Do personalized and competency-based learning have anything to do with PD?
Major themes today for educational innovation certainly include personalized learning and competency-based learning. Learning tailored to individual needs is at least as old as Socrates and not necessarily innovative, but if it’s good and old, that is certainly better than good enough. Plus, technology and software developments do show a new landscape here. We have new practical capabilities.
Competency-based learning is at least as old as apprenticeships and master craftsmen, advancing the student as he or she learns the trade or the art, not presuming to ‘pace through material’ as a curriculum taught to no one in particular. Technology again offers something new in the arena, though. This learning can practically join us in the classroom.
These are certainly big trends in any content analysis of educational writing, programs, and funding. The question for this post is whether they are present in anywhere near the same way in our professional development or teacher training.
For immediate purposes, I’m not talking about whether we are training teachers to do personalized or competency-based learning. Instead, I’m asking whether our training of teachers is being done by means of personalized and/or competency-based methodologies.
If it’s good for the goose, is it good for the gander? My own dissertation research several years back pursued a similar question about interdisciplinary instruction. If we thought interdisciplinary study and teaching was good for students, were we training our teachers in NCATE-accredited American schools of education through these interdisciplinary means? The answers were that Deans or Department Heads in Teacher Training highly valued interdisciplinary instruction in word, and in honest description told the story clearly that their schools weren’t in the great majority of instances using these methods to train teachers.
Are there PL and CBL in PD? So, today, I wonder about personalized (PL) and competency-based learning (CBL). What impact are they having on our professional development (PD)? Do we use them to train teachers? As a quick post and not a research project, I’ll also jump to a few ideas which might be of use if we want them to become more prevalent in our training of teachers.
How is most professional development done? From experience and checking a recent Education Week special report on PD, it seems the vast majority of labeled, funded, classified PD efforts are done through workshops. Teachers get their hours, districts and schools get their credit for having done the continuing education that they’re supposed to. New curricula are rolled out, new technology is put into place, and teachers go to workshops, putting in their seat time. Webinars are certainly used for delivery in many cases, but most webinars don’t use any version of PL or CBL. Are there exceptions? Of course. But the noteworthy character of the exceptions helps to prove the rule.
Certainly, some workshops and webinars are interactive and even personalized to an extent. Definitely, a few training efforts include competency-based milestones. Was that the norm, though, which left so many teachers in so many districts in so many states in abject terror over the Common Core standards coming in at the same time their assessments were being developed and the same time the textbooks correlated to them were being reprinted in some cases with minimal blurb affirmations while others were really and truly being rewritten on the basis of new standards? Those certainly weren’t opportune times for deeply authentic PD prepared with personalized and competency-based dimensions. Yet outside the CCSS maelstrom, does the PD landscape look significantly different? What percentage of our teacher training time is delivered and tallied from seat time? The Carnegie Unit is alive and well in the professional training arena through ubiquitous CEU’s.
How might it be different? Five possible moves in the direction of integrating PL/CBL into our PD:
Professional growth and teacher evaluation through collaborative goal-setting and formative, fierce conversation sorts of progress assessments.
Apprenticeships, not just for ‘practice teachers’, but for all teachers at different times on different topics and techniques in the richness and encouragement of professional mentorship as a practice norm rather than some ‘rookies only’ experience or some ‘odd bird add-on’ for only the squarest peg training for round hole implementations.
Ed tech start-ups to bring corporate training software development expertise to bear upon the training of teachers for teaching the students who will then be prepared to learn so much more from the online channels to which and through which tech-trained teachers can lead them.
Personal research with essentially included transfer to others as a commonplace building block for professional development, again not as the screwy weirdness but as one of the central few accepted, expected pillars of growth planning for teacher training.
Performance assessment PD where we know from the outset, way beyond any table group interactives, and as the norm for best practices training that we will be putting our new learning into practice as part of our training with our trainers and fellow learners.
These all provide for highly individualized, personalized training regimens, yet ones possessing common objectives and broadly accountable shared outcomes. PL/CBL is not the Lone Ranger route to professional development, but simply the way to get the most growth value added to the diverse bunch of pre-service and in-service teachers it is incumbent upon us to teach and teach well.
If PL/CBL works, why not train our teachers with it? If we can’t get away from the fact that we tend – not by necessity perhaps but by leaning at the very least – to teach others in the ways we have been taught, then doesn’t our PD really have to mirror what we believe to be the emerging best techniques in learning for our students?