This article describes the National Writing Project's (NWP) professional development approach, asserting that it reflects a shift from the traditional paradigm of theory dictating practice. The NWP model maintains instead that engaging teachers in teaching teachers empowers teachers to meet the challenges of educating an increasingly diverse student population. By providing supportive, risk-free settings where teachers can come together for extended periods of time to reflect on their practice and build on their knowledge and experiences, the NWP encourages teachers to collaborate as educational leaders, researchers, and writers, and to make pedagogical decisions that positively influence achievement for all students. The real challenge of teaching is finding human capacity (in our students, in ourselves) while working in systems that routinely highlight deficits and deficiencies. This means beginning with an assumed and unshakable faith that all students bring strengths and abilities with them into the classroom. (Ayers, 1997, P. ix) The increasing diversity of our nation's student population has put significant pressure on teachers and school administrators to ensure that they have the knowledge and skills to successfully educate students from a wide variety of racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds (Denbo, 1994; Kuzmeskus, 1996; Shanker, 1996). Unfortunately, the current U.S. educational workforce, controlled and predominated as it is by the White American majority, may have little direct knowledge of or experience with children of different minority groups, thus rendering existing hierarchical systems of professional development unsuitable for the rich cultural diversity found in today's schools. Issues of race and ethnicity further compound this dilemma. Racism and ethnic discrimination take many forms. Indeed, they repeatedly manifest themselves in U.S. classrooms through the ignorance, albeit frequently unintentional, of individual teachers and administrators. This unconscious prejudice is often evident, for example, when teachers who are members of the dominant culture assume that their group's ways of thinking and behaving are the norms by which other groups must be gauged (Donaldson, 1996). Although teachers are often verbally encouraged by school administrators and policymakers to offer and embrace cross-cultural education, their individual racist attitudes sometimes persist, and often covertly so. Yet, schools cannot provide equity of educational opportunity in the absence of a teaching corps that is philosophically and pedagogically equipped to teach all students (Denbo, 1994). According to Tatum (cited in O'Neil, 1998), despite the increasing Whiteness of the U.S. teaching ranks and the increasing racial/ethnic diversity of the U.S. student population, it is not impossible for majority-group teachers and administrators to become both more culturally sensitive to minority educational concerns and be educationally proactive in antiracist ways. Appropriate professional development is essential to improving the bulk of today's-and tomorrow's-classroom teachers' abilities to provide equal and unbiased learning opportunities to all of their students. THE FALLACIES OF TRADITIONAL STAFF DEVELOPMENT The inadequacies of the traditional approach to staff development is widely evidenced by the lack of change in teacher behaviors that it sustains, especially with regard to those behaviors that relate to the teaching of diverse student populations. Yet, whether they are responding to state or federal mandates or in search of teacher-proof ways to guarantee student learning, school administrators continue to dictate conventional in-service programs for practicing teachers. Fundamentally, such programs are distinguished by their penchant for presenting knowledge in piecemeal and disconnected fashion-thus, theory is viewed as unrelated to practice; content knowledge is seen as disconnected from teaching methods, and instructional methods are beheld as detached from learning and development (Shanker, 1996). …
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Jun 2, 2024
Elizabeth Hutchinson 
Open Access