Teachers Teaching Teachers

By Nancy Barnes

"Professional development" is one of those bits of jargon that get more obscure as you try to figure out what they really mean. People who advocate professional development in public education today are often proposing yet another top-down solution to the problems in our schools. These "solutions" remind me of an experience I had years ago, when I worked as an ethnographer in an elementary school in a poor neighborhood in New York City.

One hot June afternoon, I joined the teachers for an in-service staff-development session in the school lunchroom. The speaker was a corporate executive, a woman in a fancy suit and heels. She delivered a packaged talk about the nature of organizational change that could have been given to absolutely any group of professionals. The talk was accompanied by a slick video about "paradigm shift" that made its point by illustrating the switch from numerical watches and clocks, with hands that circle their faces, to digital timepieces that flip from one number to the next. I remember thinking to myself, why is this professional development? How can this possibly help these overextended, disenchanted people become better teachers?

Since that afternoon, I've spent a lot of time in New York City public schools and given a lot of thought to what creates and sustains outstanding teachers. I've come to understand that outsiders, whether corporate executives or ethnographers or any number of other professional "experts," are not the solution to how people become better teachers. (One high school teacher I know tells of having taken up knitting just so she wouldn't lose her temper in workshops like the one with...