TIE 575- Due January 26

What was the last AWFUL professional development you attended and why?

I've been teaching since 1996, asking me to pick one awful professional development is hardly fair. As I started thinking about this topic, I realized I could easily create a blog just on terrible, waste of time, hardly worth getting out of bed...professional developments.

Generally speaking I am pretty certain that I can safely put them into 2 categories of inside the district and outside the district. It seems that most of the PD's I've been to that are done by "professional development companies" are fairly well organized and acquire presenters that are well versed in their areas. Now, it so happens that with these professional developments you obviously have no opportunity for follow-up or extension. The follow-up portion or extension of knowledge is the part that I feel the district done professional developments really have the opportunity to hit a "home run" in. Unfortunately, they normally either strike out or go for the bunt. (done with baseball metaphors now)

I used to teach in a district in Kansas ( a rural area). To kick off every new school year the district would put together a PD smorgasbord. That's what they would call it. In theory it sounds great. If you had been teaching in the district for more than a year you knew it was a wasted day. There were 5 schools in the district and we would all show up at the high school. All of the pd's were done by one of the districts' teachers. Bad call #1. They were lazy, they already new their audience, and if they taught one of the classes then they didn't have to attend any of the other sessions....I believe they also got free bagels for the day.

Anyway, I remember going to this Spanish session for 45 minutes. The summary listed the class as a Spanish 1 course for teachers who wanted to communicate more effectively with the Spanish speaking students and their families. The first 10 minutes were taken by the presenter (district spanish teacher) discussing the upcoming football practice with the coach who came in to take the class. The rest of the time we practiced greetings and numbers and to wrap it up he taught us a song about a flower, or at least he told us it was about a flower. Frankly, at that point I had my doubts as to if I was really singing about a flower....this guy had a strange sense of funny. Anyway, I left and shook my head and thought, "I can't believe that guy is getting free bagels for the rest of the day."

Below are the 3 points listed as to what constitutes as an effective staff development by the National Staff Development Council Standards for Staff Development.

• has small groups of educators working together over time in professional learning communities;

• is based on principles of effective adult learning; and
• deepens educators’ content knowledge.

So, let's see: Referring to this Spanish PD

• We did not work together over a period of time. It was 45 minutes and then never again. Since it was within the district it would have been a perfect opportunity to get together on a weekly basis to truly work toward the goal of more effective communication.
• I am not sure this PD was based on ANY principles to tell you the truth.
  
• Deepened my content knowledge: I can now sing a song in Spanish about what I believe to be a flower, although because I'm not completely convinced, I'm unwilling to take the chance.
  

All I can say is that at least those district smorgasbord PD's are consistently .... ridiculous. No surprises.

TIE 512- Due January 19

The Question Posts: Should technology (computer skills, typing, software instruction, etc.) be taught as separate skills or as part of an integrated lesson?

I have always thought that anything taught in isolation can lose it's ability to offer connections to other learning. I was a computer lab teacher in the late 90's and struggled with how to teach the skill of typing. I admit that at the time I hadn't even really considered teaching it in conjunction with anything else. I did not have access to typing software at the time. I do think that typing, specifically, needs to have it's time for very intentional lessons on placement. However, once those placement skills are introduced, why not practice them in the context of something that's meaningful instead of "gghg gghg gghg gghg gghg". YIKES, that was a little hard to relive.

The video that linked with this blog entry featured various educators with very different views on the meaning of literacy. Most seemed to be open to changes in it's description. I'm not so sure it needs to be changed. I always thought of it as a term to encompass much more than just text and being able to read it. I never thought of "literacy" as having a very strict definition.

My point: teach me Excel, but have the data be something meaningful to me. Teach me powerpoint by showing me how to import those graphs I just learned how to do in Excel. Teach me by having me put together a presentation on my graphs. I've tried it the other way. It doesn't work for me, as the learner....so this is also how I teach.

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