The Professional Development School: A Building Block for Training Public School Faculty on New Technologies

Abstract

In his recent text (2011), Educational Leadership and Planning for Technology, Picciano noted that “an important ingredient for implementing change, improvement, and innovation in education is a knowledgeable and vibrant staff “(p. 215). However, there is a body of research (Goodson,1991; Becker, 1994; U.S. Congress, 1995; Northrup & Little, 1996; Trotter, 1999;Cuban, 2001; Park & Staresina, 2004; Christensen, Horn, and Johnson, 2009;Hargreaves, Earl, & Schmidt, 2002), that clearly indicates that teachers are not making the best use of technology in classroom. To meet this challenge,the authors secured a professional development grant from the Pennsylvania Department of Education which provided an opportunity for them to hire a highly skilled workshop facilitator who conducted a full day workshop that covered smart board technologies, web quests, and synchroneyes software to a group of teachers from our local PDS school. In an earlier chapter, the authors shared information about the workshop. The primary focus of this chapter is to revisit our findings from the faculty training workshop and present additional information from the faculty perspective and the current relate literature.