Guidelines for Better Staff Development.

Abstract

The 1980s will be the decade of staff develop ment just as the 1960s and 1970s were the decades of curriculum development. We have an abundance of curriculum and instructional plans; we now need to put them into operation in our schools. The Rand Corporation report on federally supported programs for educational change points out that if schools are to install our improved plans, and perhaps even to survive, the 1980s must be the decade of staff devel opment. In their study, the innovative projects that made a lasting difference in schools emphasized con crete, teacher-specified, extended inservice education. 1 However, inservice teacher training, as it is now constituted, is the slum of American education. It is disadvantaged, poverty-stricken, neglected, and has little effect.2 Most staff development programs are irrelevant and ineffective, a waste of time and money. Disjointed workshops and courses focus on informa tion dissemination rather than stressing the use of information or appropriate practice in the classroom. Seldom are these programs part of a comprehensive plan to achieve goals set by the school staff. While at least 80 percent of most school district budgets is allocated to personnel, we earmark inade quate funds for inservice training and staff develop ment activities. We would never let our equipment and buildings become obsolete and nonfunctional by

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 94 citations exist upstream.