Some Very Tardy Musings on Professional Development

I should have posted this long ago, but--frankly--I am still thinking about it. Professional Development. In particular, mandated professional development. I was a classroom teacher before, during, and after the insanity of NCLB (and that insanity started long before 2002 here in Florida due to Jeb Bush being Georgie Porgie's brother). Before NCLB, there were very high-quality professional development offerings that I attended, some of which had stipends. I remember CRISS training and Discipline with Dignity. I took part in action research regarding vocabulary and I spent the summer with other teachers working on creating a Differentiating Instruction manual for our peers. These were wonderful experiences--and I still use the materials from them. However, a lot has changed. First, it was all about the FCAT and beating the test. These types of strategies only work for the test; they don't carry over into real-life. Now, with CCSS, it is all about text-dependent questions. I am SO over taking (already poorly written) questions in the textbook and (simply) turning them into text-dependent questions by adding, "according to the text" or "the text says." That is NOT high-quality nor higher-order questioning.