Montana Christa McAuliffe Professional Development Planning Project
The Montana Christa McAuliffe Professional Development Planning Project (MCMPDPP) proposes to develop a comprehensive statewide plan that identifies and supports the professional development needs of Montana-trained beginning teachers, in a context that links professional development to improved student achievement. As a result of the planning process the Office of Public Instruction will assume the lead role to submit a proposal for funding under The Ready to Teach Act for implementation of a comprehensive state-wide professional development system that supports the highly-qualified teacher requirements of No Child Left Behind and ensures that teachers are ready to teach all Montana’s children.
Identification of Specific Need Areas for Professional Development
The quality, effectiveness, and availability of K-12 educators is a matter of great concern to Montana as well as the nation. The increased requirements of the No Child Left Behind initiative places greater emphasis on higher quality teacher preparation that results in demonstrated improved student achievement. Teacher preparation and professional development are key elements of any effort to increase both teacher quality and quantity.
Even before increased federal emphasis, recruitment and retention of adequate numbers of highly qualified teachers for Montana classrooms had reached the crisis stage. “Who Will Teach Montana’s Children?” (Nielson, 2001), commissioned by the Montana Board of Public Education, documents numerous aspects of this situation. The report states, “only 29% of the students who complete education programs in Montana are teaching in the accredited schools of Montana one or two years later.” Retention issues exist in districts of all sizes and in many subject areas, especially in music, math, art, special education and foreign languages, which are often part-time positions in smaller schools. “Over 80% of …districts were having considerable difficulty hiring certified staff…with the greatest difficulty being multi-subject positions, which are common in schools of all sizes.”
Mirroring the national pattern, hiring and retention problems are most acute in already low-performing schools. In Montana, those schools are often located on or near American Indian reservations or in other high poverty urban areas, where it is not uncommon for more than a quarter the teachers to change every year. Montana’s extreme rural isolation, as well as Montana’s 45th ranking for beginning teacher salaries, are major factors contributing to problems of recruitment and retention. In addition, for beginning teachers, professional isolation and lack of professional development opportunities are significant factors in turnover. As the report noted, “in many of Montana’s smaller schools, opportunities for professional development may be no more than allowing designated days to attend meetings or workshops at personal expense,” often at locations hundreds of miles away.
The critical shortage of highly qualified educators, whatever the factors, seriously hinders Montana’s school system’s ability to provide educational opportunities that meet the needs of all our children and to comply with the requirements of No Child Left Behind.
Unfortunately, Montana lacks a comprehensive model or system for delivering high quality professional development for K-12 teachers. While numerous universities, tribal colleges, the Office of Public Instruction, teacher’s unions, local districts, and others offer episodic professional development, there is neither a plan, funding, nor a system for delivering coordinated, focused programming that can be shown to result in increased student achievement.
“Who Will Teach Montana’s Children,” and another recent report, “Inquiry into the Preparation of Elementary and Secondary Educators Practicing in Montana” (MGT of America, 1998), both prioritize the need to address innovation in professional development and other supports for recruitment and retention of Montana-trained beginning educators. If Montana is to successfully increase both teacher quality and quantity, the retention of beginning teachers, by investing in their professional growth, must become a priority.
Goals and Activities
The Montana Christa McAuliffe Professional Development Planning Project will focus on the following major goals and related activities.
Goal 1. Determine what is already known about the needs for professional development and support systems that foster high quality Montana trained beginning teachers.
An enormous amount of information has been collected and analyzed by various studies about teacher preparation and professional development needs in Montana, including three recent major studies:
· The 1998 MGT of America “Inquiry into the Preparation of Elementary and Secondary Educators Practicing in Montana,”
· The 1999 Montana ESEA Title II Eisenhower Study “Teacher Self-Assessment of Content Knowledge and Student Performance with Regard to Montana’s Reading and Mathematics Content Standards and Survey of Professional Development Quality,” and
· The 2000-01 Montana ESEA Title II Eisenhower Study “Teacher Self-Assessment of Content Knowledge and Student Performance with Regard to Montana’s Science and Technology Content Standards and Survey of Professional Development Quality.”
These studies provide a rich source for understanding the complex nature of identifying professional development needs, and prioritizing those needs so that focused, long-term, job-embedded professional development can occur. These reports were written to establish baseline data prior to planning for any large-scale professional development initiative in Montana, and as such, together form the core of a data system for the Project, although they do not specifically focus on the needs of beginning teachers.
Goal 2. Establish a research-based data model that links specific professional development with measurable increases in student achievement.
