Cultivating Innovation:
How a Charter/District Network Is
Turning Professional Development
Into Professional Practice

By Kevin Andrews and Michael Rothman

If an effort like the charter school movement, which affects only 1% of public school children, is to succeed in effecting broader change, we must find ways to disseminate isolated successes to the larger system. Mr. Andrews and Mr. Rothman describe one such effort.

Art © 2002 by Susan Todd

IT WAS near the end of June, and Terri Wellner, a committed veteran teacher in the Boston Public Schools, had just finished several months of meetings with other teachers from neighboring schools. At these meetings they had shared ideas, practices, and insights. However, these neighboring schools weren't just any schools; they were charter schools. And the impact of the meetings was clear. "I had thought we were foes rather than friends. Now I see we're all in this together," Terri told us. "It's good to see we're a group of people in this thing called education, and we're all trying to make a difference in people's lives."1

Terri was a participant in the pilot year of the Project for School Innovation (PSI), an initiative of the Neighborhood House Charter School, a public school serving grades pre-K-8 in inner-city Boston. We founded PSI in 2000 and began operations in the 2000-01 school year. Over the course of that year, we worked with six charter and district schools to organize and hold a series of meetings and discussion sessions attended by a total of 65 principals, teachers, and other staff members. It is the words of Terri and others like her -- not only about charter/district collaboration, but about their shared and heartfelt commitment to education and their growing confidence about how they can work together to turn that commitment into practice -- that have been instrumental in making this project happen.

The founding of PSI comes at a time of renewed interest in education reform at the state and national levels. Words and phrases like standards, high-stakes testing, charter schools, curriculum frameworks, and accountability fill airspace, print space, and cyberspace. Amid these ambitious calls for change, at least two things are clear. First, the demands of education reform fall largely on the shoulders of principals and teachers. If these demands are to be met, they must be coupled with adequate support. Second, it would be a mistake to equate improving a few public schools with improving public education as a whole. If an effort like the charter school movement, which affects only 1% of public school children, is to succeed in effecting broader change, we must find ways to disseminate isolated successes to the larger system.

The model we developed to do this brings together charter and district schools in order to cultivate innovation in public education -- a process that research tells us is far too rare. Based on theories of experiential education and organizational change, the PSI model leads practitioners through the steps of identifying, reflecting on, and applying lessons from experience.

The Need for Support

Five years ago, as calls for education reform grew louder, the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future concluded that the single greatest obstacle to the lasting success of reform efforts was neither a lack of good ideas nor a lack of high standards; it was a lack of effective professional development. The Commission wrote:

"It is clear that most schools and teachers cannot produce the kind of learning that the new reforms demand, not because they do not want to, but because they do not know how and the systems they work in do not support them in doing so. When it comes to widespread change we behave as though mandates, like magic wands, transform schools. But successful programs cannot be replicated in schools where staff lack the know-how and resources to bring them to life."2

Indeed, research over the last decade has repeatedly highlighted the need for better support and better working conditions for teachers.3 Based on our experience with PSI, we propose that the shortcoming of current professional development is not a lack of available offerings. Indeed, data from the National Center for Education Statistics show that the vast majority of teachers reported participating in professional development during the 1999-2000 school year. Mere availability is not the problem. Rather the problem lies in the fact that most of these offerings fail to connect professional development to professional practice, leaving lessons isolated in a seminar or classroom. PSI seeks to overcome these shortcomings, viewing professional development as professional empowerment, professional networking, and a means to achieve organizational change. Let's look at each of these notions in turn.

