Holmes Group

Named after Henry Wyman Holmes, the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education in the 1920s, the Holmes Group was a consortium of 96 U.S. research universities with professional education programs that came together in the mid-1980s to address what they saw as a crisis in American education. That crisis centered on the lack of respect shown to colleges and schools of education in particular and to teaching as a profession in general. In the midst of the furor raised by the publication of A Nation at Risk, the Holmes Group set out to reform the teaching profession by increasing the number of links between schools/colleges of education and the rest of the university and between schools/colleges of education and the broader educational community, particularly teachers and administrators in PreK–12 sites.

In May 1986, the Holmes Group published Tomorrow's Teachers, the first of three volumes that would become known as the Holmes trilogy. This first publication described the organization's view of effective teaching and offered recommendations for how to prepare new teachers for the profession. Those recommendations included: requiring teacher candidates to earn a degree in a content area, broadening the work of the candidates with arts and sciences faculty, and, in a precursor to one of the organization's later hallmark agendas, preparing the candidates to work with diverse populations of students. By also recommending that schools/colleges of education establish collaborative partnerships with PreK–12 sites where both teacher candidates and experienced educators from across the PreK–20 continuum could learn and work together, the 1986 volume introduced into the educational lexicon the term professional development schools.

The second volume in the Holmes Trilogy, Tomorrow's Schools, was published in 1990 and expanded on the concept of professional development schools by offering guidelines for the establishment of these unique school–university collaborations. The principles included a focus on lifelong learning for all members of the school community, the crafting of a caring community of learners, and structuring the school environment in ways that would help overcome social and educational inequities.

Having addressed the preparation of new teachers and the redesign of PreK–12 schools in the first two volumes, the Holmes Group completed its trilogy in 1995 with the publication of Tomorrow's Schools of Education, a look at how higher education itself needed to change if education was indeed going to be recognized as a true profession. The volume called for sweeping reform of every aspect of colleges of education's work, including what was taught, who taught it, how it was taught, to whom it was taught, and where it was taught. The curriculum, the Holmes Group argued, needed to be grounded in reality and based on genuine need. The faculty needed to be expanded to include practitioners (“clinical professors”) who could share real-world approaches to teaching with the teacher candidates, who would spend much of their time not in college classrooms but in a professional development school. And the people being prepared for the profession, the Holmes Group emphasized, needed to include members of typically underrepresented groups, particularly people of color. With this last focus in mind, the Holmes Group had launched the Holmes Scholars initiative in 1991 not only to increase the number of minorities in the PreK–12 teaching profession but also in the ranks of university professors.

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