Struggling to overcome the state’s prescription for practice: A study of a sample of early educators’ professional development and action research projects in a high-stakes teaching context

Brown, P.B., & Weber, N.B. (2016). Struggling to overcome the state’s prescription for practice: A study of a sample of early educators’ professional development and action research projects in a high-stakes teaching context. Journal of Teacher Education, 67(3), 183-202.


I am not sure I would have the courage to begin a teaching career in today’s educational and political climate. Teachers today must juggle numerous and competing priorities and agendas, all while facing the day-to-day challenges of working with their young students. As I read the article here, a growing sense of palpable anxiety began to rise within me. If just reading this account produced those feelings, what must it have been like to experience the pressures the teachers described in the article did?

This article looks at the experiences of a small group of early childhood teachers as they juggled two often-contradictory sets of priorities: the priorities of state-mandated standardization and testing, and the priorities of what is considered “best practice” in the early childhood education community. In the case of early childhood education, that is defined by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) position statement on Developmentally Appropriate Practice (referred to as DAP; that document is easily available on the NAEYC web site). The standardization agenda prioritizes making sure all students have the same set of knowledge and skills so that they can achieve specified test score levels. On the opposite side of the continuum, the DAP agenda prioritizes finding out where each child is developmentally and providing instruction that facilitates each child’s learning at wherever the child is in the developmental sequence. These two agendas have historically been in opposition and often seem to prescribe distinctly opposing approaches to instruction. Early childhood educators have challenged standardized curricula and assessments by invoking the DAP.

As if all that were not enough to manage, now add in a professional development agenda with its own priorities. The teachers in the study described in the article were “invited” (my quotes around this word are quite intentional) to participate in a professional development course—a year-long, multi-session commitment—that asked them to develop and implement lessons that reflected the priorities of "culturally relevant practice”. In this context, cultural relevance meant devising and teaching lessons for their preschool and kindergarten students that dealt with “critical issues central to children’s lives” (p.190). The approach in the professional development represented a transformative, sociopolitical agenda—another set of priorities to juggle.

The article’s purpose seems to be to show whether professional development courses such as the one described here can bring about changes in teachers’ knowledge and practice. Here, the goal of the professional development course seemed to be to see teachers embrace the responsibility to understand the issues that are important to their young students, and to provide instruction that addresses those issues. Only three teacher cases are discussed in depth here (more on numbers of participants will be discussed in a moment), but it seems clear that while teachers may have been able to understand the Culturally Relevant Pedagogy approach, and might even have agreed with it, when it came to actually implementing the kind of instruction the professional development course called for, any understanding or intentions the teachers may have had were overwhelmed by the competing agendas in the teaching context.

The standardization agenda was especially powerful, and that is not surprising. Teachers and administrators in this district were evaluated on how well the children did on standardized tests. Teachers had to submit weekly time sheets that broke down exactly what was taught and for how many minutes. A system where teachers were “paid for performance” was in place. One of the teachers described here talked about being ashamed and embarrassed about her students’ test scores. Teachers could potentially lose their jobs if students’ scores were not high enough. With the threat of losing one’s career and livelihood looming, plus pressure from above from administrators facing the same threat, it is not surprising to read about a teacher who decided not to teach about immigration but instead chose the topic of bullying because it was in the mandated curriculum.

Another teacher, who had a long tenure in the school, was more influenced by what she saw as limitations in what her students were capable of. This teacher did not implement the instruction the professional development course called for, because, as she stated, “some topics are so scary that kids can’t do anything about and its (sic) not even really helpful to be exposed to it because of their reactions to it” (p. 193). She admitted to not really considering the children’s voices when it came to making instructional decisions. The authors link this teacher’s views to the DAP agenda, but I’m not so sure about that. If you read the DAP position statement, it does not really conflict with the Culturally Relevant Pedagogy approach. Possibly this teacher was working under a misunderstanding of what developmentally appropriate practice is, in order to provide a rationale for not doing something that she found personally uncomfortable or risky. For whom, I wonder, was the discussion of critical issues in children’s lives “too scary”? Young kids are capable of a lot more than we sometimes think they are, if we really approach them where they are. This teacher gave lip service to that idea, but in the end was not willing to put it into practice.

Only one teacher implemented the Culturally Relevant Pedagogy approach as the professional development course required, but her response was muted. Even though this teacher taught lessons on jail and on gender issues, and noted that the students responded well to those lessons, she in effect devalued those lessons because she was not sure how they facilitated “their academic learning”(p. 195). This again showed the heavy influence of the standardization agenda. Learning is seen as only a small set of academic skills that will be tested. Though the children may in fact have learned many important things from the lessons on jail and gender roles, the strictures of the mandated, standardized curriculum shaped this teacher’s view of what is and is not worthwhile learning in a classroom. When we consider that these teachers worked with children ages 4, 5, and 6, these strictures on what is and is not valued as academic learning become especially worrisome.

In the end, the agenda of the professional development course lost out to a more powerful agenda. The standardization agenda, with its high stakes, was the overwhelming top priority. Even though that was an ongoing reality in this school district, these teachers were nevertheless simultaneously bombarded with the other agendas that could not co-exist with the more powerful agenda. I ended my reading of this article wondering why teachers are presented with so many competing priorities. In this case, why was this professional development course provided, when it obviously did not fit the prevailing agenda in the school, and did not adequately account for the pressures these teachers were facing? How could teachers be expected to implement instruction that did not seem to them to be congruent with the mandates, especially when there was clearly no support of any kind for doing so? Teachers were “invited” to participate (though one wonders just how voluntary that was), but did not seem to be required to complete the project involving teaching the lesson, and it does not appear that the work they did do for the course was evaluated in any way by their school administrators. Even participation does not seem to have been evaluated much; in the end, 14 teachers were invited, 12 attended the information session, 9 agreed to participate, and in the end, only five teachers completed the majority of the eight sessions. The “PD” here almost sounds like something that was on a check-off list that could be said to be completed, but there does not seem to have been a commitment in the school to the actual content of the PD course. The top priority before the PD course was meeting the mandates, and that had not changed after the course.