Professional Development and Educational Reform

With the advent of what is sometimes termed the ‘academic standards movement’ in the western world in the 1990s, professional development became one cornerstone of public school reform. Funds allocated through government agencies, generally departments and ministries of education, were earmarked for teacher professional development programmes related to improving learner achievement via better pedagogy. School systems throughout the western world became the recipients of these funds, and in turn were required to produce high-level professional

development programmes for classroom teachers. Moreover, because developments in one or more jurisdictions tend to attract the attention of others, particularly if they are widely regarded as

successful, professional development programmes for public schools and their teachers in Australia, Britain, Canada and elsewhere, drew international audiences and as a result, professional development rapidly emerged as one of the major building blocks in attempts to reform and improve public education world-wide. This included attempts by developing nations to emulate or model their own programmes on those originally developed for western countries, as these nations sought to compete more effectively in an increasingly globalised economy, and as the value of human capital development was pressed by international agencies including the World Bank and UNESCO.

Although approaches to educational reform varied enormously depending upon factors such as the extent of available resources, professional development grew to become one vehicle through which improvements in teaching and learning, and educational outcomes might be achieved. Indeed, what emerged during the 1990s and 2000s was a more overt focus on ‘becoming learning societies’ which could sustain knowledge economies. Thus, teachers as ‘transmitters of

knowledge’ came to the fore since it was, as professionals, that they could instil reform and improvement via teaching and learning (Hargreaves et al., 2007).

At the same time, in Qatar’s Education for a New Era, teachers came to be viewed as more responsible and more accountable for curriculum development, teaching academic content standards within classrooms, administering but not participating in new forms of assessment, aligning teaching and learning materials with content standards, using disaggregated data to inform instruction, and using new learner report cards. Teachers came to be positioned as the people to deliver these policies, in other words, their implementers. A fuller discussion of the extent to which these responsibilities were fulfilled appears in Chapters 7 and 8.

As a consequence of educational reform evolving and growing world-wide, the public policy debate has increasingly focused on improving quality and standards via quality professional development predominantly aimed at teachers. The recent situation in Qatar has emerged as broadly similar, even though professional development was more or less, and perhaps surprisingly, ‘glossed over’ in the early formulation of Education for a New Era.

Further weight has been added to the debate as a result of it now being possible to make broad, though sometimes over-stated, comparisons between nations due to their participation and learner performance in various international studies such as PISA, PIRLS and TIMSS. Since Qatar began

participating in this now widespread and equally widely measured process of educational change, the performance of Qatar’s learners has remained very low, despite the allocation of very

considerable resources to its Independent Schools. Qatar has been consistently placed among the five lowermost nations in the cross-national studies noted earlier (Evaluation Institute, 2008). Interestingly though, low learner performance on various international studies has not yet emerged as a cause for concern in Qatar. This stands in marked contrast with the attention that such results typically garner in countries such as Australia and Britain where concerns about ‘ranking’ and ‘improvement’ loom large on political, public and educational agendas.

At the same time the focus on professional development and learner performance has sharpened, not to mention the many other facets of public education systems that are now scrutinised more carefully, and there has been a concomitant growth in the ‘free flow’ of our knowledge and understanding, largely assisted by the unfiltered mechanisms offered through the worldwide web for example. The net effect has been an exponential expansion of contemporary understandings about the curriculum, how subjects might be taught and learned and many other domains within

Another clearly observable parallel arises in terms of the types of skills, knowledge and

understanding that learners are now seen to require, something in stark contrast with a generation ago. What this means is that to be effective, teachers must be aware of emerging trends, and have sufficient professional expertise to make judgements about new pedagogies, knowledge and methods. Thus, it is not merely a case of teachers being ‘fashionable’ or ‘fadish’, rather they need to be sufficiently well informed to make sound judgements about their own pedagogy and other practices, and the wider issues involved in teaching and learning.

