Cooked On Education

Recently on the GenerationYes blog, Sylvia Martinez wrote a post titled Six Degrees of Professional Development. In the post, Martinez identifies six different types of professional development (academic coursework, workshops/sessions, formal research, informal, classroom embedded, action research). The really interesting part is she suggests mixing these styles of PD together. Here is the one that really caught my attention:

classroom embedded + workshop: What does it look like if you move a traditional workshop into a classroom environment, complete with students? Imagine that you give the usual podcasting workshop directly to students, with teachers looking on. What might happen is that these teachers will see that students pick it up quickly, and can create podcasts without much direct instruction on the tools. They will see that their own reluctance to try podcasting is not shared by students, and the roadblocks that they have created in their own heads don’t apply to students.

By pushing the workshop into a live classroom, it solves the problem of teachers creating false complexity out of the technology and being the roadblock to classroom implementation.

I think this is a really cool idea, and one that I would like to try out. It would really require a willingness on the part of the teachers to let go of the “teachers teach and students learn” mentality. This would be a great way to foster the concept of schools as learning communities, where students and teachers are both teaching and learning side by side. Imagine starting off a new school year with a session or sessions like this.  I am not sure that it is a panacea for removing teacher “roadblock[s] to classroom implementation” however. Unfortunately, there are teachers out there that just have no interest in learning about technology and ways to implement it in their classrooms. But I think it would be a great start.

(Thanks to Michael Richards for the link to the article.)

Photo Credit: Curiouslee’s Photostream