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Finding The Time
For Staff Development
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© 2008, Barry Sweeny
Here are some practical solutions and some things to think about regarding
staff development's biggest challenge.
Some Advice: The only way to really
"find" time for staff development is to restructure the
school year and school day to make adult learning a daily priority.
That this is what's needed has become evident in almost all modern
countries in Europe and Asia. In the USA, however, as long as adult
learning time remains "borrowed" from student learning time,
we will never have the time to grow as we need, AND we will always
feel guilty when we take that time for our own learning.
It is a real TRAP! Think about it. By the traditional definition
of staff development, the time to improve schools is in conflict
with the purpose of schools! It's a no win proposition.
Except for true restructuring to solve this conflict, the real
issue is NOT finding time for staff development. We are not likely
to find much more time than we already have without expanding the
school year or day. The real issue is a matter of our priorities.
We need to look closely and critically at how we spend the time we
already have and see if there are any candidates for eliminating things
we do now that are less than productive. Here is an example.
I was once meeting with a school improvement team which was preparing
for our state's external team Quality Review visit. Teachers were
really concerned about how they were going to find the time to do
the work needed in a comprehensive SIP process. They knew, with
the state visit, that they HAD to find the time. Apparently this
had been discussed at previous meetings too. One of the teachers
spoke up and said, "After we talked about time to do the SIP
process last time, I went to our school calendar and made a list
of all our school's activities this year that are not specific to
one teacher and her class. Here is what I found."
At that point she passed out a list that was typed, single-spaced,
and took 6 pages! There was every ice cream social, book fair, and
student club listed. Wow!! The other members of the SIP team were
struck silent at the enormous list! Then someone said, "No
wonder I'm so tired all the time!".
Finally, the principal stated, "I bet each of us could suggest
a few of these activities for elimination so we can find the time
we need for our SIP process." From that moment on, the people
in that school have never again said "When will we ever find
the time to do that?". They just assess what their current
priorities are and align their use of time with those priorities.
That is the lesson we all need to learn. We need to be able to
answer the question "Is our current use of time reflective
of what we say is important in our school?"
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