Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, talks about one strategy for finding time for teachers to work together. Excerpted from the video series Restructuring to Promote Learning in America's Schools, videoconference #8, The Meaning of Professional Development in the 21st Century (North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, 1991).
"Assessment development is being found if you will, being mined from a number of sources in schools that are using these new strategies. One of these places is that as schools restructures, the way in which they conduct instruction for students is quite frequently the case that when teachers are working in teams together, they can free up other teachers to meet and plan and work together and participate in staff development activities. As students are taught to become more responsible for their own learning, we also get away from the idea that every moment that a student in learning has to be one in which a teacher is quote, 'teaching them or lecturing to them', and as in many European schools, we find that students especially in secondary schools, but to an amazing extent in elementary schools as well, are able to independently work on their project that they're conducting collaboratively in the library or other settings, so that teachers, even without additional time, although that's often times needed and provided, find ways within the school day to restructure their task, that we don't have to see teachers as assembly line workers, stamps classes of kids with a lesson as they move through."
Development and production of this Critical Issue were supported by the Midwest Consortium for Mathematics and Science Education.
Date posted: 1997