Sunday, January 24, 2010
The Worst Professional Development TIE 575
A professional development that I attended that was awful, was a couple of years ago. The session was not that great for several reasons, which perhaps was out of the control of the presenter. To start, the session was overcrowded, apparently more people wanted to attend the session, than what was officially registered, resulting in the room that was originally provided, could not accommodate the amount of people that were present. Once a larger room became available, the session was relocated to the new room. Which was great, however all of the presenters materials had to moved to the new room as well as all the people. With the unexpected transition, the presenter had to set up the presentation and wait for everyone to get settled, by this time 20-25 minutes have been lost from the designated P.D. scheduled time. I felt like once the P.D. started, the presenter rushed through the session and missed, excluded, or did not go into great details with parts of her presentation because of the lost time. I'm thinking the next session was organized, detailed and accommodated the people that wanted to attend the session.
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I think I was at that same pd. No, but I was a quite a few of them just like it. The some of the worst of those were at the last NCTM convention in Chicago. I was a "volunteer," trying to keep sessions from being overcrowded. When a presenter is prepared for 50 and 75 cram into a room, hand outs become scarce. Large pd sessions are just lectures and really not the setting that will encourage teachers to change practices. Too bad that these type of sessions continue to dominate "conventions." Hope it doesn't occur at ICE. Real change simply can not take place in this setting
ReplyDeletethis pd must have sounded good to the people who wanted to hear it. too bad someone from nctm could not have worked the math for the number of people ho wanted to see it.
ReplyDeleteYou know, it seems like knowing your content is really only half of what will make your pd a success. I guess this is why a lot of evaluation forms include questions about accommodations on them.
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