Seize the Opportunity
From the desk of Carol C…
You have the opportunity to go to Hawaii, and everything for you is free. Would you take it? What about Paris, London, Rome, or southern Germany free of charge? Pearl Harbor, the Louvre, Tower of London, or Bavaria. Of course you would. It would be the opportunity of a lifetime. You would explore part of the world, learn about a different culture, and grab some time at the beach. Ah, what a life!
Opportunities to learn are everywhere. Take a walk around your neighborhood or someone else’s for that matter. When you have the desire to learn more, you take in so many things you never have before. The question comes then, “Why can’t we look at staff development the same way?”
A few summers ago I went to a writing staff development led by Lucy Calkins and her colleagues. Oh my. It was informative, uplifting, and gave me ideas to think about. Eventually these ideas led me to change some of the ways I had been teaching writing. Did it make me overhaul my entire program? No, it didn’t, but I didn’t want it to do this. I wanted my writing program to be bettered, and it was.
Many years ago I attended a huge staff development program called Confratute. It was aimed at becoming a more effective teacher of gifted students. One of the classes which I attended was one on teaching math. Now this woman completely changed the way I taught math. Why? For the first time I began to see math as something more than algorithms. I went back to school after those two weeks with her and began to change my thinking about teaching math. The transformation didn’t take place over night. It would take several years to arrive at a place I was comfortable teaching the math behind the algorithms. But between reading books and talking with my colleagues, I made the transformation into a new type of math teacher. It came through implementing one or two ideas at a time. It’s like losing weight. You lose a few pounds at a time and finally realize your goal. That’s what I did.
These are just two examples of powerful staff development I have attended through the years. Why were these different from what I received in my own school system? Well, there are several reasons. School systems are limited, most of the time, to providing workshops and not staff development. Workshops are centered around attaining knowledge or skills for a definite purpose. Think about Learning Focus, Write From the Beginning, and attendance procedures. All of these were set-up to teach us how to implement a specific program or system. Workshops by definition require uniformity and a reduction in choice. Sometimes these are necessary, but to grow as a professional and feel like we have a say in what goes on in our classrooms, we need more than what workshops have to offer.
In comes staff, or professional, development. Staff development provides an opportunity for continuous growth. Teachers often choose staff development because they want to learn more and become more effective teachers. It provides food for thought, so you are in charge of how, when, or if you implement any part of it. What a difference!
Information through staff development is usually delivered by the originator of the ideas or someone who is a disciple of him or her. Good staff development is not a series of ideas that have come through multiple people, so the person teaching is someone new to the philosophy and methods just as we are.
We do have an opportunity this summer to take advantage of what should be outstanding staff development here in Winston-Salem. Kelly Gallagher is leading it. For those of you not familiar with him, he is a full-time high school English teacher who, also, writes books about ways we, as teachers, can bump up our growth and our instruction. What do I like best about him? It doesn’t matter if I read an entire book he’s written or part of one, I always come away with practical specific ideas to improve my teaching and something to think about which I hadn’t before. I devoured several of his books and found his suggestions useful for me as a third grade teacher even though he didn’t teach 3rd grade like me. (I’ll have to say Deeper Reading is still my favorite. It was the first one I read.) To find out more about his July 29th workshop in Winston-Salem, click here.
PS-I did not write this blog to promote Kelly Gallagher even though I’m a great fan of his. I wrote this blog because I am frustrated with the wide gap between what we are told we have to do to raise test scores and what we want to do which is receive realistic and valuable information which gives us choice and enables us to grow as professionals. That’s how we raise text scores! Seize the opportunity!