Professional Development - Ten Misconceptions

The challenges faced by todays schools call for significant focused professional development, in order to begin to address the changes in society and technology that affect the student learning.  Tried and true methods reflect some common misconceptions about teachers and professional development. Here are a few….

1.      Teachers are interested in learning new things during the inservice days right before the school year starts….until they are sure their classroom is ready for kids little else is on their mind.

2.      Teachers learn differently than students...they don’t need activation, connections to prior knowledge, time for practice, or frequent work in the subject to build mastery.

3.      The time set aside for inservice days and a weekly meeting is sufficient for serious professional development….if students came to class only once a week how well would they learn new material?

4.      Teachers need extrinsic motivation such as college credit or stipends for professional development…Harry Wong noted that if teachers set a goal of being 10% better each year, they would be twice as good in 7 years...find a way to encourage those goals.

5.      A corollary to #4….threats are a tool to improve teacher learning….put teeth into mandatory training, add more legislative rules, policy requirements, and ignore the impact of stress on learning at your peril.

6.    Preservice is the best place to ensure teachers have the training they need….at a rate of turnover and new teacher hiring of 3-4% it will never be able to keep up with the changes.

7.    Using professional development to change teaching without changing the underlying system is effective…many of the things standing in the way are physical structures, schedules, transportation, and time.

8.    The current method we use is the most cost effective solution:  coaches are the most cost effective, large group meetings are the most cost effective, sending teams out to gain expertise is the most cost effective, PLCs are the most cost effective…..without measurement, how do you know?

9.      The solution to professional development is individualization to meet the needs of every teacher….when this is possible, it will still be better to take advantage of social learning and collegial teams to magnify the impact of learning beyond the individual.

10.  We can wait it out -- the pendulum will swing back….except that clocks are now digital, and time is passing us by…...