The Challenge of Present-Day Training in Education
Organizations in the corporate sector appear to have developed effective theory and practice for moving from the Tayloristic model of management and staff development to the modern learning organization. Most educators would like to create institutions characterized by continual learning, but most remain bogged down by the remnants of Taylorism. Taylor sought many of the same goals of the current-day business manager, but the techniques of his era resulted in top-heavy organizations composed of unsatisfied workers. Weisbord writes, "Taylorism became synonymous with speed-ups, employer insensitivity, people turned into robots—doing more work for the same pay instead of working smarter, producing more, and taking home fatter paychecks" (1987, p. 61).
Even in education, a good deal of money is spent on professional development, but as most teachers would attest, traditional inservice activities tend to be disconnected from issues of curriculum and learning, fragmented, and noncumulative (Cohen & Ball, 1999). According to one teacher, "Most inservices add more work without a direct and tangible benefit to my students. I don't see the value" (Sandholtz, 1999, p. 11). No one wants organizations that work in this manner; training and staff development efforts delivered in a disjointed, piecemeal fashion produce Tayloristic results.
Few educators need to be convinced of the value of the learning organization. Yet, few education leaders or policymakers know how to achieve it. In order to redirect the educational workplace, argues John Woods (1995), "three deeply held beliefs which are structuring the educational workplace must be challenged and transcended." These three beliefs are:
- People are fixed, knowable quantities, capable of only limited learning, each having their own separate place, role, and job. People are a market commodity, expendable and replaceable.
- In organizational relationships, there must be a dominant person with superior knowledge, ultimate authority, and power to reward and punish. Others comply and do their assigned tasks accordingly.
- The organization is master of its domain, focused inwardly on efficiency and simplicity and function. The organization meets boundary conditions and outside demands when it perceives those demands are in its best interests. (Woods, 1995).
The history of training and staff development in education suggests that these beliefs are entrenched. The implications of Taylorism further color the way educators view people, relationships, and work. In order to change the way educational organizations operate, policymakers and education leaders must develop staff development initiatives that attempt to combat these deeply held beliefs. This will not occur by simply importing the latest training fads and techniques from the private sector; it will require policies that reflect a new way of thinking about how learning occurs and the role of educational organizations in learning.
There is an abundance of material on what constitutes good professional development for teachers (see, for example, Sparks & Louks-Horsley, 1992; Darling-Hammond & McLaughlin, 1996; Little, 1993; Thompson & Zeuli, 1997; Zimpher & Howey, 1992). Despite the availability of professional development research and access to examples of best practices, only a small fraction of schools incorporate these ideas, and most states have been unsuccessful at replicating good models of professional development reform. Developing a local culture that values the critical role continuing education plays in ensuring a steady supply of effective teachers remains elusive to policymakers and education leaders. Smylie (1996) posits that despite what is known about effective professional development for teachers, "in education, professional development as generally practiced has a terrible reputation among scholars, policymakers, and educators alike for being pedagogically unsound, economically inefficient, and of little value to teachers" (p. 10).
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