Chapter 1. What Is High-Quality Professional Development for Differentiating Instruction

Unfortunately, to many educators, "high-quality staff development" is something of an oxymoron. The list of complaints about teacher workshop days is long and most often includes

• "Drive-by" workshops
• One-size-fits-all presentations
• "Been there, done that" topics
• Little or no modeling of what is being taught
• Focus on rotating fads
• Lack of follow-up

All of these complaints often lead educators to feel disillusioned, resent staff development days for the time they take away from the classroom and planning, and take an overall attitude of, "If I just close my eyes, this new initiative, too, shall pass."

If we seek to break this pattern of thinking in our efforts to help teachers gain—and refine—their knowledge, understanding, and skill with differentiating instruction (DI), we need to consider the following questions:

• What is high-quality staff development?
• Why differentiate staff development?
• What is the relationship between high-quality differentiation and high-quality leadership for differentiation?

What Is High-Quality Staff Development?

Numerous state and federal organizations have developed key principles of high-quality professional development. These include

• The National Staff Development Council (NSDC): www.nsdc.org/standards
• The U.S. Department of Education: www.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/pg107.html#sec9101
• Goals 2000: www.ed.gov/G2K/bridge.html

Three key ideas emerge from these organizations and will drive our work in Professional Development for Differentiating Instruction:

1. High-quality professional development leads teachers to gain and refine knowledge of both content and pedagogy.
2. High-quality professional development reflects best practices in teaching and learning, helping adults with varied interests, learning profiles, and readiness learn to work together and feel part of a community of learners.
3. High-quality professional development has a positive impact on the classroom in terms of both teacher effectiveness and student learning.

By focusing our staff development efforts around these key principles, we hope to provide administrators and teacher leaders with tools to plan for, implement, and reflect on high-quality staff development that introduces, models, and encourages teachers' continuing journeys along the road to more fully differentiated classroom practices.

What Is the Relationship Between High-Quality Differentiation and High-Quality Leadership for Differentiation?

Change can be difficult. Most of us tend to avoid it, especially if our practices have been successful in the past. In The Limits of Organizational Change, Herbert Kaufman suggests that change invites us to experience "the humiliation of becoming a raw novice at a new trade after having been a master craftsman at an old one" (1995, p.13). Good leadership for differentiation, therefore, must recognize the difficulties inherent in changing long-standing teaching habits and beliefs while celebrating the successes that happen along the way. In Leadership for Differentiating Schools and Classrooms, Carol Ann Tomlinson and Susan Allan (2000) outline nine principles about change in schools and describe how they relate to leadership for differentiation:

• Change is imperative in today's classrooms.
• The focus on school change must be classroom practice.
• For schools to become what they ought to be, we need systemic change.
• Change is difficult, slow, and uncertain.
• Systemic change requires both leadership and administration.
• To change schools, we must change the culture of schools.
• What leaders do speaks with greater force than what they say.
• Change efforts need to link with a wider world.
• Leaders for change have a results-based orientation.

This action tool offers teacher leaders tools to facilitate the change process, reminding them that teachers will be at varied levels of readiness for change and, consequently, for staff development on differentiation. Furthermore, we must consider and respond to teachers' interests and, most particularly, preferred ways of learning if we wish them to accept—and even embrace—change.

Why Differentiate Staff Development?

While there are certainly differences between kindergarteners and practicing teachers that require variations in teaching practices, good teaching is good teaching. Savvy teachers have always incorporated differentiated practices into their teaching repertoires to a certain degree, whether or not they have called those practices by that name. The trick is to refine and add to those practices over time. If good teachers believe in and strive to increase the amount and kind of differentiation that is evident in their classrooms, then staff developers must do no less. In other words, if we are asking teachers to differentiate, then we must differentiate for teachers!

The key principles of high-quality differentiation include establishing a welcoming and safe classroom, ensuring that what is taught (the curriculum) is of the highest quality, maintaining a commitment to ongoing assessment, offering respectful differentiated tasks, and incorporating flexible grouping practices over time (Strickland, 2007). High-quality differentiated staff development must reflect these principles as well.

Differentiation requires sustained motivation, hard work, and support from an entire school system. Teachers and administrators must recognize that we do not master differentiation in a day, a week, a month, or even a year. Differentiation is a continuing journey toward expertise in teaching. Just as our students start out at different places in their paths to new learning, so do teachers. To do justice to teachers and to the students they serve, we must accept the need and responsibility to help teachers make this journey, offer the training and support needed to successfully change what happens in the traditional classroom, and find the strength to persevere in our efforts to change without being overwhelmed by the urgency and enormity of the task.

If we truly believe that teachers, like the students they teach, have differing learning needs, we must accept the challenge to differentiate professional development systematically and consistently. We can increase the likelihood of this happening by acknowledging teachers' varied readiness levels for new learning, honoring and celebrating their diverse interests, and understanding their unique preferences for how they learn new information and practice new skills.