Teachers and Principals: Why Continued Professional Development is Important

You are a seasoned teacher. You have been in the Way for about 10 or 20 years, and have done very well at the end of the year principal evaluations. You have earned the privilege of keeping your job. Your kids consistently pass their state standardised tests year after year.

Yet your principal has told all of his staff of 50 or 60 teachers, that they will be expected to go to an all-expenses paid trip to Chicago this week for a professional development class to Chicago. “Professional development?” you say to yourself. “I am very professionally developed.”

Before you become angry at your principal, your professional intelligence thoroughly insulted–let me let you in on something: Professional development is a continual process. There are areas that teachers and principals must be kept fresh on. There are new ways that have been discovered to handle situations since you commenced your career as an instructor. There are new issues today, new pedagogical methods that are preferred over the time-honoured ones.

For example, in 1969 it may have been acceptable to drone on and on in class about Napoleon in a classroom of 7th-grade history students, expecting the kids to just quietly take notes for an hour. Today, that has been proven ineffective. Today’s kidlets love being interacted with, and their attention spans are much shorter. How would you know that if you didn’t attend these development classes?

How about those troubling classroom management issues? Back in the ’40s, ’50’s, ’60’s, and 70’s, you just paddled the buggers, whipping their little butts into shape. You demanded the respect, and you got it. Instantly.

Today, however, that just doesn’t work. You must learn other ways of keeping the class in line. You must rely more on positive rewards and negative consequences. For example, a threat to call Mom and Dad seems to work all the time. if little Jimmy finds out that Mrs. Smith is going to call Mommy and Daddy on him for making funny noises in class, the other rugrats will probably step in line, and will know that Mrs. Smith is tough.

There has indeed been a paradigm shift in classroom management. More and more, the teachers and classroom paraprofessionals are required to handle their own behavioural issues. Sending them to the principal’s office won’t work. It might get you fired from the district as an incompetent teacher.

Another purpose of these meetings is learning appropriate crisis intervention skills. Since April 20, 1999, when Columbine took place, crisis intervention has indeed been an important issue. In olden times, you didn’t worry that one of your students was going to shoot up a school. Then that Tuesday, the unthinkable did happen. No one was ready.

So not only is crisis intervention an issue now, but also crisis prevention. Drastic measures must be taken these days to prevent it. If you even hear of a child jokingly saying that he is going to kill someone, that is something that needs to be documented and reported right away. What professional development teaches teachers, then, is how to appropriately respond and document those instances without adding fuel to the fire.

Through much research, for example, you may learn that yelling at children doesn’t help change the behaviour, it only escalates the problem. At these professional development meetings, one topic might be to learn how to “speak softly yet carry a big stick,” to quote an expression by President Theodore Roosevelt.

So not only do we as educators need to attend these meetings, we need to go there awake and prepared to take good notes. Take notes as a student preparing for an exam. Take them in an organised fashion, in a tablet, or something, so that you can reference them at any time.

But it’s not only about going to the meetings. Meetings are just one way of undergoing professional development in your field. I strongly suggest that, as finances allow, you subscribe to some of the magazines geared towards teaching. There are some out there that keep you up to date on new classroom management styles, new pedagogical styles, and the like. Take full advantage of them.

Pedagogical styles are the next thing I’d like to talk to you about. They change over the years. For instance, I took math in the 1970s. When I got back in the school system as a substitute teacher or paraprofessional, I noticed that some things had changed, especially when it comes to multiplication and division. Many schools use more of a matrix approach, especially for division. Geometry is also taught differently now.

I am not attempting to get into a discussion as to how these new systems of teaching math, for I do not fully understand them myself. I am merely bringing these up to say that professional growth and development must continue if a teacher is to stay on top of his or her field, and remain useful to his or her district in the future. The old ways of teaching any subject–be it math,writing, science, or art–are passing away. The new methods must be learned if one is to be competitive as a teacher, and be able to actually teach their students.