Posted on 04/22/2010 11:27:10 AM PDT by MichCapCon
Another study was released this month showing that teacher professional development programs are no guarantor of higher student achievement. The research compared middle school math teachers who were enrolled in an intensive professional development program with teachers who were not and found that students of teachers receiving the extra training failed to perform any better than students of teachers in the control group. This same method was employed by a study a few years ago that found professional development to be just as inept at raising student reading scores.
This research calls into question a Michigan law requiring all teachers to receive a minimum of five days of professional development annually. Many of the activities that qualify as professional development have little to do with improving student performance anyway and are less intensive than the ones used in the aforementioned studies...
(Excerpt) Read more at michigancapitolconfidential.com ...
Our schools are run by morons, idiots, facists and perverts
Most of the professional development I attended was a waste of time. Really. But, we had to attend. I got more out of stuff I did on my own.
Most of the professional development I attended was a waste of time. Really. But, we had to attend. I got more out of stuff I did on my own.
I totally agree, besides that’s what I use my summers for.
My last pd session was an online bullying seminar. What a waste of time!
1.) Revamp schools of education by requiring that every professor having actually taught in a classroom within the last 10 years, requiring students seeking certifications to teach specific subjects to have academic majors in those subjects (e.g. math teachers are math majors, English teachers are English majors etc.) and making the teaching of reading with phonics a mandatory class.
2.)Set strict limits on the number of administrators in all school districts. There should be no more than 1 administrative position for every 10 classroom teachers.
3.) Outlaw unions in public schools.
Find the best teachers, and put their classes on the internet, streaming into all the classrooms in the country for that subject.
If there are a dozen people who are exceptional at imparting the subject matter in a lecture, why waste money paying another 100,000 people who suck at it to do the same job. This isn’t the 1800s, we have world-wide instantaneous communications.
Schools are moving to online programs for all sorts of special circumstances, like summer school. One of the Oscar movies (with the football player) highlighted another online program for dropouts to catch back up — that one was actually across state lines, illustrating my point.
The reason we have 5-6 national talk show hosts on the right is that it is cost-effective, and provides a much better product, for Rush Limbaugh to be put on 500 stations, than for those 500 stations to each hire their own “Rush Limbaugh” to do a 3-hour talk show.
The same principle can apply to college and high school education at least, and maybe even middle school and some elementary school. I do realise that at some point, the interaction with the teacher is more important than the ability to lecture. But by high school, forget it. A few lecture experts, and then have local teachers that are subject matter experts who are good at answering questions and working with students, to help individuals with problems.
There is a demand for personalised instruction. What your concept would do is mean more business for tutors.
I am a school nurse at a private school and had to attend a professional development day for educators....the speaker was making fun of giving an award to everyone because no one is a loser.....there was a groan in agreement from the audience.....
Was I the only one that saw the irony....this was the profession that thought of this concept in the first place.....
and don’t you love those bloodborne pathogen videos ?
There would be a lot of teachers available to do more personalized instruction, since they weren’t wasting their time developing lesson plans that were already developed thousands of times, or spending time in front of a class saying exactly the same thing that thousands of other teachers were saying.
It always cracks me up when I read notes from teachers complaining about how much time they spend putting together lesson plans. If you teach Algebra, and you have for 20 years, and there are another 100,000 Algebra classes taught every year, how many times do we have to “put together a lesson plan” before we have the perfect lesson plan?
It would be like Toyota only selling 20,000 cars a year, because they had to design each car separately.
I’m not saying I disagree with your statement. I work as a tutor and I try to fill some of the demand for individualised one on one instruction.
I would prefer to be a teacher though, and that is what I am working towards.
As for lesson plans, it depends on the field. Personally, I find ‘lesson plans’ to be pretty much useless. Every student is different, and everything that they need is different. Some need more emphasis on some things and others need help on other areas.
What I do use is a ‘summary’ of what I have to go over and I tend to follow that more or less depending on how the session is going. I don’t know if that counts as a ‘lesson plan’ but it seems to work for my students.
WHen I taught Sunday School, we had the lesson plans in the books.
And homeschoolers buy their lesson plans as well, and they do very well at learning the material, without having to write their own plans.
I did tutoring in college to earn a little extra money, I was paid by the school as a service to the business students taking remedial math courses. (and the general math for the undecided students). Sometimes we would tutor groups, sometimes we could get individuals. i enjoyed the work, and the paycheck, as small as it was. (you could make a lot more money hiring out privately, but then you had all that responsibility).
Interesting. I’ve worked with the school (still am on contract with them), but they are terrible at finding work for me. So I went out on my own. I do get paid much better, and yes it is more responsibility, but I find it’s better suited to my temperament than dealing with the university.
That being said, I need to find some work for the summer now that exam season is over. I’ve been thinking about becoming the stereotypical ‘arts grad’ cab driver, but it would fit my schedule as I only need 3 months work. I’d much prefer work down south in the USA, anywhere but here.
I am enrolled in teachers college in september down in TX, so I’d love something in that neighbourhood.
Can you make more money driving a cab, or delivering pizza? Because I always thought that pizza delivery sounded like a fun job.
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