It is 11 PM.  I drove all day, had an online meeting, caught up on email and provided some feedback to my students. I turned off the laptop, turned on the news and then remembered my 30-day challenge: a blog entry every day! So, here I sit, laptop on lap, writing about how easy it is to not write and thinking that if I’m really going to make this change, it needs to be the first thing I do each day rather than the last.

But I do have a quick comment before heading to bed.  My online meeting was with a group of teachers who are implementing a 1:1 iPad project.  They are leaders in their schools and trying to bring the rest of the faculty online after running a pilot program last year.  We spent some time talking about how they could encourage their colleagues to meet deadlines so they could move forward.  While they were a bit frustrated at experiencing reluctance, they also understood the problems: they had not had a salary increase for the past four years and yet they were being constantly asked to do more with less. Professional development often happens after work hours without any compensation and what little planning is included during the day is often taken up with administrivia.

Then I saw one of those Exxon “let’s fix this” videos, the ones that point out how the US is lagging in international test scores and how we can fix it.  They emphasize having knowledgeable teachers in the classroom and breezily suggest we should support our teachers:

As with much of this type of rhetoric, they don’t offer any specifics, leaving it up to the viewer to decide what it means.  Since we live in a pretty toxic environment related to teachers, many probably assume it means getting new teachers.

What it really means is that we should look at how those successful countries treat their teachers: how many hours they teach versus how much time they have to plan or learn.  This article from Stanford is a good starting point.  It focuses on professional development.  Since it’s late, I’ll just quote one example and let you read the article:

In Singapore, the government pays for 100 hours of professional development each year for all teachers. This is in addition to the 20 hours a week teachers have to work with their colleagues and visit each others’ classrooms to study teaching.

I’m wondering if this is what Exxon has in mind?