Teacher Education Curriculum, Professional Development, History of

The history of professional development for teachers has in many ways come full circle from its early days. Professional development is a set of [Page 859]practices intended to change the curriculum as delivered to students in schools. Since the 1920s, teacher professional development (also known as “inservice training” or “staff development”) has exhibited elements of each of the five models proposed by Dennis Sparks: training, individually guided staff development, observation/assessment, inquiry, and involvement in a development/improvement process. Each of these models has held differently sized shares in the total “mix” of extant models in different periods.

Among the earliest eras in professional development history was the Denver Plan of the early 1920s. The Denver Plan was the work of Jesse H. Newlon, one of the country's best-known practicing progressive administrators. Newlon, countering prevailing practice, convinced the Denver School Board that the curriculum of its schools needed to be reformed to make it more efficient, a watchword of U.S. school curriculum and curriculum theory in the 1910s and 1920s. Newlon notably was successful in convincing the Denver School Board that, because curriculum development and curriculum enactment were simultaneous and connected, classroom teachers should be the ones writing the curriculum. Further, he obtained the board's support in paying teachers or providing release for their time outside the classroom, and he received support for providing a clerical staff to record the work of the teachers so they would not have to expend energy in these tasks. Newlon's Denver model was in contrast to the then-frequent practice of curriculum developed by school boards in an efficiency, social control model, and it generated much interest in other school districts.

The decade of the 1930s was marked by the professional development and curriculum development activities of the Eight Year Study. The Eight Year Study (also known as the Thirty School Study) was an experimental project conducted between 1930 and 1942 by the Progressive Education Association (PEA), in which 30 high schools redesigned their curriculums and initiated innovative practices in student testing, program assessment, student guidance, curriculum design, and staff development. During the initial years of the study, the staffs at schools in the study developed their own core curricular programs. These core curricula sought to integrate and unify the separate academic subjects. A series of professional development workshops were scheduled beginning in the mid-1930s to help teachers reconsider the basic goals and philosophy of their schools and to support the development of their own teaching materials. Follow-up studies indicated that students from the progressive schools performed as well academically and in college as did students from more traditional schools and curricula.

The late 1940s and early 1950s saw the rise of life-adjustment education, an odd amalgam of pro-gressivism, testing and tracking, vocationalism, and therapeutic education that sought to adjust students to surrounding life circumstances. The perceived anti-intellectualism of life adjustment education, the conservatism of the McCarthy era, the close of the Progressive Education Association in 1955, the cold war, and the launch of Sputnik in 1957 led a return to academic curriculum reform in the 1960s exemplified by the National Science Foundation (NSF) curriculum projects (e.g., Physical Science Study Committee [PSSC] Physics, Biological Sciences Curriculum Study [BSCS] Biology, School Mathematics Study Group [SMSG] Math).

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