Reflection on Chapter 5
The subject of teacher quality comes up when considering Chapter 5. Professional Development is a hot topic because school districts spend a lot of money in this area, and results are questionable for most. In the business world if a company is spending a large amount of money, they want results, and will evaluate the money spent. In education we don’t have a system to measure results or the impact of a workshop or presentation. And unfortunately, many of the workshops or presentations are not worth the money. I think teachers have better experiences when they have a longer amount of time to study and collaborate with other professionals. One day here and there is never enough. Teachers need to seek out meaningful learning for themselves because I just don’t think short workshops are that effective.
In my experience, teachers can be very poorly behaved at workshops because they are just not interested in being there. I do not even know where to begin to tackle that issue, but here is a cool clip I found on You Tube. I wish I was an administrator because this would be really fun to try! I like that this internet company wants to “shrink back down our world” and connect again to people.
Just one search through Google and you will find many types of Professional Development listed. ilearnUSA offers the iEARN Collaboration Center where teachers can search for collaborative projects. Teachers need time for collaboration and students need to have opportunities to experience learning outside of our town, state, country, etc. as this is what they will encounter in college, the military, or the workforce. But by the same token, perhaps school districts need to acknowledge that powerful learning experiences can be found in this way, and give teachers “workshop credits” for any online collaboration that they do.
The current system is not working, as it is made clear in Chapter 5, so perhaps we need to re-define what we consider “professional development” and then teachers could get a little more excited about “learning” again.
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Rachel - I really like this idea in this video. It is really great! I think I will try to suggest something like this to my administration. I think it would be really fun and so interesting to see what unfolds. It made me start to think about our staff meetings, where we have set groups we must sit with each time. I wish we would be able to move around more and get to know other teachers a bit more each staff meeting. It would be fine for them to pick who we sit with, but just new people each month. It makes you really think that communication with each other verbally is really an important part of this experiment. Everyone knows a lot more than they think they do, and someone is wanting to know about it. You just have to ask and tell!
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