How Should Professional Development Change?

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/how-should-professional-development-change-ben-johnson

This article may not exactly be about technology, but since this new class is about Professional Development (PD) I feel this article is relevant.

The beginning of the article started off by listing complaints that many teachers have about PD.  It was pretty much the same things we listed in class.  Not enough time to learn or practice, not enough hands-on, little to no relevance within their content area and little to no time for teacher collaboration.  The main point of the beginning of this article is to let teachers know, that a major change or shift needs to occur.  Specifically in the amount of time teachers are allowed to collaborate.

The second part of this article compared the differences between American teachers versus teachers in Toronto.  (The ratio of actual teaching time in the classroom as opposed to learning time (aka PD time or collaboration time.)  The US ratio is 28 hours of teaching  and 1 hour of teacher collaboration.  In Toronto, the ratio is 25 hours of teaching and 4 hours of collaboration.

The author then looked at Singapore.  Those teachers teach for 18 hours a week and have 15 hours of collaboration!  Teachers in Singapore are paid to collaborate and are expected to put in around 100 hours a school year.  In the United States, it takes teachers 5 years to reach that number.  The author of this article argues that most US teachers don't know how to collaborate effectively and they need more time for DEEP collaboration.  PD nowadays needs to be more of the following: learn by doing, job-embedded and with more teacher collaboration time.

After reading this article, those numbers were just incredible to read and believe!  It would be interesting to observe how these teachers in Singapore do collaborate and use their time effectively.  (Of course, they get paid to collaborate-I'm not sure how parents and the community would feel about that.  I think the mind set here in the states is so different than over there.)  I agree that deeper collaboration is needed, but quite honestly, I think I would have to be shown how that is done.  What does that involve?  What does that look and sound like?  I would have liked to read more about that.  I also wonder when this collaboration does takes place in Singapore and Toronto.  (The article also mentioned Shanghai as well.)  We mentioned in class what would be the "perfect" time for this?!?  This article left me with more questions than answers, but it does raise some intesting points.