We have been discussing the difference between saying you are doing it, and actually doing it. PSA believes it will take a not short period of development for “actually doing it”, with online learning to reach its potential.
This article discusses how school districts in the US approach professional development for their teachers. PSA has noted that professional development in general is ripe for disruption, along with workforce OTJ learning. This because what is offered is very expensive and of questionable ability to achieve the expected/ desired results.
In other words, there’s a huge opportunity for cloud based learning tools. In the meantime, there’s this:
“When it comes to teaching, real improvement is a lot harder to achieve — and we know much less about how to make it happen — than most of us would like to admit,” Weisberg said.
The school districts that participated in the study spent an average of $18,000 per teacher annually on professional development. Based on that, TNTP estimates that the 50 largest school districts spend an estimated $8 billion on teacher development annually. That is far larger than previous estimates.
And teachers spend a good deal of time in training, the study found. The 10,000 teachers surveyed were in training an average of 19 school days a year, or almost 10 percent of a typical school year, according to TNTP.
[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Study-Billions-of-dollars-in-annual-teacher-training-is-largely-a-waste-The-Washington-Post.pdf”]