staff. In Pasadena and Soledad the partnerships were initiated by school district administrators, and some requirements for participation were placed on all teachers. In all three settings, however, facilitators countered administrators' expectations by insisting on teacher choice in level of participation. In Alaska the facilitator also insisted on increasing the choices open to Head Start staff.

In each of these collectively structured partnerships, empowerment of teachers to take action beyond the classroom emerged as part of facilitators' work, although it had not been part of the original design. It became clear that teachers' effectiveness in working with children is directly related to their interactions with adults and to their feelings of effectiveness in the larger system, as any union activist could have predicted. Teachers assigned to, rather than individually initiating, participation in a staff development project posed the significant question, "What are 'they' doing to us?" and this question became a recurrent part of the teacher/facilitator agenda. Teacher-participants in the collective partnerships reflected a wide range of ethnic and social-class backgrounds and varied professional experience. Some were sophisticated about the uses of collective action in gaining a vote.

Collective action may take place within a program or beyond it. In Seattle, community networking grew out of facilitators' discouragement with high staff turnover in child care centers. If half of those in whom a facilitator invests energy leave the field every year, action to address more basic needs is called for. The Worthy Wages campaign, which grew out of similar concerns in Seattle and elsewhere, is a program in which NAEYC participates.

In Boulder, with maximum autonomy built in for all participants, advisors prided themselves on "having no predetermined agenda and not imposing or implementing mandated programs" (Apelman, p. 96, this volume). Facilitators in some other partnerships faced greater constraints; they were responsible to national CDA standards in Four Corners and Alaska, to Title VII project objectives in Soledad, and (to an increasingly negotiable extent) to High/Scope curriculum implementation in Pasadena. In Seattle and Palo Alto, some center directors made efforts to get the advisor or mentor to reinforce their goals for teachers. In each of these settings, the challenge of working with system expectations enriched the dialogue, creating useful disequilibrium and thus significant construction of knowledge by facilitators, administrators, and teachers.

Facilitation without challenge risks wimpiness. Judith Kleinfeld (1972), analyzing differences in behavioral styles among teachers of Alaska Native high school students, found that teachers who were cool in their interactions with students got relatively low response. Warmth and personal caring were much more effective, but warmth without challenge-laissez-faire teaching-left students unsupported in the hard work of learning. The most effective teachers were identified by Kleinfeld as "supportive gadflies," whose message could be summed up as "I know you can do it, and I expect you to do it because we care about each other" (see also Delpit, 1988). Embedding knowledge in relationship is culturally appropriate for Native Americans as well as for many other learners; it emphasizes collective responsibility and support. It is also appropriate in early childhood staff development (Morgan, 1983: Noddings, 1984).

When facilitation and challenge can come from different, but allied, sources, everyone benefits-including the facilitators and the challengers-if they pay respectful attention to each other's modes of operation. Only within appropriate system constraints-a baseline of required competence-will facilitation work, just as only in a classroom or home with dependable order and limits are children able to make choices that both please them and help them grow.

*They are familiar with traditionally independent educational opportunities, including colleges, which leave each applying student on her own. Applicants from college-educated families or college-prep schools aren't actually on their own, however, they have ready access to a whole network of people within "the culture of power" (Delpit, 1988; Lareau, 1989; Rose, 1989).

Facilitators: Why would an administrator want one around? Risks, losses, and gains

It's hard to be an administrator with a facilitator around. The facilitator has all the fun and gets most of the strokes-as a tradeoff for not having the power. Teachers who have established trust in a facilitator readily use her to facilitate talk, not only about children, but also about system complaints-which often take precedence-in teachers' lives over the day-to-day routine with children. Experienced teachers know how to manage their day in the classroom, but "Do you know what SHE did?" is a challenge crying out for a sounding board.

In Pasadena, for example, teachers working within the complex system of a public school district have been quick to say, "No one ever gave us strokes until the partnership came along. All we got was criticism. You've given us confidence in ourselves." Whether this is true or exaggerated, it is more than a matter of cool versus warm personal style, although style may well play a part; rather, it reflects inherent role differences.

"When the principal comes in, he isn't looking for the same things we are looking for," a Boulder teacher said to her facilitator, confidently including her in the "we." Facilitators work on behalf of teachers and are free of system responsibility. Administrators must balance their advocacy for teachers with total-system needs, some of which are inevitably at odds with teachers' perceived needs. "They never tell us anything," teachers complain, not recognizing that it isn't possible to share all administrative decision-making processes, especially those that have to do with personnel changes and are thus of greatest concern to teachers.

