Teacher Inservice Days
With the state inservice day fast approaching, most of the departments at school are scrambaling to find something worthwhile to participate in. I thought that it would be appropriate to look the “inservice issue” for this weeks journal entry. Inservice days are typically useless…
Too many times during the year we are forced into sitting through hours upon hours of boring, unconstructive lectures. Why can’t school districts or the schools themselves come up with engaging inservice days? Most of the time it is because no one puts the time and effort into planning such events. Everyone is always tied up with their own work, whether that be planning and prepping materials or doing overservations and contacting parents. Lets face it, the work of a teacher and/or administrator is never done. There is ALWAYS something else to do. But someone has to do it. In most buildings this job is left up to the administration. Unfortunatly there is often a disconnect between what the admin thinks is appropriate and what the teachers think is useful. Rarely is there any dialogue between teachers and administrators about what inservice days should consist of. This poses the first problem. Teachers need to be incorporated into the planning process. After all these days are for them more than anyone.
However, this presents yet another problem …what to do for inservice? How can we as teachers suggest activities for inservice days if we don’t know what is out there? Teachers need to be vocal and tell the adminstration exactly what they need. I hear many teachers mention the need to develop their technology skills. Technology, especially for very young and very old teachers, seems to be “scary.” Older teachers don’t know how to use a lot of the technology and don’t understand why they need to divert from their traditional ways. Younger teachers are so overwhelmed with the amount of work, that they have very little time to try and encorporate technology into their classes. So wouldn’t it be ideal to use a day that is designed for teacher development to get everyone on board with how to use new technology in the classroom? This could then parle into future inservices dealing with specific curriculum based technology. One of the biggest criticisms is that once new technology is learned, it is often lost on lack of practice. Having follow up inservices on specific technology will help take care of those problems.