Professional empowerment. A growing body of educational research finds that effective professional development in schools should be empowering to teachers. Professional development can accomplish this in at least three ways: by allowing teachers to have time for input, reflection, and follow-up; by providing opportunities for teachers to work with colleagues; and by drawing on the expertise of participants.4 Yet studies find that little available professional development takes such an approach. A study by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) found that conventional professional development activities often cast teachers as "passive learners" and rarely take into account their individual needs or expertise. Workshops and seminars often take a short-term approach, in which teachers spend a few hours listening and there is seldom any follow-up. As a result, the CPRE study found, there is a growing body of opinion among experts that conventional forms of professional development are virtually a waste of time.5 Given such poor professional development, it should come as little surprise that many teachers believe schools make poor use of them as professionals and that this lack of professionalism hinders their ability to teach to their full capacity.6

Responses from our interviews with PSI participants are in accord with these research findings. "A lot of the time," one participant said of traditional professional development, "you go to a two-hour seminar or a daylong conference, and you come back with nothing. Maybe you have some good ideas, but, without anything to push you, you don't follow up on them." Another teacher commented, "There's not a lot of professional development out there that's relevant to what teachers need." Reflecting the lack of professional respect in the field, one participant told us, "Teachers are often told what to do; it's not very often that we're asked."

In contrast, at PSI we made a conscious effort to ensure that teachers were asked. This made an enormous difference in building confidence and improving working conditions. We designed PSI intentionally to draw upon teachers' strengths and to highlight them. At the end of the program, some 90% of participants reported that they were confident in their ability to apply new ideas. "We are so rich in knowledge and ideas, but we usually don't get a chance to hear it," a second-grade teacher told us at the close of the program.

Professional networks. Beyond simply recognizing teachers as professionals, another way to provide this kind of support is through teacher networks. In his study of alternative forms of professional development cited above, Thomas Corcoran provides significant evidence that teacher networks, which encourage teachers to discuss practices with one another, have enormous potential to genuinely affect classroom practice. The reasons are simply that the networks have "high credibility with teachers, offer safe environments for discussion of instruction, and can have positive effects on their motivation, professional knowledge, willingness to take risks, and commitment to improvement."7

This is true not only in schools but also in successful businesses. Several of the most successful companies in the heady economy of the late 1990s were "network orchestrators." That is, groups of companies such as Cisco, Charles Schwab, eBay, and Qualcomm far outperformed others in their industries by creating interorganizational knowledge-sharing collaborations.8

While the value of such collaborations and the desire for them among educators are high, their availability is surprisingly low. A recently released study by the U.S. Department of Education indicated that nationwide only one in seven teachers engaged in networking or collaboration outside of his or her school more than once a month.9 New charter schools, in particular, struggle with deficits in external expertise. Often isolated from other schools in their areas, new charter schools must struggle to become part of a larger professional network. During the 1998-99 school year, over a third of start-up schools indicated that lack of planning time presented a significant barrier to effective program implementation.10

By designing an interschool collaboration, we sought to address this problem and give teachers what they were looking for. A third-grade charter school teacher participating in PSI pointed out the same problem that the research shows and noted how PSI has helped. "The chance to talk to other teachers, visit other schools, and look at what's really working seems so simple, but it doesn't happen enough," she said. "It has been great to have that opportunity through PSI." In fact, after their participation in PSI, 95% of the participants indicated that learning from their peers was a valuable way to get new ideas and information.11 "Frequently we're isolated in classrooms," one participating teacher pointed out. "It's nice to hear that there were common problems and common successes among teachers." In the words of another PSI veteran, "This is a great resource that needs to be tapped. I loved the idea of checking out other schools and sharing ideas."