In advocating the truth/love model as an effective approach to organizational management and change (see Chapter 1), Bennis (1976) also makes its limitations clear. Radical restructuring of institutions, he says, never occurs through consensus, only through power-"because people have a terrible time restructuring themselves when they fear that their status, their power, their esteem are going to be lowered" (1976, p. 88). Administrators sometimes must exercise their power, make major changes-and take the flak for it.

"Teaching is not pleasing people. It is opening them to possibilities," Sharon Stine once wrote (Jones, 1983, p. 89). Even more, as Stine made clear in her book on administration (1983), administration is not pleasing people; it is making decisions and taking action while trying to keep possibilities open. Because there is always more action that others want taken than can possibly be addressed, and because others disagree among themselves about what action should be taken, it is very hard to be an administrator and be popular.

It is easy to be a facilitator and be popular with teachers, easy to say yes and not no. It is hard to be a facilitator and be popular with administrators, even if inviting the facilitator was the administrator's idea. Facilitation invigorates teachers; they may start to make waves. In Soledad and in Pasadena, teachers rebelled against administrative decisions. In Palo Alto several teachers left the centers they were working for, having realized-with a facilitator's help-that the fit wasn't a good one, thus leaving administrators with yet another hiring to do.

It is important that administrators acknowledge their power and be able to exercise it. It is important that facilitators acknowledge their position outside the power structure and be free of the need to engage in power struggles. It is important that both recognize the useful balance between fixing up and facilitation, and learn to collaborate in making use of both strategies at appropriate times and places. There is real potential for mutual learning in this relationship if both parties are open to learning.

Administrators are often isolated because they are in charge (Stine, 1983, p. 81). A facilitator from outside the system has the potential for becoming a peer; participation in a partnership may provide an administrator with others to talk to and/or to delegate some responsibilities to. In Pasadena partnership staff took increasing responsibility for planning and implementing district in-services, as trust was gradually established. The facilitator needs to resist being co-opted by administrators on one hand and by teachers on the other, while remaining accessible to both.

A facilitator who is able over time to gain the trust of both teachers and administrators may become something of an ombudsperson, a mediator between sometimes-opposing interests-on her own initiative or by request. She can tell affirming stories to administrators about teachers and to teachers about administrators. Collectively structured partnerships will work only if the facilitator has respect for both teachers and administrators. Individual-oriented partnerships, which bypass system constraints to work only with teachers, need not meet this requirement, but they have less potential for influencing system change.

System constraints on facilitation models

A facilitation model is relatively easy to implement with autonomous, confident, privileged teachers accustomed to making educational choices for themselves and successfully asserting themselves in the face of institutional authority. This description is somewhat more likely, give unequal distribution of power in society, to fit elementary teachers than child care workers, college graduates than persons who barely got through high school, Anglo-Americans than people of color, upper-middle-class than working-class folks, and men rather than women (although most participants in these early childhood education projects were, as would be expected, female). The great majority of all teachers of children, however are treated as less-than-autonomous professionals in the systems in which they work (Donmoyer, 1981; Kamii 1985).

Because people oppressed by gender, race, language, and social-class bias have significantly limited experience in making successful choices on behalf of their personal and professional growth, they are unlikely to be trusted, by institutions or by themselves, to make autonomous decisions as classroom teachers, so they are given training rather than practice in critical thinking. They are treated as silent receivers of knowledge (Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, & Tarule, 1986), as objects rather than subjects (Freire, 1970; Darder, 1992), to be manipulated for purposes other than their own. Elementary schools are hedged with prescribed textbooks and tests; Head Start, with performance standards. Teachers are thus understandably skeptical of an external facilitator who attempts to affirm and ask rather than critique and tell; so are administrators, who are likely to try to coopt a facilitator to their own purposes. Institutional purposes are often served by isolating teachers from each other. In many schools teachers are notably reluctant to share ideas with other teachers; the unspoken message is that if you ask for help, you must not know what you're doing. Among teachers, as among children, competition-not cooperation-is the cultural norm. Each teacher's classroom is her own turf (Apelman, 1979). At many schools and centers, faculty/staff meetings are notoriously uninvolving; they are used for announcements, nitty-gritty coordination, and administrators' training agendas. Teachers' own agendas aren't solicited or developed.

