Vital yet elusive

Accountability mandates have changed the field of teaching dramatically in the last ten years. Teachers, particularly those in urban schools, are under greater pressure to increase the achievement of all of their students. Schools in urban areas face additional challenges, such as chronic low achievement (Cochran-Smith, 2003) and increased pressures to improve outcomes for more student subgroups than are typically found in suburban schools (Kantor & Lowe, 2006). Additionally, urban schools experience higher levels of teacher attrition (Ingersoll, 2001), with teachers often leaving for less urban settings (Hanushek, Kain, & Rivkin, 2004). Although schools in urban areas have used a variety of approaches to meet accountability demands, teacher learning lies at the heart of most improvement strategies (Desimone, 2001; Fullan, 2000; Valli & Buese, 2007). This study provides insight into the professional learning experiences of urban, second-stage teachers, all of whom worked in schools and districts under intense accountability pressure. Overall, these teachers described a variety of learning experiences. Yet many of these experiences were of little value to their daily practice. Because of accountability pressures, most participants reported professional learning that was shaped by these pressures but that, on the whole, did not help them improve. Teachers cited district-led trainings on how to use new curricula or how to cull data from standardized tests as examples of professional development that held little value. Participants reported that much of what was meant to help them improve their teaching was instead a waste of time or irrelevant to their efforts to increase student achievement. Second-stage teachers in this study wanted to collaborate with colleagues in order to learn new teaching strategies. They hoped these new strategies would help them meet specific needs that they identified among the students in their classrooms. Ultimately, participants sought learning that was relevant to their daily work in classrooms. When teachers worked at schools that had clearly articulated plans for addressing accountability mandates, they encountered professional learning that was linked to those plans. They reported that these learning experiences were directly relevant to their own improvement efforts as well as to school-wide instructional improvement goals.