As noted earlier, Education for a New Era with its sharp focus on English as the medium for teaching and learning, even in mathematics and science, placed vastly increased pressure on the quality of ESL teachers, and enhanced the need for them to have the skills, knowledge and understandings in terms of ESL, and in mathematics and science pedagogy too. However, ESL provision in Qatar’s Independent Schools lacked any across-the-board pedagogy, other than that which individual teachers may have evolved personally or in groups. There was an absence of a clear approach to ESL teacher development, and to advancing mathematics and science via English medium teaching and learning. In Chapter 8, I explore in more detail the impact of proposed changes to the development of English language pedagogy on professional development programmes.

According to Sparks and Hirsh (1997), at all levels of education, there are many excellent examples of highly effective endeavours in professional development. Every successful programme that is focused on improving teaching and learning, curriculum revision, school re- structuring design, or systematic reform, has at its centre, the provision of quality professional development for classroom teachers and other support personnel. However, serious concerns remain about the effectiveness of many professional development practices and the literature on

this topic is littered with descriptions of high expectations that resulted in failure (Corcoran, 1995; Guskey, 1986; Guskey and Huberman, 1995), and reviews of modern professional development programmes are often equally pessimistic (Consortium for Policy Research in Education, 1996 and Frechtling et al., 1995).

In fact, many conventional forms of professional development are seen as too top-down and too isolated from school and classroom realities to have much impact on practice. As a result, anticipated or expected improvements are seldom realised. As Cooley (1997:18) has observed,

“I have concluded that most educational reform takes place in our literature and on the pages of Education Week, not in schools and classrooms … it seemed to me that all this talk about waves and waves of reforms really refers to trends in the reform literature, not changes that are really taking place in real schools. Ofcourse, that is true of waves. They tend to be highly visible at the surface, but do not affect what is going on down in the lower depths”.

My study sought to address some of the evident weaknesses in the types of professional development programmes described by Cooley. I wanted to find out whether it is possible to have coherent and systematic methods of professional development for teachers within a system of at least notionally Independent Schools, which are publicly-funded but which operate more or less corporately, and where there is no formal all-embracing central authority such as a Ministry of Education, although the Education Institute is rapidly looming as a de facto replacement. In particular, I wanted to explore the professional development needs of women ESL teachers, anticipating that they would articulate these in the context of the emerging reform model.

Guskey (1994) observes that educators themselves frequently regard professional development as having little impact on their day-to-day responsibilities, or as being applicable to their classroom needs. Some even consider it a waste of their professional time. They may participate in

professional development primarily because of contractual obligations, but often see it as something they must ‘get out of the way’, so that they can get back to the important work of teaching. But, not all professional development in education is ineffective, meaningless, and wasteful. Rather, educators simply have not done a very good job of documenting the positive effects of professional development (Consortium for Policy Research in Education, 1996 and Guskey, 1994).

It is generally recognised that the school context will expand teachers’ professional development options beyond those available in traditional in-service models (Sandholtz, 2002), and thus, what becomes important during explicit reform, is the extent to which opportunities provided within a school are identified, meaningful and accessible. Within Qatar’s Independent Schools, it has become a relatively widespread practice for women ESL teachers to have opinions about what they consider to be meaningful professional development, and what they believe they need to develop and grow as professionals. The degree to which this input is actually used to plan professional development programmes for women ESL teachers is explored in Chapter 8.

To add to the methodological complexities involved, identifying and addressing teachers’ professional development needs is shared between the Supreme Education Council’s Education Institute that houses a Professional Development Office, and staff from the multi-national school support organisations that are under contract to the Supreme Education Council to assist in carrying forward the aims of Education for a New Era.

In broad terms at least, an expectation seems to have arisen in the Professional Development Office and among staff from school support organisations that ESL teachers in Independent Schools will engage in action research, peer teaching/peer observation, teacher groups and associations. This study examines whether or not these external ‘requirements’ for teachers are actually fulfilled within the Independent Schools at which they teach. This is important as,under the terms of their contracts with the Education Institute, school support organisations are supposed to deliver support services to teachers in Independent Schools. Part of these services entails assisting teachers to become familiar with, and contribute to, educational journals, engage in peer discussion and to facilitate opportunities for new teachers to learn from more experienced teachers. In Chapter 8, I review the role of school support organisations and the support provided to teachers.