Whose agenda is it? is the basic question relevant to teacher empowerment, just as it is in developmentally appropriate practice in early childhood classrooms. Autonomous learners continually generate their own agendas, negotiating them with each other through play during childhood and through dialogue during adulthood. Throughout the stories of these partnerships, teachers' emergent issues partially displaced facilitators' plans for group discussion-appropriately so, because no teacher or group leader can predict in advance all of the significant topics that may emerge. In Palo Alto the facilitator had confidently predicted that mentors' interest would be in new information about children; she was surprised to discover how much time they chose to spend talking about working with other adults, not only their interns, but also their colleagues on the job. In Pasadena both the Play and Language seminar and the Working with Adults seminar, offered in years two and five of the project to interested teachers, jettisoned planned topics on days when teachers' day-to-day complaints spilled over, when teachers were angry about system restructurings, or when children and adults were reacting to recent riots in Los Angeles. By the fifth year of the project, content often emerged in the required in-services as well as in the smaller, more private seminars, as teachers lost their fears about what might happen if they spoke up.

Teachers and children accustomed to being paid attention to will interrupt training plans and lesson plans with concerns of their own. Empowered, they have less respect for top-down agendas and expect respect for their concerns. Both facilitators and classroom teachers are vulnerable to administrative criticism if they let this happen, but in the best of outcomes, administrators may join the emergent process themselves, taking risks made relatively safe within a context of caring relationships (Noddings, 1984; and see Chapter 4, p. 69 [newsletter], this volume).

Finding and growing facilitators

Facilitation is time consuming; it requires commitment to building relationships with teachers over time. Where can people be found with such time available, with flexibility of hours to match teachers' hours? And what's in it for them if they do?

In the majority of these partnerships, initiative has come from facilitators who, as experienced teachers themselves, wanted to learn-by doing-more about growing teachers. College faculty members, whose responsibilities typically include research and who sometimes have access to funding sources for special projects, are more likely than most other people to have both motivation and flexible schedules. The same may be true of some retired educators.

With relatively limited funding, it is possible to establish a peer-facilitator system like those among community programs in Palo Alto, between Head Start and school-district programs in Pasadena, and among teachers in Boulder. Providing release time for experienced teachers to visit other classrooms and be visited in their own builds a new level of leadership and motivates teachers to stay in the field. Many school districts designate mentor-teachers to give support to new teachers. In some districts one- or two-year teacher-advisor positions are available on a rotating basis to teachers taking a leave from the classroom. Other districts may provide a few longer term positions to specialists who, while working at the district level, are hired as teachers and can return to the classroom in the future.

Organizations such as Renton Vocational Technical Institute, the Australian Kindergarten Union, and teacher centers like Mountain View have employed advisors to work regularly with staff in child care centers and schools while maintaining their independence in relationships with teachers' employers.

As discussed in the introduction to this book, freedom from responsibility for teacher evaluation is probably the single most enabling characteristic of an external facilitator, equalizing in significant respects the relationship between teachers and facilitator. Agency or district personnel whom teachers find trustworthy may be able to function as facilitators-in the role of education coordinator, curriculum consultant, mentor teacher, or head teacher, for example-provided they are outside the evaluation/hiring-and-firing loop.

It is because of their evaluative responsibility that directors are never entirely free to facilitate. However. with tenured or otherwise secure teachers they can come close, and with any staff member a director may choose to practice storytelling, focusing on children and encouraging teachers to do the same (see Carter, Chapter 3).

Making it as a facilitator : Some useful advice

For all facilitators, including administrators trying on the role

1. Become a collector and broadcaster of stories. There are little stories everywhere; you can choosethem arbitrarily as long as they're a fair representation. Emphasize stories of children at play, the ultimate focus of attention in an early childhood program.

2. Invite teachers to collect and tell their own stories whenever there's an opportunity- on bulletin boards and in news notes; at staff meetings, parent meetings, in-services, and workshops.

3. Always be generous; give credit whenever possible. Build on strengths.

4. If asked for criticism, don't necessarily give it. Consider whether the criticism will be useful and what you're in fact seeing. Look for points of convergence between your values and the teacher's values. Support her values.

5. If giving advice, couch it as a question to which you genuinely do not know the answer: Would that work? What would happen if you ... ? Could you try ... ?

6. Pay attention to teachers' needs hierarchy (Maslow, 1970). Personal problems and job-security issues often take precedence in teachers' lives over events with children in the classroom. Acknowledging and expressing empathy for these priorities is a necessary part of relationship building. It may become part of partnership agenda, as well, when anger becomes a source of energy for collective action.

