My Opinion of the National Staff Development Council definition of Professional Development

The National Staff Development Council has created a definition for Professional Development for use in the redevelopment of No Child Left Behind. It states that professional development is:

"comprehensive, sustained and intensive approach to improving teachers' and principals' effectiveness in raising student achievement."

The subtext states that it "fosters collective responsibility for improved student performance." It is "conducted among educators facilitated by well prepared school principals, and/or school based professional development coaches, mentors, master teachers, or other teacher leaders." Takes place "several times per week among established teams" of educators. Organized as a continuous cycle of improvement that evaluates needs and establishes goals based on data and student performance. The identified learning goals include "implementing coherent, sustained, and evidence-based learning strategies; provides job embedded coaching; regularly assesses effectiveness; informs on-going improvements; and is supported by courses, workshops, institutes, networks, and conferences.

Interesting definition. The words that stand out to me are "comprehensive, sustained, and intensive approach." Comprehensive means complete, sustained means continued, and intensive means concentrated 0n a single subject or topic for a short time. First of all, comprehensive and intensive are not really compatible for me. It is really difficult for me as a learner to have an intense course and consider it to be comprehensive. Based on my own experiences (excluding the Nurturing Teacher Leadership program which I mentioned in a previous post) something is lost, either the comprehension or the intensity. I am the kind of learner who needs to have time to practice a skill over again - and I can't be the only one. The "hit-it-and-quit-it" format does not work for me because I don't often have time to go home and play and teach myself in order to master a new skill or strategy, especially related to technology.

Another phrase that sticks out to me is "fosters collective responsibility for improved student performance". This lets me know that a lot of people are selling "snake oil" and the administrators or districts buying it will be breathing down teachers' necks with "intensive training" to see if they can make the next miracle cure for low student achievement work after hours of comprehensive, intensive PD training.

After those words it all started sounding like Charlie Brown's teacher, waa, wamp, wamp...several times a week... waa...several times per week...established teams...waaaaa. In a nutshell it seems like some nice words that look good on paper but not really realistic or feasible to me.