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Last year, New York City first grade teacher Peace in the Classroom got trained in a literacy tutoring program which her administration promised to implement this year. But more than three months into the school year, they haven’t started yet, she says:

I am so desperate to get it off the ground that I have repeatedly inquired about when I am tutoring and which kid I will be tutoring. I even made up a possible tutoring schedule using times when a school aide could be with my class (like right when they come up from lunch), which I now can’t even offer because I need to use that time for oral storytelling. I offered for them to pay off my preps and tutor then. I have tried all I can so that this training, which probably cost at least $15,000 can actually be put to some good use.

Three teacher bloggers recently had three very different experiences with professional development.

Senorita in the City gave up a Saturday to participate in a workshop at the Museum of Modern Art, and found it well worth her time:

I attended the workshop that lasted from 10 am to 4 pm with a colleague from my school. We both found the workshop to be interesting and valuable to our classrooms (she teaches high school English, I teach high school Spanish). The day included a discussion of using modern art objects in the classroom and how to develop quality questions to ask our students while viewing a work of art. We spent half of the day in a classroom in the education building of MOMA, and the other half in the galleries of the museum acting as students while the instructor modeled a good way to ask questions and keep an art related conversation going.

Meanwhile, They Call Me Teacher is dismayed that her school is just beginning to discuss strategies for helping students on the upcoming social studies test:

We are talking about a “new” discovery and strategy. We need to teach our students the jargon on the test. What are those words? How can we teach them (in less than 3 weeks)? … Ummm My thought: What the hell have you been doing for the last 5 years of Social Studies testing? Why are you just realizing this now!? It’s a complete given that the wording on tests can cause students to miss questions that they may be able to answer if worded differently. … Every school I have been at prior to this one has had this vocabulary issue integrated into their teaching. There are lists developed or shared with districts and schools to use… and they were created from the start of these high-pressure tests.

And Mr. S. at Sig Gains in the City wasn’t so impressed by a workshop at his school, which included reading the standards aloud, creating a skit about data-driven instruction, and other creative professional development practices:

Even more unfortunate is the DOE’s version of keeping all teachers up to speed with the best teaching practices. Part of me says playing a board game on exemplar teaching practices is not keeping our 30 year veterans up to speed with how technology can be incorporated in the classroom, or teaching our new teachers how to differentiate their curriculum. Nor is it helping the teacher who reads the newspaper in the back of the room during instructional time.

Illustration by Bob Dahm for EdWeek.

Miss G. is blogging again with brief dispatches from long, long days in her new school. As hard as she’s working, she’s much happier:

Our kids took school made standardized tests in both reading and math last week and we spent all of today (7:15 – 6) analyzing the data in grades and as a school. We made data driven plans, formed intervention groups, and talked about trends we were noticing and how to continue the great ones and stop the not so great ones.
Tomorrow is data day 2 – more planning and looking at numbers and standards and tests and discussing these tests that we now all have memorized.
And this is reason #131 why I came to this school. This is great instruction.
My old school has most of this stuff on file, too – the only difference is that most of it is contrived for the purpose of the quality review and then never used – by anyone. Here, it’s used – breathed.

Her previous experience of data being available but not well-used may be the more common. According to EdWeek, a new report from the US Department of Education shows that most teachers now have access to student performance data, but far fewer have access to recent data or training in how to use it well. And very few have time during school or paid professional development hours to look at data and really use it to plan. “[T]eachers in the study were more likely to use data to inform parents about how individual students were doing than to help guide curriculum changes or identify effective instructional practices,” EdWeek reports.

Is data for show only, integrated into planning, or somewhere in between at your school? What kind of professional development have you participated in on this topic? Has the push to collect more data and use it to improve instruction changed your teaching practice?

Federal Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings visiting a Chattanooga school in 2005.

Bonuses for teachers based on value-added measures. Firing and selective re-hiring of all teachers. Were these the key reforms responsible for the significant improvement of the “Benwood eight,” a group of struggling schools in central Chattanooga?

Elena Silva of Education Sector argues in Phi Delta Kappan that what really turned around these schools was validation, support, and on-going professional development for Chattanooga’s existing teaching force:

[It} would be a mistake to conclude that efforts to bring different, more effective teachers into the Benwood eight represent the only -- or even the primary -- lesson of the Chattanooga reforms. What Benwood teachers needed most were not new peers or extra pay -- although both were helpful. Rather, they needed support and recognition from the whole community, resources and tools to improve as professionals, and school leaders who could help them help their students.

The pay incentives didn’t attract many new teachers, Silva says, but they were “a way of signaling that the local community valued the Benwood teachers and supported their work.”

Silva says that though the district made all teachers in the Benwood schools re-apply for their jobs, the majority were re-hired and the teaching staff in these schools did not change significantly, although the numbers she cites suggest that the re-hiring process was more than just letting go of a few bad apples.

If cleaning house and providing performance incentives weren’t wholly responsible for improvement, what was? The answer is all the more crucial given the blitz of new and expanded merit pay plans, teacher-linked data collection, and aggressive evaluation of teachers in districts across the country.

Silva believes it was a host of reforms focusing on supporting teachers and improving their practice. (more…)