For facilitators external to the system

7. Pay attention to system realities, especially the constraints under which administrators work. Administrators are the most vulnerable members of the facilitator/teacher/administrator triad; they have the most to lose when things go wrong because they're accountable for things going right. A facilitator's interest in supporting risk taking by teachers needs to be checked out with administrators from time to time. Don't undermine.

8. Respect confidentiality with both teachers and administrators. If you succeed in establishing trust, you'll find out a lot. Passing some of such information along can be useful to everyone only when done in ways that maintain confidentiality.

9. Pay attention to the limits of facilitation; you're a helper, not a rescuer. The agency must establish a baseline for teacher performance, just as teachers must establish limits for children's behavior.

10. Respect and recognize the useful challenge provided by system constraints. Practice the "believing game" (Elbow, 1986) in your dealings with administrators. Be explicit with teachers about how the system works, as you see it. and find out from them how they see it, Strategies for real-world survival, including your own, are part of what you're teaching and learning (Delpit, 1988; Rose, 1989).

Summing up

Facilitation of teacher growth is a second-level model for staff development. Because it offers questions instead of answers, inviting teachers to construct knowledge for themselves with all of the risks inherent in that process, such facilitation relies on a baseline of prior competence established through training--direct teaching of social knowledge about standards for early childhood programs.

Only rules of behavior and names of things are appropriately taught as social knowledge. If you are a student observer, for example, you are expected to sit on a low chair and not interact with the children. If you are a new teaching assistant, you are told this is how we set up snack and this is where we hang children's wet paintings. If you are a teacher in charge of a classroom, you are told these are the licensing regulations for emergency procedures, storage of cleaning materials, and diaper changing, and this is how we expect you to keep lesson plans and to talk with children.

Theory applicable in practice is not social knowledge, although college instructors often teach such theory as if it were. Usable theory is logically constructed by each knower, on the basis of experience and dialogue about experience. Preservice students not in the classroom with children don't need rules for behavior; they need facilitation of their thinking about children and teaching. Adults in the classroom with children, in any role, need rules to begin with-and then facilitation of their thinking about children and teaching.

Effective facilitation depends on personal relationships sustained over time; it isn't a useful model for rapid change in large systems. Because it encourages critical thinking by teachers about all aspects of their work, it represents some risks for those administrators whose security depends on a top-down status quo. It is an open-ended, emergent model, focused on the quality of the learning process rather than on specifiable outcomes. Its objectives, stated behaviorally, are that teachers will reflect on their practice in dialogue with other teachers, identify changes they want to try, try them, reflect on them, and continue making changes.

In a presidential address to the American Educational Research Association in 1991. "Managing Dilemmas While Building Professional Communities," Larry Cuban stated,

What joins together teaching from kindergarten through graduate school is that it is, essentially, uncertain, action driven, ridden with dilemmas, and morally based.... Teaching requires making concrete choices among competing values for vulnerable others who lack the teacher's knowledge and skills, who are dependent upon the teacher for access to both, and who will be changed by what the teacher teaches, how it is taught, and who that teacher is.... Teachers ... demonstrate ways of thinking; they model how to inquire and engage others in intellectual exchanges; they disclose how they cope with the inevitable conflicts that arise in classrooms; they display moral virtues. Our character as human beings and how we teach become what we teach. (1992, p. 9)

For teachers of prekindergarten children, there's deja vu here; we've been left out again, as we've come to expect in the rhetoric of the American education establishment. But these words describe us too.

In proposing, in this book, a professional growth model for early childhood education, we are making a statement that knowledge about teaching can be constructed by all teachers if they have the opportunity to take their stories seriously. We hope that readers who are directors will be challenged to go beyond training toward a teacher-growth model. As both Carter and Greenough found, in the stories they tell in this book, banking education-the depositing of knowledge (Freire, 1970)-doesn't work; teachers won't consistently implement developmentally appropriate practice unless they have constructed their own understanding of it. That's the slow way, but there isn't any fast way that can be counted on.

