Toe-dipping or Cannonballs?
I’ve always been a fan of focused, incremental professional development. Find a few areas that are “ripe” and work them hard with whatever group of teachers you happen to be helping. I talk with a building tech committee and ask them what they think we should be focusing on and we’ll throw around a few topics and that largely sets my agenda for part or all of the school year. For example, at our high school, we made a push with wikis during the spring, and a few of our teachers made important steps forward in their classrooms.
But David Warlick’s got me thinking that, especially with the constellation of web 2.0 technologies, maybe each tool can’t be taught in isolation from the rest. In a post on “Tying It Together,” he discusses one teacher who approached him recently and said that she was finally “getting it” after seeing a presentation on web 2.0 and personal learning networks:
She continued that she knew about and had played with blogs, wikis, and RSS, and understood them functionally. But she said that after this conference she saw how they all worked together, that there really is a new connectedness today where information flows in logical and directable ways, connecting us not only to the content we need, but to the people we need, not merely because of proximity — but through the content.
Maybe trying to teach teachers about blogging without introducing them to RSS and wikis is a mistake. Maybe the “focus on one tool at a time” approach is robbing teachers of the context they need to understand how these technologies support and reinforce one another and, taken as a group, represent a whole new communication paradigm.
But who has the time? With so few hours for professional development, how can we effectively introduce teachers to “the whole enchilada” in a way that is meaningful, in a way that connects with classroom practice? And does such an approach result in information overload? Is it better to ask teachers to try to swallow the whole web 2.0 thing at once and then go out and integrate it with their practice or to keep them moving along a slow and steady path that may prevent them from seeing the big picture, a path where one tool is forgotten/discarded by the time the next one comes along? Our teachers are standing on the deck staring down in to the giant pool that is the read/write web; do we structure professional development along the lines of toe-dipping or cannonballs?
Mike,
Perhaps her process was the appropriate one, to learn and play with blogs, and wikis, and podcasting, and RSS, and to wonder about what all of this means. then to learn, either through some culminating workshop or through her own continued reflection that blog, wikis, and RSS do indeed fit together in ways that we control.
2¢ Worth