Chapter 10: System-Wide Reform: The Role of Professional Development for Instructional Improvement

As Michael Fullan (2000), the most prominent advocate of the educational change movement during the second half of the twentieth century, has recently observed, large scale-school reform has, during the 1990s, come back into fashion. Although the main focus of analysis in this chapter is on selected United States reform efforts, the decade of the nineties witnessed a world-wide burgeoning of attempts to “reform” or “improve” or make more “effective” schools as total institutions.² Coupled with this has been widespread concern with raising the performance and motivation of students “at risk”. These two concerns present something of a dilemma, which manifests itself as either: (a) a search for a “one-size-fits-all” (sometimes referred to as a “silver bullet”) solution that could be uniformly applied to all schools in the district, region or nation. This model could be called the “medical” model—seeking the equivalent of a childhood inoculation, which once applied, would protect the students from failure now and in the future; or (b) the realisation that students (particularly but, by no means exclusively, those in deprived inner city and rural areas) are “at risk” for a variety of reasons, to do with communities, families, genetics, cultures, and languages as well as what happens to them at school. These considerations render a “one-size-fits-all” solution as totally inappropriate to the day-to-day realities of classrooms and schools that deal with significant numbers of students so classified.