We have told stories of programs that tried the longer way around and were rewarded by evident teacher growth both in competence and in the energy that comes from intrinsic motivation. Tapping into the energy of self-directed learning is crucial in promoting quality in schooling and child care. Adults, like children, learn and thrive when they are choosing new experiences for themselves. The trip to the brick factory described by Apelman in Chapter 6 was exciting, but it wasn't just entertainment; elsewhere, Apelman (1981) has commented that the children knew they were going to learn and they liked being learners. As Margaret Mead once said in a keynote address at NAEYC (1973), the "transcendent boredom" of being shut up in classrooms day after day doing the same old things is the worst thing about schools for children and, we would add, for adults; "[it] means that we are taking away from them any kind of chance of responsiveness" (p. 329).

A program director who is interested can try any of several strategies for implementing this model. The simplest may be to invite teachers to find their own resources (college classes, workshops, conferences, and the like), while supporting them with tuition aid, substitute time, and opportunities to share their new ideas with peers. It's important to acknowledge and facilitate the growth of their new ideas, even if these are unrelated to the director's specific goals for a teacher's growth. This model is about valuing growth for its own sake and trusting that it will keep moving along. This individualized strategy leaves it up to teachers to find external facilitators for themselves-in the person of college instructors, teachers' center advisors, or mentors.

In contrast, collective strategies designate facilitators, introduce them to members of a staff, and hope for a good match. Collective models for ongoing partnerships may be implemented within a national structure, such as that provided by CDA advising or by NAEYC accreditation (accreditation could be handled as a planned staff-development process, a genuine self-study with an external facilitator and no pressure to meet a completion deadline); or they may be locally invented, like those in Seattle, Soledad, and Pasadena, with a structure emerging out of the process.

However you choose to go about it, we recommend helping teachers grow.

References

Apelman, M. (1979). An advisor at work. In K. Devaney (Ed.), Building a teachers' center (pp. 157-168). San Francisco: Teachers' Center Exchange, Far West Laboratories.

Apelman, M. (1981). The role of the advisor in the inservice education of elementary school teachers: A case study. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO.

Belenky, M.F., Clinchy. B.M., Goldberger, N.R., & Tarule, J.M. (1986). Women's ways of knowing: The development of self, voice and mind. New York: Basic Books.

Bennis, W. (1976). The unconscious conspiracy: Why leaders can't lead New York: AMACOM.

Bredekamp, S., & Willer, B. (1992). Of ladders and lattices, cores and cones: Conceptualizing an early childhood professional development system. Young Children, 47(3), 47-53.

Cuban, L. (1992 January-Feruary). Managing dilemmas while building professional communties Educational Researcher, 21(1), 4-11.

Darder, A. (1992). Culture and power in the classroorn. New York: Bergin and Garvey.

Delpit, L. (1988). The silenced dialogue. Harvard Educational Review. 58(3), 280-298.

Donmoyer, R. (1981). The politics of play: Ideological and organizational constraints on the inclusion of play experiences in the school curriculum. Journal of Research and Development in Education, 14(3), 11-18.

Elbow, P. (1986). Embracing contraries: Explorations in teaching and learning. New York: Oxford University Press.

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder.

Jones, E. (1983). On the growing edge: Notes by college teachers making changes. Pasadena, CA: Pacific Oaks College.

Jones, E. (1992, June). Teaching adults to teach young children. Paper presented at the first annual conference of NAEYC's National Institute for Early Childhood Professional Development, Los Angeles, CA. (Available from the author)

Kamii, C. (1985). Leading primary education toward excellence: Beyond worksheets and drill. Young Children, 40(6), 3-9.

Kleinfeld, J. (1972). Effective and ineffective teachers of Native high school students. Fairbanks: University of Alaska, Institute of Social and Economic Research.

Lareau, A. (1989). Home advantage: Social class and parental intervention in elementary education. Bristol, PA: Falmer Press.

Maslow, A. (1970). Motivation and personality. New York: Harper.

Mead, M. (1973). Can the socialization of children lead to greater acceptance of diversity? Young Children, 28(6), 322-329.

Morgan, C. (1983). Journal of a day care administrator. In S. Stine (Ed.), Administration: A bedside guide (pp. 11-20). Pasadena, CA: Pacific Oaks College.

Noddings, N. (1984). Caring: A feminine approach to ethics and moral education. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Rose, M. (1989). Lives on the boundary. New York: Penguin Books.

Stine, S. (1983). Administration: A bedside guide. Pasadena, CA: Pacific Oaks College.

van Manen, M. (1990). Researching lived experience: Human science for an action sensitive pedagogy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

To contact the author, write:

Elizabeth Jones, Pacific Oaks College, 5 Westmoreland Place, Pasadena, CA 91103.

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