E-based professional development (e-pd) for effective teaching and  (Page 3/8)

Background of Traditional Professional Development: Taking Aim

According to Roland Barth (2001), traditional professional development for educators has been characterized by assorted courses at universities, episodic in-service activities in school districts, or incoherently planned workshops. Barth describes this as a“wasteland”of professional development, and Malone (2001) concurs, stating that after a rather intense period of formal training for educators, it seems that the professional development that follows is rather informal, self-guided, and sporadic.

Teaching and school administration are intense, complex jobs, and without regular, well-planned, relevant professional development, educators become stagnant and less productive in terms of new ideas, instructional strategies, time management, interpersonal and communication skills, and the energy required to keep up with the pace of teaching and learning, especially under the stringent guidelines of No Child Left Behind. Barth (2001) contends that in the past, those traditional forms of professional development drew upon common assumptions and logic: find schools where students achieve at high levels, observe and identify those traits that are exhibited by the teachers and principals, and develop professional activities based on those traits. While this appears sound on the surface, Barth asserts that the flaw in this design comes fromassuming that the main measure of effective teachers and principals comes solely from high student test scores. However, as we now know, a“good”education is much more than high test scores, and schools are very seldom that similar.

Unlike teachers, school principals were actually not assumed to require professional development prior to the 1980’s, and only in the 1990’s did participation in administrative staff development become common. Today, many states require that school administrators complete a specified number of in-service hours or courses over a specified period of time (Hallinger and Murphy, 1991). Likewise, teachers in almost every state are required to attend in-service workshops to renew their teaching certification, meet state standards, or maintain their jobs.

Two decades ago, principals were seen as the“learn-ed”, while teachers and students were the“learn-ers”. Principals were required to know everything from building management to human relations to every subject in the curriculum. Their needs for professional development came dead last; it was simply assumed that they knew all they needed to know, and therefore had no immediate need for professional development. As we moved into the 1990’s, professional development for principals came to be viewed as a‘necessary evil’for the advancement of administrative skills, knowledge, and abilities. Workshops and conferences abounded all over the country, and indeed, there was a movement toward sharpening principals’management skills and fine-tuning their knowledge of curriculum, instruction, assessment, supervision, and more recently, the use of technology as a management tool.