Improving the skills of employees is extremely important in the business world. Competition in the market place requires companies to become more efficient through training employees and implementing new technologies. Companies are willing to pay "big bucks" to send employees to training courses, or to bring a training firm to the office. The expense of keeping up to date is justifiable because of the impact on the company's financial statements.
Unfortunately for educational institutions, the benefits of keeping employees up to date does not translate directly to improved financial statements for the school district. Spending money on staff development has sometimes been perceived as an extravagant expense that can be reduced when other demands seem impossible to ignore. Staff development is too often a one day lecture, which is inefficient and does not adhere to general educational practices of learning over time. Staff development must be ongoing, based on real work, and collaborative (AppleUpdate, 1996). One day is insufficient to learn new concepts to be implemented throughout a program, and can be viewed as one day of reprieve from the students. One day to listen to someone else.
Therefore, issues about staff development must be fully understand in order to make the best use of time and money. Understanding the aptitudes and attitudes of teachers is paramount to planning and implementing staff development programs.
Geoghegan (1994) describes five distinct categories of technology adopters, as defined by Rogers.
Innovators
These are the techies, the high risk takers, the top 2 or 3 %, the ones interested in the latest, newest hardware and software (Geoghegan, 1994).
Early Adopters
These are the teachers the visionaries with an aptitude and a positive attitude toward technology. They are risk-takers and have a high tolerance for ambiguity (Geoghegan, 1994).
Early Majority
These teachers adopt technology for a different reason than the early adopters. "Although fairly comfortable with technology in general, their focus is on the concrete professional problems of teaching and research rather than on the tools É" (Geoghegan, 1994, p 11).
Late Majority
The late majority are skeptical and a little less comfortable with technology than the early majority. These teachers have a lower tolerance for risk and need to follow the earlier leaders. (Geoghegan, 1994).
Laggards
The last 15% of a population, these teachers may be antagonistic toward technology and have a very low tolerance for risk. As a group, they are very slow to convert manual tasks to computer (Geoghegan, 1994).
Successful Approach
Teachers learn in the same way students learn (AppleUpdate, 1996). The approach to staff development needs to be:
- ongoing - scheduled regularly, perhaps weekly
- based on real work - teachers address real problems they experience with technology
- collaborative - teachers build on other experiences and work together to develop new skills
Students appreciate the effect of teachers working collaboratively on curriculum development. Within interdiscplinary groups of English, math, and science assignments are aligned and students feel an overall sense of direction and unity (Campbell, 1997).
From this author's experience, a successful staff development approach has been
- ongoing - 30 minutes one morning a week
- based on real work - teachers request the software application to learn
- collaborative - five teachers in a interdisciplinary group come together
ReferencesAppleUpdate, Staff Development Issue. Special Edition, 1996.
Campbell, A. Personal interview, 1997.
Geoghegan, W. (1994). What Ever Happened to Instructional Technology? Reaching Mainstream Faculty. Proceedings from the 22nd Annual Conference of the International Business Schools Computing Association, July 17-20. IBM Academic Consulting.
Kinnaman, D. E. (1994). Master/Apprentice Teacher Teams. Technology & Learning, 17(8), 74.
Created by Hope Campbell, Last updated 12-10-97