Professional Development in Education

Yesterday, Mitch Weissburgh made an interesting post on professional development in education. I actually chatted w/ Mitch about this vision after a SIIA breakfast meeting at FETC. And Don Hall wrote the discussion guide for our BLEGroup forum there.

Mitch's vision is a fascinating one. What schools and vendors are working through now is how to overcome the barriers to implementing on-line, on-demand professional development in a way that drives student achievement. In fact, that's part of what we explored in our BLEGroup panel. The vision makes sense, but there are a number of barriers to overcome in order to make it a reality. I'll go into depth in a later post, but here are they key issues:

1. Access to technology - although schools have made great strides in this arena, we're not yet to a point where all (or even most) teachers have anytime access to a computer so they can watch streaming video online.
   
2. Availability (and alignment) of PD content - as Mitch points out, companies like School Improvement Network and Knowledge Delivery Systems (who I also met at FETC) are putting a lot of great content online. We're still not to the point, though, where we have a critical mass of content indexed, accessible, and aligned to the PD requirements of a typical teacher (and educational standards, per the vision in Mitch's post) .
3. Market acceptance - this is the least tangible and most tricky piece of the puzzle. People (specifically, teachers and administrators) aren't comfortable yet with the medium. That will change with time, it's just difficult to say how fast.

Those points are in reverse order of difficulty. Technology access will be a non-issue in five years (maybe as little as three). Companies like SIN (did anyone check that acronym before they named the company?) and KDS are already making a go of content, so there's no reason to think we won't get to a critical mass of content. And working for a compnay that does alignment and correlation all the time, I'm comfortable that alignment's also a solvable problem. The key variable (and the one that's hardest to gauge) is market acceptance. We saw some encouraging signs at FETC, but mostly by thought leaders and early adopters. It will be fun to see how fast the market moves along the adoption curve.

One more interesting reference on this one (and another effort that will be fun to watch) is the 6-month professional development project that Will Richardson is working on.