June 2005 — Industry Perspective
Print this articleClick here to receive your FREE subscription to T.H.E. Journal
No Teacher Left Behind
Online learning tools provide the foundation for today’s professional development programs.
Educators are constantly struggling
with the growing disparity between
an ever-increasing need for professional
development resources and the
actual ability to provide them in an efficient,
timely, and cost-effective manner. States
and districts also must wrestle with their
own familiar obstacles—fewer and tighter
resources, restrictions on time and space,
and increasingly demanding training
requirements—when trying to deliver
professional development programs.
Ensuring that instructors are trained and
qualified is further complicated by high
attrition rates among new teachers, as well
as by federal policies in the No Child Left
Behind (NCLB) Act, which created strict
guidelines and aggressive timetables for the
management of teacher qualification.
All of these elements impose severe new pressures on states and districts to deliver professional development services. As school districts race to train and retain their teachers and paraprofessionals, and more teachers fall below the minimum levels of qualification, it is clear that districts can no longer rely solely on traditional means of face-to-face, in-service support to meet their professional development objectives.
National summit participants tackle challenges. In response to the search for new approaches to delivering professional development, Blackboard convened a national summit in March 2004 to address the topic of online professional learning. Developed in collaboration with several educational organizations (ISTE, NEA, NACOL, SETDA, CoSN, and the Education Development Center), the event brought together federal-, state-, and district-level instructional leaders; advocates; and researchers to explore how online networks could be employed to augment the accessibility and overall quality of professional development and support. An estimated 130 people attended the 2004 Blackboard Summit to explore how eLearning strategies that have transformed much of higher ed and a growing number of K-12 classrooms could also be applied to more traditional approaches of teacher professional learning. Summit participants tackled key policy objectives, from teacher retention and leadership development, to meeting highly qualified provisions of NCLB. They then discussed how online strategies could be applied and evaluated, and produced an initial inventory of online and blended approaches found to be effective in certain contexts, as well as a set of policy challenges and empirical unknowns that the technology and staff development communities will need to collectively tackle in the months and years ahead if successful approaches are to grow. The question is: How actionable have such forums proved to be? The following reflects results of discussions in last year’s forum, and future forum impact.
Real vs. Virtual Classrooms
The advantage of conducting continuing ed courses in a traditional classroom is that it brings peers together, allowing a dynamic flow of knowledge between/among instructors and teachers. Yet, the disadvantage is that once the session ends, teachers and administrators return to their own classrooms and must apply what they have learned on their own. With no extended support, the community of practice that temporarily was created is lost, and the sense of commonality and community with peers ceases as soon as the classroom empties.
