Education Week - Calendar of Events & Professional Development Directory - August 22, 2012 - S4

Online PD Growth Challenges Schools, Providers to Adapt
Teachers drawn to targeted learning opportunities
By Michelle R. Davis
Educators seeking professionaldevelopment
opportunities these
days can choose from a vast
menu of technology-related options
that range from bite-size to
entrée. But those who create and
use this type of PD say they’re
still struggling with how to officially
recognize teachers’ efforts,
particularly when it comes to the
small-dose, on-demand versions
available.
Teachers often need to rack up
professional-development credits
toward recertification, or to fulfill
job-evaluation requirements.
But acknowledging the growing
segment of professional development
that can range from a webinar
to a Twitter session raises
difficulties.
“This is a darn good question as
we all struggle with the new technology
and how it’s being applied
to professional development,” says
Segun C. Eubanks, the director of
teacher quality for the 3.2 millionmember
National Education Association.
“A wider variety of options
makes this issue more important.”
These new forms of professional
development can provide targeted
enhancements of the skills each
individual teacher needs in a way
that more traditional PD, often
chosen by principals or district officials,
frequently can’t. Because
of that, these small-dose opportunities
to improve skills can be
considered more engaging and
meaningful to the teacher’s work
and may have a greater impact in
the classroom.
But experts caution that this
type of professional development
is not designed to replace conventional
workshops and courses that
teachers might need to enhance or
learn some skills.
“The expansion of good online
materials and easy access has put
the control of this type of learning
back into teachers’ hands,”
says Barry Fishman, an associate
professor of learning technologies
at the University of Michigan,
in Ann Arbor. “The caution is
that a lot of people are confused
about online professional development,
as if it were a thing or a
particular way of interacting. It’s
not. It’s a medium.”
Self-Service
Companies and organizations
that develop online professional
development are increasingly
getting more demand for small
chunks or snippets of PD that
don’t require a big time commitment
and can be used in flexible
ways, says Kathy Yates, the chief
executive officer of San Franciscobased
Teachscape, which develops
software for teachers and specializes
in creating professional development.

“We are hearing more and more
from districts that they are concerned
about release time and are
very interested in professionaldevelopment
programs that are
job-embedded,” she says. “At the
same time, teachers are looking
for something that is more targeted.”

To get at the individual needs of
teachers, Teachscape developed an
online library of more than 2,500
videos for its members that pro-
vides examples of strong pedagogical
practice addressing a variety
of subjects, skills, and strategies
that can be accessed any time, Ms.
Yates says.
Lisa Butler, who teaches Spanish
at Hershey Middle School in
the 3,500-student Derry Township
district in Hershey, Pa., says she
routinely uses Twitter, YouTube
webinars, and blogs as professionaldevelopment
tools. Because she’s
seeking out the information, Ms.
Butler says, she’s more engaged in
the content.
“Last summer, I sat through an
eight-hour webinar on [the educational
social-networking site]
Edmodo, and I loved every minute
of it,” she says. “It doesn’t make
sense to force people to sit through
courses they’re not going to use.”
Ms. Butler did not get any official
credit for that webinar toward her
professional-development obligations,
she says. However, she says
her district is moving toward a system
that would acknowledge some
of these nontraditional PD opportunities.

