Teachers' Professional Development For Vital Middle Schools: What Do We Know And Where Should We Go?

Abstract

Over the last decade the challenges to educators, both from within and outside the profession, have been numerous and often conflicting. Much of the time the difficulties appear overwhelming, as schools are confronted with seemingly endless challenges such as changing demographics, a sense that student engagement and faith in education is declining, and problems of attracting and retaining high quality faculty and administrators to work in an embattled professional setting. In this paper the author argues that we have lapsed into constrained, but easy, thinking about how to make middle schools a reality through teacher development. This has occurred not because the specific goals are wrong, or even the short-term strategies, but because we have not considered all of the larger implications.