Teacher training: what's planned for this year?
by Jessica Oliff
The School District has planned a variety of professional development offerings for this school year, as it continues to roll out new components of the core curriculum.
Logistically, the District's professional development will differ from last year. According to Mary Lou Fischer, director of curriculum support for the District, there will be more full days for training and fewer Friday afternoon sessions. When Friday sessions are held, they will be for three hours. The District will also continue to offer Saturday workshops on the new curricula.
Training for elementary and middle school teachers will focus on strengthening their ability to work with small groups of students on reading comprehension, vocabulary and writing. Fischer says these are areas of weakness for Philadelphia students according to last year's standardized tests.
In addition, the District will offer training on implementing the new social studies and science core curricula for middle schools. In science, Fischer says, "The professional development will be around how to use the [science] kits and the textbooks in the classrooms and use the core curriculum side by side with them."
Director of Secondary School Curriculum Nancy Hopkins-Evans says the District will offer high school teachers training on how to use the new core curricula for math, English, social studies and science.
"The teachers will have to take ownership of this and then move it forward..That's the only way this is going to happen," says Evans.
This year the District also plans to address some of the critiques teachers have made regarding professional development.
One of these criticisms is that schools receive different, sometimes conflicting, messages about how to implement the core curriculum. To remedy this problem, Fischer says that the Office of Curriculum and Instruction has created audiovisual presentations that explain how the administration expects teachers and schools to implement the core curricula.
Another criticism has been that the Friday professional development sessions have not focused enough on teachers' needs. To address this issue, the District is introducing the ATLAS "whole-faculty study group" model to some schools. This professional development model is designed to help teachers work in small groups to improve their instruction.
"Professional development is really important," Fischer says. "You can't just hand teachers something and not really teach them how to use it. But it's hard because you can't make them come on Saturdays, so those few hours that we have [on Fridays], we have to use wisely."