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theses

Since the 1980s, there has been a growing body of literature in support of restructuring the nation’s top-down educational system. At the same time, providing teachers with quality professional development (PD) has become a critically important task in this current era of accountability. When I began my dissertation work, I intended to study the impact of iterative, research-based professional development on my colleagues’ practices and PD satisfaction. Upon investigation of my research questions, the constraints to professional development in a public school operating within the bureaucracy of the New York City Department of Education became apparent. It then seemed more pressing to explore the PD experiences of staff members, especially the challenges for the teacher leaders on our school’s PD team in providing professional development within a top-down education system. The research questions I then developed for this study are: (1) What challenges does the PD team at a large urban high school navigate in attempting to plan and implement professional development over the course of one school year? (2) How does the instructional staff and administration experience the professional development processes at a large urban high school over the course of one school year? However, when attempting to answer my questions using the data that I had outlined for my original study, I realized that the participants’ experiences were difficult to convey using traditional research methods. After studying the performative social sciences, I concluded that a performative piece would help give voice and life to the story, and hopefully reach more audiences and raise awareness regarding the need to restructure the current top-down system. Surveys, focus groups, a participant observation journal, and a binder of documentation comprised the data for the study. Data collection methods provided an ongoing set of responses to the professional development activities at the site from every group of stakeholders: myself as the team leader, PD team members, teachers, department level administrators, and the principal. The data collection procedures aided me in exploring my research questions, and provided me with enough varied information to deeply understand participants’ perspectives to create the performance, which is presented herein as a screenplay of monologues. A review of the performance indicates that regardless of the PD structure in place at the site, changes in bureaucratic mandates and expectations caused changes to the school’s PD model, and, subsequently, conflict and stress within the team and dissension among staff members. Relying upon the support system they developed was often one of the only things that helped the team counteract the bureaucratic structure and culture embedded in the site. Implications for policy, practice, and future research are included.  

ETD_8111

Ed.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Daniele Vingelli

doi:10.7282/T3V98BWS

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.