Connections between big ideas and everyday practice

Elmore (1996) suggests that educational institutions have protected themselves from the disturbance created by new ideas about good educational practices by making changes in their external structures that act as buffers, protecting teachers and leaders from making any real change at the instructional core of schooling. He suggests that the prevailing incentive structure reinforces this process. He proposes four strategies that educators could use to overcome these problems and to scale up good ideas about teaching and learning.

1. Develop strong external normative structures for practice. Elmore says that external norms are important because they institutionalise “the idea that professionals are responsible for looking outward at challenging conceptions of practice, in addition to looking inward at their values and competencies” (page 31). They legitimise those who “draw their ideas about teaching from a professional community and who compare themselves against a standard external to their school or community” (page 32).

2. Develop organisational structures that intensify and focus, rather than dissipate and scatter, intrinsic motivation to engage in challenging practice. Elmore argues that schools and school systems should develop structures that bind diverse groups of educators together in relationships of mutual obligation as they work through issues of practice. Such face-to-face interactions help educators “to develop strong and binding professional norms about what constitutes high-quality teaching practice and a supportive organizational environment” (Elmore, 2003, page 9).

3. Create intentional processes for reproduction of successes. Elmore (1996) says that there is a need to create interventions that expose teachers to new practices and to monitor the effects of those interventions on teaching practice. He outlines five possibilities for scaling-up educational reform, one of which involves creating professional networks that connect the more advanced (in terms of change) to the less advanced through a mentoring programme.

4. Create structures that promote learning of new practices and incentive systems that support them. Elmore observes that changing practice requires learning, and that learning takes time and several cycles of trial and error. Educators also need to feel that there is a compelling reason for them to practise differently and to receive feedback from trusted sources about whether the changes they are making are benefiting their students.

According to Elmore (1996):

These four basic principles constitute departures from previous strategies of broad-scale reform, and they address fundamental problems of previous strategies. It is unlikely that teachers or schools will respond to the emergence of new practices any differently than they have in the past if those practices are not legitimated by norms that are external to the environment in which they work every day. It is unlikely that teachers who are not intrinsically motivated to engage in hard, uncertain work will learn to do so in large, anonymous organizations that do not intensify personal commitments and responsibilities. It is unlikely that successful practices will spontaneously reproduce themselves just because they are successful, in the absence of structures and processes based on explicit theories about how reproduction occurs. And it is unlikely that teachers will be successful at learning new practices if the organizations in which they work do not embody some explicit learning theory in the way they design work and reward people.

page 39

The TPLD BES (Timperley et al., 2007) affirms Elmore’s argument about the importance of achieving coherence between big reform ideas and everyday practice. The developers found that successful professional development is coherent both internally (around a common framework or vision) and in terms of its consistency with pedagogical approaches that have been proven through research and promoted by policy makers and professional teaching bodies. Effective ISTEs understand their role in linking policy and research to classroom and school practice.

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