Thursday, February 15, 2007

Reflection on My Staff Development Session

The Beloit school district sends their students home early one Wednesday of every month. The choice has been made to dedicate one afternoon to training and development for their teachers. As a student teacher I have gone to each of the monthly meetings which are organized based on the grade level each employee teaches at. Therefore, my previous experiences have been entirely with second grade teachers like myself. The meetings are taught by liaisons, teachers who have elected to spend additional hours working on curriculum development for various subject areas. As a Duffy intern I had the opportunity to attend a staff development session with a different group of teachers than I have previously, and I chose the fifth grade social studies meeting taking place at McNeel.
The session was lead by the ESL Coordinator and social studies liaison at Wright, as well as another teacher who acts as one of the two social studies liaisons for her school. The two had attended a meeting with the creator and manager of the new curriculum at Kolak, the district office. They had been instructed on what information to present, and had designed their own activities and method of presentation for their fellow teachers. The social studies curriculum was first implemented last year and a third of the staff development meetings have been dedicated to it. The other curriculum changes in math and writing, are the focus of all other development meetings. The meetings have been difficult in the past year since many teachers are responding very negatively to the new curriculum approaches. On the drive over to the development session the ESL Coordinator from Wright had told me about how hostile some of the meetings had been. Apparently the kindergarten teachers were the worst, and their meetings had been broken up into two groups with additional district members helping teachers run the meetings. Apparently, this would ensure they kept calm while they were being spoon fed the pre-planned curriculum instructions. I was lucky though, the group I was attending a session with was apparently slightly less intimidating, though they had gotten disgruntled at a few of the meetings.
The session began with the teacher on an overhead describing the theory behind the social studies program. She re-emphasized for the teachers what a concept based approach should look like, reviewed the strands the social studies program was based around, and went over suggestions for how to tie the strands into lesson plans. The teachers had been instructed to bring examples of their lessons, and at this time one of the fifth grade teachers brought up a concern she had with the information in the presentation. This merged into a discussion of her lesson, which she shared with the other teachers. They discussed the ideas she shared, many exclaiming as they went, "That's a great way of doing it," "I should try that with my kids," or "I never thought of that before." I was happy to see, but not surprised at the comparison of ideas and the excitement elicited by teachers once they began swapping stories. However, once this ended it was back to the pre-planned material we needed to cover.
We broke into groups to discuss one of the strands and link it to the historical events students would be covering in the next unit. I was placed with two teachers who taught together at another school. They were quite negative and un-enthused about the activity. After learning that I was an intern one of the teachers asked me what I thought of the staff development in Beloit. I responded that it seemed fine, and asked him what his feelings were. He was not at all hesitant with his response, "I think its the worst I've ever seen," he responded. He stated that he thought he could do a far better job. I thought this was an odd statement since all teachers were given the opportunity to act as liaisons and take part in staff training. However, he also indicated that it was the decisions made at Kolak about what content the teachers at the meetings had to cover that he was frustrated with. Apparently the basic concepts behind the social studies program have been regurgitated in development meetings repeatedly all year. The two teachers and I discussed the benefit that teachers would gain out of instead spending this time working together to create lesson plan ideas, and this is what we ended up doing.
It is remarkable to see the change that came over teachers at the meeting, including these two once discussion moved to practice instead of theory. These two listed off several of their favorite lessons they had done in the past. The conversation ended with both of them agreeing on how much fun it was to work with kids. "I just love it, even after all these years," one of them concluded. At this point the groups were instructed to come back together to discuss what we had done in our groups, and the sour attitudes and boredom returned.
The problem that I have often encountered with education policy is that their is an underlying assumption made by its creators that they need to, "teacher-proof" the system. Packaging curriculum in a way the relegates teachers to the position of mechanically carrying out orders. The new social studies program allows teachers the valuable decision making power in lesson planning, but the new standards and method of approaching the subject matter is very different from what they did before. To assist teachers with this, and ease their frustrations the material does not need to be repeated, it needs to be internalized through comparison of ideas and discussion with their colleagues. Coming up with ways to implement the new program together is the best pedagogical approach to teaching a new idea. Ironically the district is short changing these teachers by trying to make them learn through rote memorization, the exact opposite of the concept based approach and higher thinking they are telling these teachers to encourage from their students. Sadly they have yet to realize that all teachers want to learn about better ways to teach, they just want to be able to do so in a way that maintains their professionalism and dignity.

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