Beau Fly Jones, senior researcher at the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, Oak Brook, Illinois, talks about the manner in which professional development is evolving. Excerpted from the video series Restructuring to Promote Learning in America's Schools, videoconference #8, The Meaning of Professional Development in the 21st Century (NCREL, 1990).
"Well there's changing priorities of professional development in the sense that they are much more ongoing experience, as you were talking about before, that merger between the university and the school is changing, and that people won't go just from college to a university to school because faculty from school is going to be going back and faculty from university is going to be back in school, so that's one way in which there's a new priority. And secondly, the people that actually do, quote, staff development, which is probably going to be more operatively called professional development are not themselves going to be dispensers of knowledge and skill builders as they used to be in the past. Basically, they're going to be change agents, and they're going to be an integral part of the organizational change that takes place in schools, so that these new priorities are hand in hand with the meaning of staff development and professional development."
This Critical Issue was researched and written by Cathy J. Cook, Mathematics Education and Professional Development Specialist, Midwest Consortium for Mathematics and Science Education and North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, and Carole Fine, Director of Professional Development, North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, Oak Brook, Illinois, in collaboration with the National Staff Development Council, Dennis Sparks, Executive Director, and Stephanie Hirsch, Associate Executive Director.
Date posted: 1996