Response to Section IV: What's Needed Now: Issues of Professional Development School Accountability and Sustainability in Today's Complex Educational Environment

The concept of Professional Development Schools assumes that improving teaching ultimately depends on providing teachers with opportunities to contribute to the development of knowledge in their profession, to form collegial relationships beyond their immediate working environment, and to grow intellectually as they mature professionally. The idea of such collaborative sites also recognizes that the university-based research and instruction in education must have strong roots in the practice of teaching if they are to maintain their intellectual vitality and credibility with the profession. Professional Development Schools, then, would provide a structured partnership for developing the teaching profession and ultimately improving students’ learning. (Holmes Group, 1986)

Power, Knowledge, and the Rationalization of Teaching: A Genealogy of the Movement to Professionalize Teaching

In this article, David Labaree presents a genealogy of the current movement to professionalize teaching, focusing on two key factors that define the lineage of this movement and shape its present character and direction. First, he argues that teacher professionalization is an extension of the effort by teacher educators to raise their own professional status. Second,he examines the closely related effort by this same group to develop a science of teaching. Given these roots, the reforms proposed by the Carnegie Task Force on Teaching as a Profession and The Holmes Group may well do more for teacher educators than for teachers or students. More importantly, they may promote the rationalization of classroom instruction by generating momentum toward an authoritative, research-driven, and standardized vision of teaching practice.