March 2008 — Features
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Five on Five: A Dialogue on Profession Development
Jim Gates: If you think of the alternative, which is not to have ongoing professional development, then the bar would have stopped five years ago with PowerPoint. Look at technologies such as RSS, wikis-none of that would be in schools if we'd just said, "Okay, we've reached the end." It's not a journey with an endpoint. It's ongoing.
2 What does each of you see as the most successful model for providing professional development?
Martinez: I work with a lot of schools across the
United States and I see a lot of different models. I don't think
there's only one that works. I see success when professional
development is taken seriously by administrators. Their support
is crucial. Beyond that, constructivist techniques, when used in
workshops, really work with teachers. The teachers want to get
their hands on things and make them their own. Finally, I think
support really has to be provided back in the classroom. Students
can be part of this kind of last mile of classroom support
that's so hard to provide and is so essential.
Kristin Hokanson: What's traditionally known as "spray and pray," where you give educators information and just hope that they're able to use it, hasn't been working. There is no one thing that works. I've been very impressed by how Classrooms for the Future tried to develop a model of professional development [that includes] coaches. The coaches are highly trained, and then they go out and work with their staff. Some vendors have also come and done out-of-the-box training with the teachers. Another part of our grant funding [required] that we have a student support team to inspire teachers to start changing their thinking. With this kind of support, we can see the kind of integrated use of technology that we really hope will benefit our students and prepare them for the 21st century.
Gates: We've stopped teaching the "click here, click there" method, and instead we bring teachers in with their laptops and we teach a lesson that happens to use one or two different computer applications so that we're modeling the classroom dynamic. When you're done with that, you see that each team in the room maybe created a slightly different product and each team learned the same material. Then we ask them, "How did you feel as a learner?" Teachers are learners, too, so instead of having them say, "I walked away knowing where to click," now they walk away knowing how to fashion an entire lesson.
