How Teaching Matters

The views expressed in this report are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the officers and trustees of Educational Testing Service. FOREWORD Improving the quality of teaching in America's schools continues to be a central focus of educational reform. Increasing salaries, changing licensing requirements, and improving pre-service instruction are just some of the major initiatives targeted to bringing better prepared teachers into the classroom. Certainly, there is ample evidence, including the findings from this report, that well-prepared teachers produce more successful learners. Recruiting and preparing high quality teachers must remain a priority for policymakers. Yet, Harold Wenglinsky, in this significant report, reminds us that attention only at the front end of the teacher pipeline is insufficient. Simply put, even if recruiting and preparation efforts were wildly successful, today's students do not have the luxury of waiting for a new generation of highly qualified teachers to staff our schools. For these students, it is imperative that their classroom teachers, today, are as effective as possible. Wenglinsky's report is an optimistic one, giving us reason to believe that effective professional development does make a difference in student achievement. Of course, much of the professional development in our schools has been criticized as being superficial and irrelevant. What makes this report so important is that it begins to tease out the quality of professional development and its relationship to student learning. Professional development that attends to student learning of important skills and concepts appears to matter, and matter for all students in mathematics and science. Other kinds of professional development do not seem to matter. Wenglinsky has helped us move from the question " Should we support in-service professional development " to " What kinds of in-service professional development should be supported? " As with many of his past reports, Wenglinsky capitalizes on the large-scale survey information from NAEP to give us insight into classroom practice and student learning. However, such data are limited in that they don't provide us a depth of understanding of the phenomena under investigation, in this case the detailed characteristics of professional development. But, these data certainly do give us reason to explore these issues with more intensive methodologies and smaller samples. If we are to improve education , we must avoid the tendency to rely on simple generalizations and dichotomies. We need to attend to pre-service and in-service issues in improving …