Recent report published on duration of teacher professional development as well as other aspects of professional development.
professional development that offered 5 to 14 hours of contact had no statistically significant effect on student achievement. This suggests that the participation of our nation's teachers in professional development in most areas is likely to have little impact on the quality of their instructional practice and on student achievement.
So in order to be effective PD has to have a certain duration....with makes sense if you think that much of new learning involves unlearning and building new beliefs and practices. Required changes can't happen in short amounts of time. Expecting teachers to change a practice or add a new practice in a relatively short amount of PD time is akin to blaming a student for not learning something the first time you said it. We know that learning requires repeated exposure.
Support for education and new learning of teachers needs to change via all involved parties. We are identifying teachers who aren't getting the job done according value added measures. Yet, when we have data showing us we need to improve (some teachers more than others) we don't do a very effective job of improving them....simply because we don't offer PD that is of high enough quality or duration to actually improve teachers and consequently their students. Why is that? Do we really not have that much time to give to teachers to learn or do we as teachers and admin not know how to teacher teachers for improvement?
I can only speak to my own district. We have 2 half days of inservice in addition to a fair amount of staff meetings (30 min or 1 hour) that try to be PD. We are lucky if we hit 14 hours for the entire year.....and that is on multiple initiatives subjects, etc. So how do we increase that time? I think we need to either ask educators to step up and work outside of their contract time or admin needs to reclaim some the teacher planning time which exceeds almost any local school I can find. This is not to say our teacher planning is not used well....but it is not being used well in ways that raise achievement and improve teacher's teaching. Instead much of it is spent on non-optional administrivia.
When you read the featured article (linked above) make sure you read the comments. I am almost always saddened by some of the comments left to educational articles life this one that are obviously left by teachers. Schools have worked so hard to build PLC practices and structures and allocate time for those meetings....yet someone will post that the PLC is the biggest waste of time. Why is that? Is the PLC poorly organized or is any use of your planning that you don't have absolute say in a bad, unworthwhile thing. Other educators won't be happy for me to say this....but I fear many of us have too much autonomy.
No comments:
Post a Comment