What are they thinking?

Last week, out of the blue, we received an e-mail with an "invitation" or rather a command appearance at an in-service.  I teach in a very large county and the leadership had decided that ALL K-2 teachers would attend a half day in-service conducted by the state.  The time was to be spent learning about the FAIR, our state K-2 assessment and how to plan for instruction.  I was actually excited.  I have been to several state workshops and in-services over the years and they are usually presented by very knowledgeable presenters.  I figured if the county was making EVERY teacher go then it must be something new and cutting edge.  Why else would the county take on the expense of substitutes for every single teacher and moving so many teachers in and out of the city over the course of an entire week?

So... today I sat through three hours of the most basic in-service.  I think the presenters were very knowledgeable but the information presented was not that different from the information that we were presented three or four years ago and every year since then.  Will the county ever quit presenting on beginning professional development? In my county, performance pay for K-2 teachers will be based on this assessment so I can understand why you would need to have every teacher have a basic foundational knowledge of this assessment but the focus was "using the data to focus instruction, to differentiate for groups".  The presentation was one PowerPoint slide after another with a couple of demonstrations - several Elkonin box examples (are there really K-2 teachers who don't know about Elkonin boxes?)  It was... boring...  It scares me to think what must be going on in my county that that was the level of presentation someone in our leadership thought we needed...

One of the things that I have learned as a presenter is that if you want teachers to really "get all it" then you need to model what it is that you want them to do.  There was a lot of talk about explicit instruction today but surely they also know the research on basic lecture methods and their ineffectiveness.  Of course, they did throw in a couple of "turn and talks."  In my opinion, if you want teachers to differentiate in their instruction with kids then the presentation itself should have been differentiated.  It doesn't seem to me that it would have been too hard to give a quick assessment that teachers could have used to self-assess and then choose a workshop that was appropriate to their need and interest. There were certainly enough instructors from the sate in the room that the session could have been divided into many smaller groups.  For example, I would love to have asked these real state experts about some of the questions that we are wrestling with such as how to best use the FAIR data in the RtI process or how better to use the vocabulary percentiles and what the best interventions might be that match the data or exactly how to group students using the comprehension data in the early grades.  Instead we spent time looking at the same basic scores that we were taught to analyze three years ago. I hate to say it was a waste of time, because maybe it wasn't for some teachers.  But... for me, I could have been much more productive working with children in my classroom this morning.

I REALLY HATE complaining... but I hate wasting my time even more...