On Professional Development

Today we had a professional development day. This was a day for teachers to come together to share information about what strategies they use in their classrooms. The presenters were teachers from my school who had volunteered (or been volunteered) because they had something that was really working with their students.

As teachers we need this time to teach and learn with our colleagues. We all have a tremendous amount of knowledge that could be shared if we only had the time.

As I was sitting in the first session of the day, which was run by our administration, I found myself getting frustrated though. Why is it that we feel we need to invent the wheel? We talked about RTI and the presenters were excited about their updated paper forms. Teachers have to fill out the forms with information about students. Then, someone has to take that same data and input it into a computer. Then we have to run reports, on paper, and have meetings where we are going to read the information. Why isn't this process electronic? with dropdowns? and maybe even the ability to file share and work collaboratively with other teachers across disciplines who share the same student?

That got me thinking about blogs and wikis. Much of the day was filled with information dissemination. The kind of information dissemination that could have been done through postings like this one. We could have read the information ahead of time. We would have been prepared to discuss and interact with the information. Then, we would have had enough time to learn about how to use our distance learning lab, the lab that we were told had over $100,000 worth of equipment, that is just sitting there because we don't know how to use it. Or we could have worked to develop activities that students could participate in. Or...

Then I started thinking about professional development in general. Why is it that teachers, who are skilled in the art of differentiation, can't seem to figure out how to differentiate our own professional development? Why did people who knew how to collaboratively write have to attend a session that included training they had already had, instead of extending the session on technology? How did all of the training we had today directly address our focus for the day, the achievement gap ? I don't know...because we ran out of time to talk about it.

That's okay though. I know that another day is coming for us to discuss this. We understand the importance of professional development to the growth of teachers and student achievement. That is why we have set aside time for those discussions. I also know that they are giving me time to formulate my questions and ideas so that I will be prepared for the next professional development day. In fact, I have until January to ponder the items we almost learned today.