The Lifelong Learning Issue: The Knowledge Base Under Professional Development?

Abstract

Let’s begin with the stories of Ted, Joe, and Amanda. None of them would identify themselves as professional educators. Ted is an accountant. Joe is a dentist. Amanda is a hairdressor. Ted (a practitioner of 40 years) and his primary staff in their firm in Menlo Park, California, attend a monthly 1 day seminar and a yearly 1–2-week seminar on the practice of accounting and changes in regulations about taxes. Let’s average this out at about 20 days a year. Paid for by themselves, by the way, not to mention days when they could be selling services, but are in study. Joe and his staff in Saint Simons Island, Georgia, study new techniques on about 10–12 days per year. Amanda, also of Saint Simons Island, travels to Atlanta, Savannah, or Jacksonville for workshops that consume about 10 days per year, days in which she has no earnings but, rather, often pays for the service she receives. Ted, Joe, and Amanda are fine representatives of modern continuing education in their professions. They have good help and they are not alone as they try to enhance their job-related knowledge and skills. Their occupational groups have tried to connect their practitioners to state-of the-art practice and trends. Lifelong occupational learning is routine for them. Teaching is quite a different kettle of fish. Formal staff development for the average practitioner is usually paid for by the organization – the school district – but occupies only three or four days each year (see Cook, 1997, for a discussion of causes and remedies of the time problem). And, rather than an attitude of seeking the training of the types that Ted, Joe, and Amanda do, teachers, administrators, and central office personnel express considerable dissatisfaction with the content and process of the workshops that are offered in those few days. For 20 years, authorities in the field have virtually trashed the most common practices – the sets of brief workshops, and, by implication, the people who plan the smorgasbords of workshops, but the time allotment remains unchanged and “What” is so peculiar is that, in education, the employer pays for development opportunities for most practitioners but is castigated for what it does, not for the small amount of time paid for, but for how teachers, administrators, and central office personnel – the people who plan the workshops – feel about it and its effect on