Teacher Professional Development That Really Works
Examples of Classroom Management Professional Development Training Strategies
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Teacher Professional Development That Delivers Practical, Ready-to-Use Tools
Teacher professional development doesn't have to be boring or useless. Few staff development courses allow teachers to set content, but that should be the way staff training works.
Few teacher training classes give ready-to-use, practical content, yet that is what surveys of educators show teachers want. Even fewer professional development seminars deliver on what they promise. That is why so many teachers dread attending teacher inservice day workshops.
When you look for teacher development on classroom management, here's is what you can expect. You should count on an information-packed course, delivering about 100 strategies per day. The professional development offering should allow participants to specify the problem areas that students present in the classroom, and throughout school. Concrete, easy-to-do interventions should be given, and teachers should leave feeling competent to use these new methods right away.
It is essential to expect that your teacher professional development providers will offer you a way to understand measurable outcomes. Typically, a pre- or post-test can be used, and suggestions for quantifiable measurements should be included. Measuring number of minutes tardy, or number of talk-outs per hour are just two examples. While all content should be theoretically sound, your professional development provider should be able to concentrate on providing practical interventions, but able to supply research, data, or practical documentation that is evidence that the new methods can work better than the existing approaches.
As a general rule of thumb, it is not reasonable to expect lay people like teachers to present courses that are of the same caliber as professional presenters and presentation companies, and evaluations by staff can confirm that. Just as a teacher who only rarely provided classroom instruction to young students might not be at the top of his or her game, the same is true for a teacher who presents only occassionally to colleagues. Crafting and offering top-notch school staff development training is tough under any circumstances but may be daunting for school staff to do on a once-in-a-while basis. Use participant evaluation forms to confirm this assertion if you are skeptical. You will find there is absolutely no comparison.
These professional development standards for schools are offered to you as just a guide, but have been the benchmarks used by Youth Change Professional Development Workshops, one of the nation's oldest, most prominent providers of classroom management inservice courses to teachers, special educators, counselors, psychologists, and social workers. We have 20 years of workshop evaluations, and other research-based documentation to support these concepts. This data does focus on courses that address classroom management concerns.
Teacher training days are so precious. Make sure you know what you're getting before you book your inservice, and then be ready to use quantifiable methods to confirm your staff got the concrete results you were hoping for. A sampling of some lively, concrete classroom management methods from Youth Change's professional development course is shown above as an illustration of what is meant by "concrete," "ready-to-use" strategies. Need more help? Find additional, free intervention methods and articles on Youth Change's website by clicking here.
