After reading "Secondary Teacher Attitudes Toward Including English-Language Learners in Mainstream Classrooms," I realized that providing PD to my peers may not necessarily by an easy task. This article brings up the great point that many teachers are simply too overloaded with the basic duties of being a teacher to listen to professional development that may ask more of them.
Another finding was that teachers may have a negative attitude towards any type of training or PD. We have all sat through useless trainings many times, in which we hear things we already know, and wish we could have been actually getting some work done. If I provide PD for my staff, I need to keep this in mind and work to make the trainings fun, useful, and directly applicable to our situation.
As a fourth year English/Language Arts teacher, I am feeling more and more overwhelmed with all of the requirements of a general educator in today's teaching world. I truly appreciate that you are cognizant of SOME PD trainings feeling like a waste of time, resulting in teachers feeling overloaded to the point that they don't want to even open their ears to listen. I feel that stress and can relate to what you are saying. I am open to listening, but only if it is worth both my time and my student's time in the long run. I agree that if you keep the trainings fun and APPLICABLE to our real worlds in education today, your teaching staff should be more than open to participate. Sometimes there just needs to be a positive motivator before people can get out of their rut to move forward again.
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