#edpd

Lost in the all of the talk about education reform is how we prepare teachers. Here is a report on how we need to change the way we train teachers. From the report: Do we know how to help teachers improve? The Mirage challenges the widely held perception among education leaders that we know what works when it comes to teacher development, and if we could just apply that knowledge more widely, we could improve the quality of classroom teaching in short order. Over two years, we looked closely at teacher development in three large school districts and one charter school network. Here’s what we found: School systems are making a massive and laudable investment in teacher improvement—far larger than most people realize. Yet most teachers do not appear to improve substantially from year to year, even though many have not yet mastered critical skills. We found no evidence that any particular kind or amount of professional development consistently helps teachers improve. School systems are failing to help teachers understand how to improve—or even that they have room to improve at all. But school systems shouldn’t give up on teacher development. And they shouldn’t cut spending on it, either. Rather, we believe it’s time for a new conversation about teacher improvement—one that asks fundamentally different questions about what great teaching means and how to achieve it.

Steve Jobs famously said, when unveiling the iPad five years ago, that we are living in a post PC world. What he meant was that we no longer will be relying on the old desktop computer to do most of our computer work for us.

Indeed, he was pretty much correct. In our current digital world, many of the tasks that we used to do on clunky desktops are now being done by tablets, smartphones and laptops. Only those "heavy lifting" computing chores are consigned to the desktop, but even that may change soon as well. If trends continue, we soon will be doing most of our computing in our mobile smaller devices and probably wearing many of them as well.

I got to thinking about how we train probably needs to change to match the changing paradigm of the app centric world. I remember, because I am old, when a new program came out, like Adobe Photoshop or Word, for instance, the box would weigh about 5 pounds: 4.90 pounds of instruction manuals and a the rest was a few discs for the program and some packaging You were expected to actually read the manuals. Then there would be the "For Dummy's" books and Adobe or Office Authorized instruction books at the bookstore or computer store in case the default instruction manuals didn't help. It looked something like this:

Same held true for any major program: MS Office, Excel, PowerPoint, even the Apple programs had their fair share of crazy instructional manuals that would give War and Piece a run for it's money. As soon as the program came out, there were the manuals.

Fast forward to today: An app comes out. No instructions manuals. Figure the program out yourself. Maybe, of you are lucky, an introductory video, but by and large now, everyone is pretty much assumed to know how to be able to figure out how to use the programs.

We have come a long way. The emphasis has moved away from HOW the program runs (giant manuals) to what the program can create or do.

I think that professional development development is going down the same path. The emphasis is moving away from the HOW the program or technology runs, towards more of WHAT the technology can do.

That way, you choose the app that matches the need and want of the lesson and not try to shoehorn the expensive app into a lesson.

We have become an App World. The old PC paradigms are dying quickly.

My views of PD are constantly changing, especially this summer, and the more I think people can just learn on their own if motivated, then the less the need for formal professional development.

Today for instance, at a session for administrators, we asked the admins to fill out a collaborative spreadsheet on Office 365. No instructions other than here was the link and get to work. Not one person if the 100 or so in attendance asked for help. If they needed it, they simply asked their neighbor. In no time, there are over 40 people were working together online to create the spreadsheet.

The same thing happened a few minutes later when we asked everyone in the room to take a selfie and Tweet it out. No one was given professional development on Twitter, yet everyone was expected to create the selfie and do the assignment.

Guess what? No professional development needed. No one was asking how or when or what, they simply just started tweeting. Again, if they didn't understand, they just flagged down someone nearby, asked for quick help, and started tweeting. Many had never tweeted before and a few even started by saying "I don't tweet." However, those around her began to tweet quickly and easily:

Looking forward to a great year #powerupepisd pic.twitter.com/94sXyFzzhp

— Carla Gasway (@CGasway) July 29, 2015

To take all I learn and share it with my faculty! #PowerUpEPISD pic.twitter.com/D9cGGuoywY

— Craig Kehrwald (@CraigKehrwald) July 29, 2015

These are example of the admins that were ready and willing to use twitter! I love it when people are willing to go out on a limb and try something new. It was a very Green Eggs and Ham moment.

By the end of the day, even the refusenik was tweeting and easily using the collaborative document. Staff development to use the tool: Zero. Time taken out of the day to show how to use the tools: Zero.

So I am starting to really rethink using time to teach the tool as opposed to simply embedding the tools right into the other PD. Do we really need to have traditional "Hands On" PD for software and hardware anymore? Are people now at a level of familiarity with technology that they can at least navigate their way around an unfamiliar program with some ease?