Continuous In-Service Professional Development of Teachers and School Change: Lessons From Mexico

Abstract

Since the 1980s, there has been a major (re) focusing of attention in the mathematics education literature, both in policy and research, on the role of the teacher in understanding and implementing educational change. In the area of policy, many new curriculum reforms around the world acknowledge the need for professional development (PD) of teachers as an integral part of school change process. For example, in the United States, the National Council for Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) published a set of standards for teacher education programs (NCTM, 1989b) and for the PD of teachers (NCTM, 1990) to parallel its earlier standards for curriculum and evaluation (NCTM, 1989a). Although concerns have been raised about the view that these documents provide the direction, but not the mechanism, for reform in school mathematics (Brown & Barko, 1992, p. 235), they have been used as the basis for several PD innovations (Aichele & Coxford, 1994). In Australia, the federal government has undertaken a discipline review of teacher education in mathematics and science (Department of Employment, Education and Training, 1986), raising several issues related to initial and continuing education of teachers. In Mexico, the Development of Education Program (Poder Ejectivo Federal, 1996) clearly identifies the concern of the government to strengthen basic, or compulsory, education by focusing attention on schools as places for developing effective teaching and as special places for the PD of teachers. Program asserts that educational change is only effective if starts from the agents of education-that is, the teachers-themselves. According to the document, teachers are seen as essential agents in the dynamics of quality, for whom special attention should be given to their social, cultural and material conditions (p. 13). Hence, the Program establishes teacher training and development as168 ATWEH AND OCHOAHow effective these policy statements and reform programs are for changing actual school practice is still open to question. Sprinthall, Reiman, and Thies-Sprinthall (1996) argued that research on the gap between policy and practice has shown that often many innovations are seen by many teachers are external demands that force teachers to change and hence are resisted by teachers. experience of teachers under the National Curriculum reform in the United Kingdom illustrates the effect that sudden changes imposed from outside the classroom can have on demoralizing and disempowering of teachers (Hargreaves & Evans, 1997). Similarly, Kilpatrick (1999) argued how the U.S. reforms initiated by the NCTM have lead to a backlash in some school districts in what has become to be known as maths wars. Further, many of the planned provisions for professional development of teachers to deal with the suggested changes are not implemented in practice. In a book with the provocative title of The Predictable Failure of Educational Reform (Seymore 1990, cited in Hargreaves, 1994), the author identifies the piecemeal approach that many of these reforms take as responsible for their failure to change actual school practices. There are separate agendas of reforms. For example, there are reforms for the curriculum, for teacher professional development, for school structures and organizations, and so on. Hargreaves argued that significant change in curriculum, assessment or any other domain is unlikely to be successful unless serious attention is also paid to teacher development and the principles of professional judgement and discretion contained within it (p. 242). Sprinthall, Reiman, and Thies-Sprinthall argued that these massive failures of the [many] national curriculum projects of the 1960s (p. 666) raised interest in investigating and theorizing the teachers' role in educational change.