Summary: PD Standards Benefits and Drawbacks
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To contribute to this list of benefits and drawbacks, post your response to the Adult Literacy Professional Development Discussion List by December 7, 2007,[[1]] or edit this page by clicking on the edit tab above.
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What are the benefits of having PD Standards?
- Standards provide a target to plan, implement and evaluate professional development in a systemic and meaningful way.
- They provide a common target to plan statewide professional development. One need I have experienced over and over when planning professional development was the need for a framework to offer and define quality professional development.
- The AALPD standards...offers us the target to provide quality professional development. In each state we do not have to reinvent the wheel to define quality professional development, we can proceed to plan, implement and evaluate the content for professional development to meet the needs of our state.
- If...they help us to remember what it is we believe to be important and necessary to good educational practice, then they can be useful to us over the long term.
- ... the development of PD standards in and of itself could present useful opportunities for ongoing professional development through a thoughtful, probably long-term(ish) process.
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What are the drawbacks?
- It is a relatively new concept for our field and the need for learning what standards are, the importance of the standards, and the place to use standards is in the early stages.
- Ultimately, these standards will only be useful or meaningful if they serve to help us continue our own ongoing learning and development. If they become mere competencies, things we demonstrate and tick off as having "done," we really gain nothing.
-- Overly-broad or too prescriptive
- Sometimes standards are so general and loose that they hardly serve any purpose despite a lot of time and money spent on developing them.
- Standards can be too prescriptive, limiting creative approaches to a highly fluid, very human process. By their nature, standards would have to either be the consolidated ideas of some group assigned to write them, or a compromise between
those wanting nothing and those wanting rules and guidelines, which could mean the standards cannot really meet the needs of those who will provide PD and those who will be recipients of it.
-- Regulatory
- I would worry about legislating or too-tightly regulating PD standards
-- Other
- Hard to know in the abstract whether standards help or not.
