Why Can't We Get It Right?
Designing High-Quality Professional Development for Standards-Based Schools
- Marsha Speck - San José State University, USA
- Caroll Knipe - Retired
Foreword by Dennis Sparks
Instructional Leadership
—From the Foreword by Dennis Sparks, Executive Director
National Staff Development Council
How can we use professional development to provide the best teaching and learning opportunities for all students?
To increase student achievement and prepare all students to meet standards, educators must be well prepared. Teachers who know their content and strategies can open a virtual toolbox and take out what they need to help all students become successful. This thoroughly revised and updated edition of Why Can't We Get It Right? explains how educational leaders can design, deliver, and evaluate collaborative standards-based professional development.
In this unique and indispensable guide, Marsha Speck and Caroll Knipe provide professional development designs, challenging teachers to make a difference for students and resulting in dramatically improved schools. This excellent resource contains:
- Essential questions about high-quality professional development
- Information on creating the culture for a learning community
- Conditions and processes for professional development
- Suggestions on designing your own model
- Tools for evaluating and rethinking professional development and learning
- Strategies for deepening a leader's impact on a standards-based system
“In Why Can't We Get It Right? Second Edition, Marsha Speck and Caroll Knipe provide a thorough overview of what is known about the nature of professional development that produces high levels of learning and performance for teachers and their students. They admirably achieve their goal of showing how well-designed professional development with a clear focus on improved student learning can make a difference in teaching and student success.”
"This is indeed a caring and pioneering book. Seldom have I seen or read such a thorough, comprehensive, and theoretically sound text on professional development. I challenge teachers, parents, principals, superintendents, district office personnel, board members, and professors to add this book to (their) professional library, to use it as a text, and to share it with others."
"Speck and Knipe's book is unique in that it does justice to both the complexity and the central role staff development must play in raising student achievement. The authors discuss professional development in a way that does not sacrifice depth for breadth, sound research for practical application, or comprehensiveness for expediency."
Praise for the First Edition:
"As a proponent of whole-system change and as a professor of change leaderhip in education, I highly recommend Marsha Speck and Caroll Knipe's book as a valuable guide for improving student, faculty, staff, and whole system learning. Professional development leaders concerned with whole-system improvement will want to have a copy of this book on their shelves."
"From an amazingly true-to-life perspective, this book explains how educational leaders can design, develop, and evaluate truly collaborative professional development . . . This second edition is intended to give supervisors and edge in the 'race for personal efficacy and collective power focused on student achievement.'"
Sample Materials & Chapters
Chapter 1: Essential Questions About High-Quality Professional Development
