The personal learning network for educators
Matthew Miles described professional development as it existed 1995 when he wrote the foreword for Thomas Guskey and Michael Huberman’s book, Professional Development:
"A good deal of what passes for 'professional development' in schools is a joke-one we would laugh at if we were not trying to keep from crying. It is everything that a learning program shouldn’t be: radically under resourced, brief, not sustained, designed for 'one size fits all,' imposed rather than owned, lacking any intellectual coherence, treated as a special add-on event rather than part of a natural process, and trapped in the constraints of a bureaucratic system we have come to call 'school' (p. vii).
What do you think? Is Professional Development in 2015 still a joke?
Tags:
Thank you Shawn for your insights. My EdD research (2018) around professional development of college teachers in rural locations (in Ontario, Canada) indicated that agency and institutional support were key factors in active professional development. What I experienced in my 35 years of college teaching reinforced the concept that the "keeners" and successful teachers were first to sign up for new learning that facilitated their teaching and responsibilities to the learners. Interestingly though, teachers engaged in active professional development were true life-long learners, whether they had institutional support or not.
© 2022 Created by Thomas Whitby.
Powered by