The Challenge of Professional Development
For a long time professional development of teachers (and other professionals as well) was seen largely as a problem of information transmission: assemble teachers, bring in outside experts to talk and motivate them, give them resources to study the innovation in greater depth, and encourage them to return to their classrooms and perform differently.
Over the last two decades the profession has arrived at a richer sense of what is required for professional development. Certainly information--about new practices, for example--is important; and so is motivating teachers to engage in the process of examining their current practice and trying out a new approach. In the 1970s Gene Hall at the University of Texas documented that adoption (and adaptation) of a new instructional practice took between 3 and 4 years. Not surprisingly he and others in the business community came to see that a journey this long required a support system: teachers needed to pursue growth with supportive colleagues and helpful experts. They needed regular constructive feedback on their progress in reaching the goal. The importance of these factors is now well documented.
The Crisis In School Districts:
No Time For Teacher Professional DevelopmentSuch a model requires a great deal of resources. Importantly, it requires teachers to have regular time away from their daily class to learn new skills and then return to the classroom to experiment with the skills and receive feedback on their attempts. In a time of constrained resources, this is becoming difficult to impossible. School districts in Michigan are particularly challenged. In 1996 three things brought professional development activites almost to a halt: there was a cut in state funding for professional development, a dwindling of the supply of substitute teachers who could manage a teacher's regular class while she met with colleagues, and a decreasing number of dollars for education in general.
In large school districts the biggest challenges to professional development are these:
- Easy access to resources about an innovation (journal and magazine articles, curriculum guides, lesson plans, and classroom materials), especially those materials developed over the course of an extended professional development project, or older materials whose relevance is discovered as the development process goes on.
- Supporting released time for teachers so they can come to a central location for meetings with both mentors and with collaborating colleagues.
- Opportunities to try out new practices in one's own classroom while securing the support and constructive feedback of colleagues and mentors engaged in the long-term effort of development and change.
In some ways, the most serious challenge is providing teachers with the right size time slices to support growth and development. In a world without electronic communication, the minimum slice for a meeting is about two hours: 15-20 minutes to travel to a training location away from the school in which one teaches (e.g., the district's central office) and about 90 minutes to engage in a fruitful activity that will contribute to new ideas and personal growth (a lecture or study group).
The Activities of Professional Development: An Example
In 1995 the Ann Arbor Public Schools decided to pursue a major professional development initiative throughout the district. They are today in the middle of educating teachers about an approach to classroom and school management called Brain Compatible Learning Environments (BCLE). A major proponent and trainer for this model is Susan Kovalik. The director of professional development envisioned several phases in the long process of helping teachers learn the principles and skills of BCLE, and identified various activities that she planned for teachers to help them grow in awareness and understanding of the approach and develop their skills in implementing it in their own classrooms. The phases and activities are listed in the first two columns of the table below. The third column provides examples for each type of activity that is currently being used or planned to be used to help teachers. Note the constraints of time that permeate the plans. There are major presentations once or twice a year. Even study groups convene only once a month. This constraint arises from the realities of teaching. Compare this in-service educational effort with the daily activities these same teachers orchestrate for their own students, and then sometimes complain that the slice of time each day (the 45-55 minute class period) is insufficient for students to engage the subject for a long enough period of time.
|
Phase |
Type of Activity |
Example |
|
Awareness Information about Brain research and relevant classroom practices (1 year) |
Introductory Overview |
1-day live presentation by Kovalik; follow-up readings |
|
Study Groups |
Monthly 1-2 hr. face to face meetings of tearhers from different schools | |
|
Visit Model Sites |
1-day visit to a model site (2-3 days total w/ travel) | |
|
Skill Development Selective Focus on Skills to Achieve BCLE Environments (2 years) |
Multi-Day Training Session for Building Teams |
3-Day face to face conference in the summer |
|
Support Group for Problem Solving |
Monthly face to face meetings of teachers from different schools | |
|
Teachers Practice Skills |
Teachers work on their own. Facilitator visits classrooms as time permits | |
|
Focused Visitations Within District |
Participating teachers get subs & visit selected classrooms; reflect on their own practice | |
|
Implementation (1-3 years) (concurrent with "skill development") |
Intensive Workshop for Bldg. Leaders (6) |
Six-day face to face workshop for Principals |
|
Leaders Support Staff |
Regular classroom observations; every 3 weeks in-bldg meeting of participating teachers | |
|
Leaders Support One Another |
Monthly meeting of six leaders with professional development leader |
Can Internet Tools Enhance Traditional Methods?
It is the challenge of this course to examine the variety of Internet tools available in the fall of 1996 and ask whether they can contribute to or enhance any of these professional development activities. In the chart above there are basically five types of professional development activities: transmit information, motivate, support collaboration, support study groups, and visit model sites. In the table below these activities are arrayed in column one; examples of electronic enhancements to the traditional activities are listed in column two.
|
Type of PD Activity |
Electronic Enhancement |
|
Transmit Information |
Web pages as a library of print & graphical information. HomePage & Fetch. |
|
Motivate |
Web as a library of illustrated lectures: text, graphics, & "streaming audio." RealAudio. |
|
Support Collaboration |
Asynchronous communication among participants. Electronic mail and e-mail with attachments. Pine, Eudora, Netscape Mail. |
|
Synchronous communication. Chat Group. | |
|
Study Groups |
Internet as an interactive electronic newspaper. NewsGroups. |
|
Visit Model Sites |
Video Conferencing: CU SeeMe. |
As an illustration of use of the Web as a device to make available information for professional development, a prototype web page was developed for Ann Arbor Public Schools, containing resource pages for Brain Compatible Learning Environments. It was created using Claris Home Page, a program described in the next chapter.
The remaining chapters in Part I of this magazine describe how various Internet tools work and how they could make their contribution to enhancing traditional non-electronic activities of professional development.