With town budgets about to be finalized and financial town meetings to be taking
place over the next month, school districts around the state are putting the
final touches on their numbers for the 2004-05 school year.
Professional development dollars are continuing to play a larger role in those budgets as school systems weigh the importance of meeting new federal performance guidelines while keeping their faculty on the forefront of the latest teaching techniques.
Larry Purtill, president of the National Education Association of Rhode Island, said professional development has become all the more important in the past four to five years, even before President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001 (legislation outlining high standards of education reform to be reached by the 2013-14 school year).
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“Teaching is harder than it’s ever been,” Purtill said. “The days of standing in front of a room and lecturing 40 minutes at a time for 180 days are long gone.”
In 1997, when the state’s Board of Regents for Elementary and Secondary Education eliminated the issuance of life certification, Purtill said a new certification process called for teachers to develop Individual Professional Development Plans. Called an I-Plan, the document allows for a five-year certification renewal after being approved by a panel of educators. Purtill said the plans must also be linked to the goals outlined in a teacher’s school improvement and district strategic plans.
“Professional development goals are built into those I-Plans,” Purtill said. “It gives teachers the chance to develop skills in areas where they think they need it most. The way certification used to work, it used to be just taking courses that would maybe be helpful, or maybe not.”
Purtill said another trend being seen across the state is the use of mentoring programs, provisions of which are outlined in the contracts for many teachers’ unions in the states. While conferences and guest speakers are still common, Purtill said with tightening budgets, in many cases schools are finding ways to job-embed professional development. That includes tying course curriculum work together with math and science teachers collaborating, or “looping” at the middle school level, where teachers have students for more than a single school year. He added that teacher evaluations, instead of generic checklists, are now based on set rubrics and standards.
Robert Shapiro, superintendent of Warwick’s school system, said while the amount of dollars set aside for professional education are hard to quantify, staff development has become especially critical with the signing of the No Child Left Behind Act. Shapiro said many teachers might have gone decades since they themselves sat in a desk as a student, and the cultural differences have resulted in a very different classroom environment.
“The old method of delivery doesn’t work with today’s modern kids,” said Shapiro, who summed up the teaching style of 25 and 30 years ago as “chalk and talk.” He said collaborative and team-teaching methods, where a teacher acts as a facilitator, rather than merely positing information is the way most classrooms now operate.
“That whole theory didn’t exist when I was in school,” Shapiro said. “Kids were expected to just ingest the information. Teachers today have to deal much more with collaborative, cooperative methods of teaching kids.”
Purtill said state funding granted under the Rhode Island Student Investment Initiative provides targeted funding for professional development programs, both formal and informal, although the amounts vary from district to district.
“If we’re going to continue to meet high standards, teachers need to maintain their skills and stay current,” Purtill said. “People wouldn’t be going to a doctor who planned to operate the same way doctors operated 20 years ago. There have been a lot of advances. Why shouldn’t teaching be treated any differently?”