Organizational change. Education reform is not just about helping teachers; it is about changing schools. Unfortunately, professional development and organizational change do not necessarily go hand in hand. "Teachers may choose to exercise leadership independently," writes Roland Barth, a veteran principal and author of Improving Schools from Within. "But few can successfully undertake school improvement without support from the school principal."12 Despite the clear need for principal involvement, many teacher networks do not include principals. That is why we have structured PSI to be a network of teachers and principals. By asking for commitment from each school principal and by providing opportunities for principals to meet with one another, we ensured that top leadership was involved. By providing teachers with "action plans" that served as tools to help bring ideas back to their principals and schools, we ensured that top leadership was also well aware of the work being done, an important element in successful organizational change.13

This structure has proved valuable to PSI participants. Reflecting an understanding of the importance of the work, one principal commented, "This has been a very valuable experience for my teachers. They come back from each session with new ideas."14 Teachers have also noted the value of tools that help them think about how to turn their ideas into action. "Anything that you can come away from and say, 'Hey, I can do that' is valuable," commented one teacher. Another agreed, "I don't think in any other staff development that I've had to think about how to bring something back to my school. Usually you go in, spend a few hours discussing something, and leave it there, instead of thinking about how you make it happen back in your school."

The Charter School Movement

While we have so far explored the research on what makes professional development effective, PSI is not simply a program in professional development. It is also a program that conducts professional development by bringing together charter and district public schools. It is clear how such a connection fits into the discussion above: bringing different schools together helps to build a larger professional network through which to share ideas. However, what is the benefit of specifically connecting charter schools and district schools? Why not a network of only regular district schools (as some districts provide)? Why not a network of only charter schools (as several states have put together)?

In fact, one of the fundamental reasons for the creation of charter schools was to enable these schools to serve as small laboratories in which innovations could be tried and the outcomes brought back to the larger public school system. In Massachusetts, the legislation that created the charter schools is explicit about the need for charter schools to influence other public schools, and replication and innovation are cited among the central purposes for the existence of charter schools.15 The same focus on communication between charters and regular public schools can be seen in Project Connect, a federally funded program that is based on the premise that "charter schools may stimulate broader reform of public education by serving as laboratories for school improvement." Indeed, in a state and nation where about 1% of children are enrolled in charter schools, efforts that benefit only children in charter schools would leave out 99% of the public school population. Education reform through charter schools cannot succeed unless innovative practices from charter schools are shared with other public schools.

The benefit of charter/district collaboration, however, is not a one-way street. Charter schools can clearly benefit from interacting with district schools, which often bring their own innovative ideas as well as the wisdom of experience. In essence, all charter schools are start-up organizations; they lack the history, a veteran faculty, professional ties, and the good community relations that some public schools enjoy and cultivate. District schools also bring the central benefit of size. Public school districts have the reach and ability to influence and bring together communities on a much broader scale than individual charter schools.

The relationship between charter schools and district schools was designed to be symbiotic; thus neither can realize its full potential in isolation. Yet, despite this potential for mutual benefit, it is no secret that many charter schools and district schools have held skeptical -- even suspicious -- views of one another. The lack of mechanisms to connect the two has been highlighted time and again and was cited as one of the most glaring obstacles to effective charter school reform in the 1999 report of the Massachusetts Education Reform Review Commission.16

With this in mind, we designed PSI so that charter and district teachers and principals would have the opportunity to do the one thing that makes it most difficult to hate one another: they meet one another. The results are clear. "I've found the contact with charter school teachers very helpful," one district school principal said. "They really do live in a different world, and their ideas and perspectives have been stimulating and enriching." Another teacher commented, "Once we were all just sitting down together and talking, we realized we're all doing the same thing." The trust, collaboration, leadership, and professional respect that arise from participation in networks can help facilitate the process of sharing.

The PSI Model: The Importance of Experiential Education

To achieve such a high level of satisfaction, collaboration, professionalism, and organizational change was not easy. Over the course of the 2000-01 school year, the project model we employed to accomplish this was tested and refined with six elementary and middle schools -- two district public schools, one experienced charter school, and three new charter schools. The principals from these schools met twice over the course of the year. Teachers and other staff members from the schools -- 65 individuals in all -- met in several dozen discussion sessions held over the course of the year. In these discussions, the participants identified and shared the strengths of their schools and used these to address weaknesses at other schools. Below, we describe the basic steps in which participants engaged. We do so through the lens of experiential education, which has been a linchpin to the model's success.

