Program Overview: Professional Development

Professional development is an essential dimension of our program. We based our professional development model not only on the mainstream professional development literature (reviewed below) but also on the evolution of our primary professional development vehicle; namely, international educational exchange.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union , one of the central missions of civic education exchange has been education for democracy in newly democratic countries. To serve that mission, exchange has become a vehicle of technical assistance. In a program structured along those lines, the exchange typically consists of two components. One involves American educators traveling to new democracies where they demonstrate principles of democratic education and practices of active learning. In the second, educators from new democracies travel to the United States where they observe schools and communities and, on occasion, provide feedback on American teaching of civics and history.

One expects that the participants gain important comparative understandings from such experiences. Ideally, sufficient opportunities are provided to transform those understandings into curricular results. However, in many instances, there is less direct and institutional benefit to the American educational system than to the other country's educational system!

Our program begins with a commitment to a more symmetrical approach in which exchange is a two-way street that brings back significant value-added to American education. The key, we believe, is to tie the exchange component to the professional development of our Exchange Fellows and to the product of their collaboration, the textbook for U.S. classrooms. To do this, we engage American and Russian exchange participants in joint research projects designed to produce classroom resources to supplement the textbook as well as their own teaching. To enhance the likelihood of this succeeding, we have come to assign each region to specific textbook lessons, recognizing, of course, that resource development involves more than exchange-based research.

The challenge is how best to insure the classroom transfer and utilization of the participants' professional development experience. To decide how best to address this challenge, we reviewed the relevant professional development literature. We found of special value for our needs the work of Fred Newman, Beatrice Birman and Valerie Hastings Moye.

Fred M. Newmann and his associates identify five factors of a professional community. These include: clear shared norms, focus on student learning, reflective dialogue, publicizing good practice, and collaboration. 3 Beatrice Birman and her associates researched this subject from a different angle which emphasizes the importance of these factors: a focus on content knowledge, opportunities for teachers to learn actively, collaborative use of student work, duration, and collective participation.4 In a third study, Valerie Hastings Moye specifically examines classroom transfer, finding five conditions that promote classroom use of what teachers learn so that students benefit and their achievement increases. These include: teaching content linked to student achievement, the teacher's sense of efficacy, a strong and positive school culture, elements of effective training, and coaching or follow-up.5

We also benefited from an earlier literature review by Laurel Singleton6 and a later review by Thomas S. Vontz and Robert S. Leming.7 The latter work is a thorough analysis of professional development in civic education, and Professor Vontz has joined our team as one of the contributors of our textbook as well as the regional coordinator for the Civics Mosaic region in Kansas City, MO.

From the participating teacher's perspective, the highlight of our program is definitely the trip they take to their foreign counterpart's country and region. However, our evaluation results show that participants appreciate the overall professional development opportunity system of which the trip is a significant part.

Based on our research findings, our professional development system centers on five basic commitments. The first is collaboration with colleagues in regional teams, in counterpart regions, and with textbook authors. The second is strong pedagogical content linked to teaching methods-in the annual institute they attend, in the textbook they review, and in the research they do in the development of textbook resources. The third commitment is support to our teams administratively by their regional coordinator and national staff, financially (including annual stipends and a regional budget), and technically (with equipment, supplies, educational material, and translation services). The fourth is follow-through in the Fellows' classrooms and schools with an exchange program that is classroom based and field testing of the textbook by the Fellows in their classrooms. The fifth commitment looks to involve participants over as long duration as possible. Fellows serve two-year terms and can continue in the program as alums.

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