“When I die I hope it is during a professional development session because the transition from life to death will be so seamless” ( p. 283).
We all can relate to the feelings of the teacher who expressed this view in Fullan’s The New Meaning of Educational Change. With so much that we need and want to learn about teaching and students, why are most staff development sessions so frustrating to teachers?
Yesterday I attended a 45-minute session about teaching vocabulary. We learned how valuable vocabulary building is and then proceeded to explore several different strategies. Roughly 25 teachers attended the session. I sat next to a drama teacher with over twenty years of experience, a physical education teacher and track coach with 30 plus years of experience, and a math teacher who has been teaching about ten years. Throughout the room, there were special education teachers, social studies teachers, administrators, science teachers, other English teachers, music teachers, and a few teachers I have never seen, one of the problems of working in a large school.
Some teachers were very young and had little teaching experience, and the rest of us had been teaching vocabulary long before the young teachers had spoken their first words.
Regardless of the effectiveness of the presenter, what staff development program can be appealing, profitable, and memorable for teachers of all subject areas, for all grade levels, and for all years of experience? While it is true that vocabulary building is important in all areas, teachers cannot all use the same approaches, nor should we all be taught in the same way.
How ironic that teachers must attend staff-development sessions that emphasize individualizing instruction for students, but no one thinks that teachers need different forms of staff development!
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2 comments on this topic
21. January - 10:06 pm
Staff development?
That’s an oxymoron in itself.
*sporks*
23. January - 12:40 pm
Keep on tellin’ the truth, girl!
25. January - 6:20 am
The evangelical fervour behind educational beliefs is unique to teaching….many things teachers are supposed to do via inspiration, motivation and vocational aspiration alone are almost breatharian in sentiment. This is because money is rather lean. Therefore to achieve things within schools…one must inspire others to pay for them, fund them or provide them for free. Administrators practice on teaching staff they are easier targets than parents, state governments and the community…the latter cannot be threatened with being fired ; ).
Individualised teaching and learning for children is one of those things….no…there won’t be reduced teacher student ratios, individualised resources, individualised assessment tools…planning time or any other support provided. However…teachers may be inspired to pay to attend professional development in their free time, work unpaid hours designing and making resources to cater for individual differences. They may even buy them for their schools or the students…a nation finds it hard to budget for things like stickers and pencils.
Honestly…teachers need to lose their faith in the religion of education. Is there any indication that the government is going to individualise taxes, that bank managers are going to individualise loans or that teacher staff training is in any way going to be individualised? Or that we’re all going to celebrate individual differences and diversity because of individualised teaching in elementary schooling?
Every time I hear what teachers need to be doing…I hear blah-blah-blah-ble-blah instead. Really…its great. Whenever teaching resources have no substance or are not seen I recognise it as faith or religion…. nothing to do with teaching or classrooms…just ideology. The idea that teachers will make these ideas happen in school without any support or assistance whatsoever is magical thinking. No they’re not going to happen in teacher training and development sessions either. Its not ironic…a meeting between expectation and what actually happens was never likely…its more of an absurdity. We should genuinely treat anyone that vocalises individualised teaching and learning as a serious intention when referring to one individual teacher to many individual children as ridiculous to the extreme. As soon as a teacher speaks to another individual child they are no longer giving all of the other children individual teaching instruction….quite obvious really…individualisation cannot happen in factory modelled learning situations like schools.