The Role of Professional Development
“A minority of ICT professional development courses are designed to help teachers revise their pedagogical practices so that technology strengths can be fully utilized. Most of the professional development courses, in contrast, may help teachers run certain software packages and fix the printer but do not provide long-term assistance in helping them rethink their teaching.”
This from Laurence C. Peter’s chapter in “Scaling Up Success: Lessons from Technology-Based Educational Improvements,” captures well why we haven’t seen more success in our classrooms where technology is concerned. So many of our educational leaders stop at the skill level and don’t realize that it is the underlying belief systems of all educators, administrators and teachers alike, and the pedagogy that must change. Technology, in most schools, is yet another half-baked initiative.
Another important point made in the article is that when you get to the stage of transforming beliefs and pedagogy, it has to be alright to experiment and fail. Learning is messy. And we need to learn new ways of thinking where technology is concerned.
In my school, we are fortunate to have two Instructional Technology Specialists who work with teachers directly in the classroom. This is professional development embedded into the job of teaching. Sometimes the work is focused on skills, and sometimes, depending on the teacher and where they are in the continuum of curriculum, pedagogy, and technology, the work is focused on changing the classroom so technology can be more effective.
For the last two years we have implemented, with a small number of teachers at the high school level, a model of professional development that is designed to focus on what Peters suggests—rethinking teaching. The program has several defining characteristics: it focuses on epistemology, pedagogy, and skill development; collaboration; the real pedagogical problems encountered by those teachers in the classroom; and it lasts for a period of time - this is not one shot professional development.
Through this process, we have had successes, and yes, some messy learning. The report from the first year can be read online here. You can see how we designed the program and see examples of how teaching and learning were changed. Each group also posted some of their thoughts and ideas to a weblog. Last year’s weblog is here. And the current year is here. The big question for our district now is how we scale this up—to other classrooms in the high school and other schools in the district.
We have learned some valuable lessons (and will continue, I’m sure), from this sort of professional development. “Integrating technolgy successfully means that pedagogy changes as the teachers’ focus shifts to enabling more individualized student learning. For this shift to take place, state and local leadership is vital in articulating why and how high-quality professional development for technology integration matters and in providing teachers with appropriate support as they change their practice.” Leadership is essential. The vision for professional development, and the way that it is carried out in our schools must model what we want to see in the classroom—engaged learners.
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