Session 9

Professional Development (PD)

Professional development, aka, training... Whatever they are known as, we hate to hear that we have to attend them. I have attended many professional development seminars, for the most part I have to say that they have been pretty good, but there are those that just seem to be pointless.
I once attended a PD that was mandatory at one of our staff development days. The speaker had been paid a lot of money to come out and basically tell us that in order to reach our students, we need to develop a relationship with them. The irony was in the fact that he was an African American male and he was speaking to a Mostly African American audience and he felt that we African American teachers could not effectively teach our students because we had no idea how to relate to them on racial issues. I personally was upset by the implications that were made to the staff of our school and appalled at the fact that the district paid someone to come and talk about teaching to such issues when in fact, our students of all races have scored very well on standardized tests and those whom seem to be having problems are not having problems because of racial issues, but because they choose the actions that they are being cited about.
I guess I was so frustrated because the seminar was supposed to be on how to effectively use the data from your assessments and I was excited about finally getting some direction.
On the other hand, the PD seminars that I have had a chance to sign up for have been very informative and beneficial to me. This is not to say that everything that I have seen and heard during said seminars have been useful to me, but I have walked away with a wealth of information.
I think if we are interested in the topic at hand then it will be more of an interest to us and we can see more clearly what we needed to see from the presentation.

Activities for the week of 3/4/07

Downloaded the podcast and listened to it, read some of the posts of classmates, finished working on project focus 3, searched the web for other Acceptable Use Policies (AUP), responded to classmates blogs, responded to podcast and posted my assignment

Project 3