In his model of experiential education, David Kolb describes four steps in the process of learning from experience. These are: having the experience itself, identifying the experience as a concrete fact, discussing the implications of the experience, and applying lessons learned to a new experience. Donald Schön similarly emphasizes the importance for the "reflective practitioner" of moving agilely from the world of practical experience to that of reflection on experience and back again.17

The ideas that Kolb and Schön suggested in academic literature are now being seen in business literature as well. In his analysis of successful learning organizations, David Garvin, a professor at the Harvard Business School, outlines a process of acquiring, interpreting, and applying information as three critical steps for turning ideas into innovation. To do this, innovative organizations depend on "a mind-set of inquiry and experimentation, plus a knowledge-sharing process that enables everyone in a company to act in an informed way upon what's been learned before."18

The PSI model is designed to serve as that knowledge-sharing process. By walking participants through a two-year cycle that follows Kolb's learning cycle, PSI uses discussion sessions among practitioners to serve as a bridge between reflection and practice. The result is a program that turns experience into valuable lessons and does so in a way that highlights the leadership of participants. Below, we outline what Kolb's four steps looked like during PSI's first year of operation.

The first step in this process was the identification of important school experiences. The method we used to do this was piloted at the Neighborhood House Charter School over the summer and early fall. There, over a two-month period, two teachers armed with a simple inventory of school practices interviewed 18 teachers and staff members -- about half of those employed at the school. Drawing on their own experience, interviewees reflected on the school's strengths and weaknesses and on the impact and originality of particular practices.

Next, we narrowed our focus to one strength at each school by choosing a strength that other schools in the network thought would address their weaknesses. Staff members at each school then discussed the implications of that identified strength. For example, to understand the KidLab program -- a hands-on science program that was identified as a strength at the Neighborhood House Charter School -- six teachers participated in a series of after-school discussions on the subject. In these discussions, the participants looked at the key components of the practice, considered advice they would give to others, examined challenges they had faced in the past, offered suggestions for improvement, and, perhaps most important, gathered evidence that the practice had produced a positive impact. Emphasis was placed on using the teachers' own experience and expertise to inform discussion, so that meetings were simultaneously drawing out innovative ideas and empowering teachers as leaders.

Next came the first significant meetings of staff members from the different schools. As discussed above, such interschool professional development is relatively rare. Its success hinged on two important preceding steps. First, the staff members of these schools met to focus on matches between the strengths brought from one school and the weaknesses of another. Thus each participating school had something to offer as well as something to gain. Second, charter schools and district schools entered the relationship with ample preparation, having already spent significant time carefully exploring and documenting their own strengths and weaknesses. They were not thrown haphazardly into joint work.

In the after-school discussion sessions, participants engaged in a variety of one-on-one and small-group exchanges, in which they heard ideas from their peers at other schools and were encouraged to add their own strengths and challenges to the discussion. In full-group exchanges, "expert" teachers who had previously participated in discussions to explore the effective practice now explained how and why the practice worked, using handouts they had developed earlier.

After selecting one practice that they had learned about in the course of sharing with other schools, teams from each school then proceeded to write an "action plan" -- a strategic document to adapt that practice to their own school. Participants were discouraged from trying to take a practice "whole cloth" and were encouraged instead to stitch together pieces that seemed most likely to work in their school. PSI facilitators provided training to help participants set anticipated outcomes, outline benchmarks, and analyze the landscape for change -- carefully considering potential obstacles and allies in their effort.

Over the course of the 2001-02 school year, the six school teams that developed action plans are to meet after school five times. These meetings will give the teams an opportunity to reflect on the progress they have made on their action plans, to revise anticipated outcomes as they learn from experience, and to get advice from expert teachers as they move ahead.

