Investigating Professional Development

M Ed Extension Cohort Kari Fruechte April-99

I asked five co-workers to provide me with the answers to the following questions:

1. What types of staff development would be useful to you and others in your professional context?

2. What fomat would be most useful for staff development?

3. What content information do you need from staff development in the next year? How about the next 5 years?

4. How often should we have specialization trainings?

5. Do you prefer staff development opportunities in small group settings or large?

6. Do you have a preference for "outside" or internal speakers? Could you name some of the best you've heard lately or would like to hear?

The co-workers I interviewed came from a variety of backgrounds. I purposefully picked them because I was curious to see what similarities or differences they may have. Just as their work was varied, so were their answers and opinions on staff development!

In Question #1, all interviewed prefer training relevant to their work. Subject matter and decriptions that intriqued them included practical information that dealt more with specifics to their jobs. For example, the Nutrition Education Assistant I interviewed preferred Nutrition-related subjects, and Livestock Specialist preferred Beef topics, etc. They all ranked broad-based professional development as lower than subject-matter, maybe because they have all been employed a fair number of years!

Question #2 was answered by a majority of the participants as wanting hands-on, experiential learning. Only the Livestock specialist preferred a really interesting, cutting edge speaker.

The content information requested varied, but a definite similarity was toward current, up-to-date research and application. All agreed that technology training would remain critical in the future years. Another repeated answer was the importance of looking at new ways to reach our audiences in the future other than face-to-face meetings and workshops.

Question #4 varied from a full day to two days. Some felt the networking they were able to do with colleagues in the evening on a two-day training was very valuable. Also, the distance we usually travel to our trainings makes a full day turn into two days anyway in order to arrive early in the morning. All agreed that any time spent on in-depth training beyond two days gets to be too much to absorb.

Small group settings were the preferred way to learn. The hands-on learning would be difficult in too large a group. Although, if a well-known, motivating speaker is the agenda, a large group setting was seen as a good format.

My coworkers listed several "in-house" educators as some of their favorites teachers, but also each had "wish lists" of speakers they had either read articles by or heard of through conferences that they were unable to attend because of cost.

All said, I think we are generally open to many ideas for professional development, but because of our differenct learning styles, we prefer and retain information presented in a way that fits our style.

-- Anonymous, April 11, 1999

Answers

Another very interesting documentation of similarities and differences. I think this tells us that the professoinal development must be varied with both "in-house" experts and folks from the wish lists AND as you say, varied in terms of folks' work AND learning style preference.

-- Anonymous, April 23, 1999