The people making the decisions regarding what kind of professional development we need aren't people who are in daily contact with our children. That's wrong. We teachers need to be in charge of what kinds of professional development we do and don't need.
Too much time is being spent managing the manifold programs our district has purchased. After dealing with all of the paperwork, data entry, etc., these programs entail, there's little time left for teaching. The district says we teachers need to "work smarter, not harder." We firmly believe they need to take their own advice.
Incidentally, the people who are often in charge of "teaching" these programs to us teachers are people who couldn't wait to get out of the classroom. I don't have much respect for people who abandon the classroom only to make money by telling classroom teachers what they should and shouldn't be doing.
Recently, I attended a required professional development session. Three professional developers showed up -- all from the same professional development organization. It took all three of them to show a video, hand out a worksheet related to the video, and lead a "discussion." There were only six or seven teachers in the session and three of us teachers had already seen all or part of the video. One teacher had already seen it three times.
Professional Development??? or ???A complete waste of time.
We teachers must demand better.
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