Connections between professional development and accountability

Elmore (2002a) believes that the key to large-scale improvement is investment in the knowledge and skills of educators. Professional development supplies educators with the knowledge and skills they need to improve, helping to bridge the gap between what society wants of its educational system and what that system can deliver.

The practice of large-scale improvement is the process by which external demands for accountability are translated into concrete structures, processes, norms and instructional practices in schools and school systems. Professional development is the set of knowledge- and skill-building activities that raise the capacity of teachers and administrators to respond to external demands and to engage in the improvement of practice and performance.

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Elmore believes that it is unfair and unrealistic to expect educators to achieve improved outcomes for students if they are not provided with the professional learning opportunities they need to improve their own practices. Further, he believes that there is enough consensus in the current literature and research about effective professional development to form the basis of a “reasonable working theory for the design of large-scale professional development activities” (page 11). However, he warns that current structures tend to make it difficult to put what is known about effective professional development into practice.

Accountability must be a reciprocal process. For every increment of performance I demand from you, I have an equal responsibility to provide you with the capacity to meet that expectation. Likewise, for every investment you make in my skill and knowledge, I have a reciprocal responsibility to demonstrate some new increment in performance. This is the principle of “reciprocity of accountability for capacity.” It is the glue that, in the final analysis, will hold accountability systems together (Elmore 2000). At the moment, schools and school systems are not designed to provide support or capacity in response to demands for accountability.

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Elmore argues that for professional development to contribute to teachers’ instructional capacity, schools and systems are going to have to re-organise in significant ways, reducing isolation and making them places of learning for educators as well as for students. He suggests that Spillane et al.’s (2001) ideas about distributed leadership “can help educators become more aware of the connection between instructional practices and their own and their students’ learning” (Elmore, 2002b, page 24):

Instructional practice and the improvement of instructional practice are complex and require high levels of knowledge and skills across a number of important domains …

To be successful at this complex work, schools need to have structures that develop the knowledge and skills of individuals and that stretch this expertise among people occupying the same role (such as teachers) and different roles (such as teachers and administrators). In these situations, learning grows out of concrete tasks that require shared expertise and allow people to develop their own skills and contribute to the development of others’ knowledge and skills.

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