How Not to Teach

It’s staff development season for me right now, and it’s time to learn how not to teach.

I’ve just been through one.  The Tapestry one, which was good, but could have been better, but they needed loads more time.

I’m going to one on Monday from the district on our 9th grade enrichment camp, and went to one before our 8th grade enrichment camp.

I’m going to one on Tuesday, which I am looking forward to, as they have already sent us the agenda and told us what software to load on our laptops.  It’s done.  I’ll be back Friday night and the internet set probably won’t miss me at all.

Then I have the start of school staff development.

Here’s what I absolutely hate in a workshop:

Sitting around waiting for someone to pour knowledge in my brain.  In other words, lecture type workshops.  It’s worse when they read the power points to me.  People, I have a master’s degree, please, I can read.  Okay, maybe most of the people in the room have their bachelor’s degree, but I bet they can read too.

I also hate the fake activities.  At the 8th grade enrichment camp they played Simon Says.  Okay, that’s a great game, but it had nothing to do with the content!

Another problem I have with workshops is workshops with group activities when they don’t manage the groups.  I was at a workshop recently when I was put in a group where the group wasn’t acting correctly and I was shut out of the activity.  That would have been a perfect time to show us how to manage that problem — I’m not good at that myself, and it would have really helped me.

Oh, I’m betting that the giver of the workshop doesn’t do a good job of that themselves, which is why the chaos was allowed to happen.

I give staff development myself, and here’s how I do it:

I recently did a workshop on Camtasia, a program used to make movies of classroom presentations.  I spent some time showing the participants the Techsmith website, showed them a short movie I had made for my students and then showed them how to make a short movie.

The rest of the hour was spent with the participants making movies while I wandered around the room and helped.

By the way, that’s exactly how I teach my students.  I spent 5-10 minute on the front end of the topic showing them the new topic, have them do an example program in the book, dig them out of their holes — and I often broadcast their screen and let the class dig them out of their hole, and at the back end of the assignment, if they are having trouble, I’ll show them my answer.

Maybe I need to call my sleep doctor and ask him to prescribe the restless leg medication he suggested … I might need it over the next few weeks….