The Project intends to contract with an outside consultant to facilitate the examination of research correlating teacher preparation and professional development activities to increases in student achievement and to propose a model that supports and delineates such a proven connection. “All education policy should be driven by what we want P-12 students to know and be able to do. Thus all aspects of a state’s education system should be aligned with and organized to achieve the state’s policy embodied in its P-12 student standards.” ( INTASC, 2003) In other words, student achievement is the ultimate measure of how well our teacher candidates are performing in the classroom. It is therefore imperative that the teacher education and educator licensure standards within the state of Montana are aligned to the P-12 student standards and that we establish a theoretical foundation for a statewide professional development model linking teacher preparation and professional development of beginning teachers to improvement in student achievement of all Montana’s students.
The statewide professional development model will use existing research to provide the leadership team with consistent guidance about the specific qualities of professional development and teacher preparation that will result in measurable student achievement. This model will provide beginning educators, administrators, and education institutions with clear guidelines for evaluating specific professional development activities and program standards for potential impact on classroom achievement.
Goal 3. Design, develop and pilot an electronic teacher tracking system for beginning educators.
The Project intends to contract with an outside consultant to design, develop and pilot an electronic tracking system for beginning teachers that provides the data linkages between high-quality professional development and increased student achievement. The new teacher tracking system will be designed to follow recent graduates of Montana teacher preparation programs as they take their first teaching positions in Montana schools. These new teachers will self-access their professional development needs and report on professional development activities in which they participate. In addition, each beginning teacher’s direct supervisor will provide information on the teacher’s knowledge, skills, and perceived professional development needs. The teacher tracking system will be designed to link the self-reported evaluations and supervisor’s evaluations to currently collected student achievement data, measuring the impact of specific professional development as it impacts student achievement.
The Project also will examine the feasibility of using existing systems, such as the Montana Annual Data Collection system, for additional data needs and explore other new data evaluation systems or enhancements that might be needed.
In the final quarter of the project year the new teacher tracking system will be field tested in two very different school districts, Helena and Browning, with beginning teachers. Evaluation of the pilot sites will determine if the system provides a tracking process that provides the data to drive decision making about professional development and also determine the usefulness of the model to teachers, the district and other educational stakeholders.
Goal 4. Assess the capacity of existing education stakeholder institutions to meet the identified professional development needs of beginning teachers and design a high quality professional development model that builds the capacity of all stakeholder institutions to train, support and retain high quality beginning teachers in Montana schools.
The Project will provide valuable information to the teacher preparation programs regarding the effectiveness of existing systems that prepare, assess and evaluate teacher candidates. To address Goal 4 the work of the leadership team will focus on a range of issues of pertaining to institutional capacity to provide high-quality professional development. Initial planning to address the required accountability provisions for teacher preparation programs in The Ready to Teach Act, including state and institutional report cards on the quality of teacher preparation, will be included. The Project also will incorporate ongoing discussion about potential reforms to Montana Educator Licensure in preparation for submission for a Ready to Teach grant.
Goal 5. Develop a collaborative process and structure that allows all stakeholder institutions to move forward together to secure resources to implement the model.
The cumulative work of the Project will develop the core of a proposal to be submitted to the United States Department of Education’s Ready to Teach Program for implementation of the model. The leadership team will serve as a nexus for coordination and collaboration of the stakeholder institutions as they implement reforms, based on rigorous academic content, scientifically based research, and challenging student academic content standards, ensuring that teacher education programs are preparing teachers who are highly qualified as defined by No Child Left Behind.
Project Oversight and Leadership Team
The Planning Project will pull together a diverse team of Montana’s education stakeholders to develop a model that can be successfully implemented in Montana and to develop a plan that can serve as the basis for submission to the United States Department of Education for funding under The Ready to Teach Act.
The collaborative planning process will serve to ensure that proposed changes by stakeholder institutions are fully integrated into a systemic model, as well as building the capacity of the entire system to respond to change.
Also serving on the MCMPDPP leadership team will be two local school districts, a large “urban” district and a small reservation district, and the Small Schools Alliance, representing 250 of Montana’s smallest schools, to ensure that the planning process fully incorporates the perspectives and realities of Montana schools. These schools will serve as pilot sites for field-testing the new teacher data tracking system, linking professional development and student achievement.
Institutions that have agreed to serve on the MCMPDPP leadership team include:
The Office of Public Instruction
The Office of the Governor
The Montana Board of Public Education
The Montana Certification, Standards, and Practices Advisory Council
Council of Deans of Schools of Education
Salish Kootenai College (tribal college)
Montana Education Association-Montana Federation of Teachers
Montana Small Schools Alliance
Montana Advisory Council on Indian Education
Helena School District (a large “urban” district)
Browning School District (a small reservation district)
Over the twelve-month planning period the Project leadership team will meet six times to accomplish the proposed objectives of the project. The team will be convened and facilitated by the Office of Public Instruction under the leadership of Dr. Linda Vrooman Peterson, which will bear final responsibility for implementation of all aspects of the Project. Two outside consultants will be engaged to assist the leadership team. One consultant will assist in the establishment of a research-based link between professional development and student achievement. The second consultant will design, develop, and pilot an electronic database tracking system for beginning teachers.
