March 2008 — Features
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Five on Five: A Dialogue on Profession Development
Cathy Groller: When you use the word technology, it addresses the efficacy of the people you're teaching. And so, for those who are still afraid of technology, it creates a level of fear, and you start with an obstacle before you've even begun in your training. Knowing that, we have to always keep in mind that we're dealing with adult learners who have a different set of skills.
4 Moving forward, what do you see as the biggest challenges to professional development?
Martinez: There are obstacles to [overcome] in
every organization. Schools aren't unique in that way. People
like their comfort zones-that's why they're called comfort
zones. What we try and do is create success, and then show
that success to other people. I think, a lot of times, we're
building a wall between professional development and what
actually happens in a classroom. For some teachers, unless
they see it with students, they're never
going to believe it. They can build a
project in a workshop, but then
they don't quite believe that
students are actually
going to be able to do it.
So we need to move
professional development
to a place
where students are
actually participating,
and participating
in an important
way, to show teachers
how students
use technology.
Hokanson: Exactly. We need to help teachers see that we are providing them the professional development to learn these tools in the same way that the students are learning them, and I think that the students can be great models for that. We use wikis and MySpace a lot with our teachers, and the students know how to change their pictures and do all the things that the teachers want to be able to do. Let the kids show them how. Listen to the kids.
Gates: In the school I'm with, I don't see any resistance to the desire to learn. What I see as the biggest obstacle is time. Our teachers are under contract for 188 days, and when you take away the day before school starts, the day after school [ends], and a few other days here and there, you're down to six days left for professional development. So it isn't that teachers don't want to learn this stuff. It's more a question of, when are we going to make this happen?
Keegan: We can't forget about the administrators and the school board members. Administrators are hugely powerful. If they model the use of technology in their presentations to their staff, if they model the use of technology in school board meetings, in budget presentations to the community, they have a chance to grab the interest of parents. And above all, they get school board members into the schools to see how the technology's being used and how it can affect student learning. I think that's unbelievably powerful because those school board members, let's face it: A lot of them are of the older generation. They're the ones making the money decisions about providing the resources for these things to occur, and I think that's a critical piece of the puzzle.