Thus, through a process of experiential learning, we achieved a set of important goals. First, six teams of teachers brought new practices to their schools, with tools in hand to enable them to implement those practices. Second, each original team of "expert" teachers was empowered by developing the confidence to provide leadership on its particular effective practice. Third, teachers and principals were drawn into a network that brought together charter and district schools out of a mutual interest in sharing ideas and improving education.

At the end of a pilot year of operation, the Project for School Innovation has clearly generated positive feedback from participants. Some of that feedback is reflected in the quotes highlighted throughout this article. A few statistics are also rather telling: the average attendance rate for all discussion sessions was 93%; 95% of participants expressed interest in continued participation; and 74% said this was better than most other professional development available to them.

We like to say that PSI is unique, but in many ways it is nothing new. As researchers from Susan Moore Johnson and Thomas Corcoran to David Garvin and Remo Hacki have pointed out, all sorts of organizations -- whether they are car manufacturers, high-tech companies, or teacher centers at schools -- have for years benefited from networking, creating mechanisms to share knowledge, and treating staff members as professionals. Looking at the success of such networks in a bank, a car manufacturer, and a government agency, Etienne Wenger and William Snyder write, "Successful managers bring the right people together [and] provide an infrastructure in which communities can thrive," allowing staff members to "share their experiences and knowledge in free-flowing, creative ways that foster new approaches to problems."19

This is not rocket science. But it is important work that needs to be done. By serving as the organization that makes it happen, we hope to help schools become more innovative, to help educators become more effective, and to help education reform succeed.

2. What Matters Most: Teaching for America's Future (New York: National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, 1996), pp. 5-6.

3. Kati Haycock, "Good Teaching Matters: How Well-Qualified Teachers Can Close the Gap," Thinking K-16, Summer 1998, available at www.edtrust.org.

4. Katherine C. Boles and Vivian Troen, "How Teachers Make Restructuring Happen," Educational Leadership, February 1992, pp. 53-56; and Lee Teitel, Designing Professional Development School Governance Structures (Washington, D.C.: AACTE Publications, 1998).

5. Thomas Corcoran, Helping Teachers Teach Well: Transforming Professional Development (Philadelphia: Consortium for Policy Research in Education, University of Pennsylvania, CPRE Policy Brief No. RB-16, 1995), pp. 2-4.

6. Susan Moore Johnson, Teachers at Work: Achieving Success in Our Schools (New York: Basic Books, 1990).

7. Corcoran, p. 14.

8. Remo Hacki and Julian Lighton, "The Future of the Networked Company," McKinsey Quarterly, Fall 2001, pp. 28-29.

9. Teacher Preparation and Professional Development (Washington, D.C.: National Center for Education Statistics, 2001), p. 27.

10. The State of Charter Schools (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, 2000), p. 44.

11. "Results of First-Year Evaluations," unpublished manuscript, Project for School Innovation, Dorchester, Mass., 19 June 2001.

12. Roland S. Barth, "Teacher Leader," Phi Delta Kappan, February 2001, p. 447.

13. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Change Masters: Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the American Corporation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984).

14. E-mail correspondence from Mary Street, May 2001.

15. Massachusetts General Laws, Chapter 603, section 1.

16. Jennifer Wood, An Early Examination of the Massachusetts Charter School Initiative (Boston: Massachusetts Education Reform Review Commission, 1999), pp. iii-iv.

17. David Kolb et al., Organizational Psychology: An Experiential Approach (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971); and Donald Schön, "The New Scholarship Requires a New Epistemology," Change, vol. 27, no. 6, 1995, pp. 27-34.

18. Laurie Joan Aron, "Managing to Learn: How Companies Can Turn Knowledge into Action," Working Knowledge: A Report on Research at Harvard Business School, 13 November 2000, available at http://hbswk. hbs.edu under "Knowledge & the Information Economy."

19. Etienne C. Wenger and William M. Snyder, "Communities of Practice: The Organizational Frontier," Harvard Business Review, January/February 2000, p. 140.

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