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BARNARD ALUMNA DEVISES NEW STANDARDS FOR PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT SCHOOLS

By Laura Whitlock ‘03

NEW YORK, N.Y. - After two years of research, a Barnard graduate has developed national standards designed to help guide the growing professional development school movement that links colleges and university teaching programs with K-12 schools.

"Professional development schools are probably the most promising innovation in education today," Marsha Levine '62, senior consultant at the National Council for Accreditation of Teaching Education, said. "These standards will help school districts develop high quality teachers and boost teacher retention rates even in times of teacher shortage."

According to Levine, schools that have the new standards in place have seen an improved learning environment for both students and teachers. "The candidates [teachers] have better skills, and the children show significant achievement gains," Levine said.

The National Council, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that accredits 525 colleges and universities, released the professional development school, or PDS, standards in October. A national advisory group including prominent educators and policy makers worked with Levine to develop them, and they were then field-tested at 18 sites for three years.

The standards for professional development schools, sometimes called the equivalent of teaching hospitals, include:

• Standard I: Learning Community - "a belief that adults and children learn best in the context of practice."
• Standard II: Accountability and Quality Assurance - schools and partner institutions "collaboratively develop assessments, collect information, and use results to systematically examine their practices and establish outcome goals."
• Standard III: Collaboration - "partners and partner institutions systematically move from independent to interdependent practice by committing themselves and making a commitment to each other to engage in joint work."
• Standard IV: Diversity and Equity - "include diverse participants and diverse learning communities"
• Standard V: Structures, Resources, and Roles - "The partner institutions ensure that structures, programs, and resource decisions support the partnership's mission."

"We wanted to ensure that the new PDS movement, in its infancy, was supported and nurtured," said Levine. "The standards describe PDS partnerships at various stages of development helping to distinguish between PDSs... and other kinds of school university partnership."

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