Barbara Treacy, the director of
EdTech Leaders Online at the
Newton, Mass.-based Education
Development Center, says she’d like
to see a PD system focused on demonstrating
skills instead of time
spent in traditional PD activities.
Ms. Treacy says she’s investigating
the idea of using digital badges—
often described as the online version
of a scouting patch—to signify
mastery of a particular skill.
“Badges … are one way to show
your credentials or document your
skills and knowledge,” she says. “If
there gets to be some acceptance
of it, there could be some criteria
for certain generally recognized
badges.”
Ms. Yates agrees that teacher
professional development seems to
be moving toward an emphasis on
“demonstrating competencies instead
of investing a certain amount
of time.”
“We’re seeing early signs of this,”
she says, “but it’s something that’s
likely to gain a greater foothold in
the future.”
Questions of Quality
Despite the growing popularity
of technology-facilitated PD, some
of it remains hard to verify and,
though it may be more convenient
for teachers, may not always be
the best way to master complex
Common Standards Present New Frontier for Teacher Learning
Schools scramble to get
educators ready for
instructional changes
By Stephen Sawchuk
A quiet, sub-rosa fear is brewing
among supporters of the Common
Core State Standards Initiative:
that the standards will die the slow
death of poor implementation in
K-12 classrooms.
“I predict the common-core stan-
dards will fail, unless we can do
massive professional development
for teachers,” says Hung-Hsi Wu,
a professor emeritus of mathematics
at the University of California,
Berkeley, who has written extensively
about the new math standards.
“There’s no fast track to this.”
The common standards, adopted
by all but four states, are intended
to deepen learning in math and
language arts by emphasizing
more rigorous content and the development
of higher-order thinking
skills. By any accounting, the challenge
of getting the nation’s 3.2 million
K-12 public school teachers to
integrate the expected changes into
their practice is enormous.
And data show that many school
districts have barely begun to
tackle the challenge. A nationally
representative survey of school
districts issued last year by the
Washington-based Center on Education
Policy, for example, found
that fewer than half of districts had
planned professional development
aligned to the standards.
With new assessments aligned to
the standards rapidly coming online
by 2014-15, the implementation
timeline is tight. Teachers are
already wrestling with an absence
of truly aligned curricula and lessons.
And added to those factors
are concerns that the standards are
pitched at a level that may require
teachers themselves to function on
a higher cognitive plane.
When standards are more challenging
for the students, “then you
also raise the possibility that the
content is more challenging for the
teacher,” says Daniel T. Willingham,
a professor of psychology at the
University of Virginia, in Charlottesville.
“Of course, it’s going to interact
with what support teachers
receive.”
Supporters of the common standards
contend the standards encourage
a focus on only the most
important topics at each grade level
and subject, thus allowing teachers
to build those skills.
“It could make things simpler
and allow teachers and schools to
focus on teaching fewer, coherent
things very well. That’s the best
hope for teachers to build in-depth
content knowledge,” says David
Coleman, one of the writers of the
English/language arts standards
4 EDUCATION WEEK 2012 CALENDAR OF EVENTS & PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT DIRECTORY
Gretchen Highfield, a 3rd
grade at Robert Kerr
Elementary School in
Durand, Mich., engages
her students in a
hands-on reading
lesson. States and
districts are working to
help teachers piece
together the components
of the common-core
standards and better
equip students to think
conceptually.
and a founder of the New York
City-based Student Achievement
Partners, a nonprofit working to
support implementation of the
standards.
“That said, the standards are necessary
but not sufficient for improving
professional development,” he
adds.
New Math Problems
Each of the two content areas in
the standards poses a unique set of
challenges for teacher training.
Mr. Wu, the UC-Berkeley profes-
sor, contends that current math
teachers and curricula focus almost
exclusively on procedures and algorithms,
an approach he refers to as
“textbook mathematics.”
But the common core emphasizes
understanding of the logical,
structural concepts underpinning
mathematics—the idea being that
understanding how and why algorithms
work is as important as
crunching numbers.
Many teachers, Mr. Wu contends,
will themselves need more mathematics-content
preparation. But
training focused at least initially on
content could be especially difficult
for classroom veterans to accept, he
concedes.
“After 26 years of doing things
only one way, the common core
comes along and says, ‘Let’s try to
do a little bit better at this,’ “ Mr.
Wu says. “Well, suppose you’ve
been smoking for that long, and
someone says, ‘Just stop raising a
cigarette to your mouth.’ It’s dif-
Brian Widdis for Education Week_File
Education Week - Calendar of Events & Professional Development Directory - August 22, 2012

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