Routman's Professional Development

At my school, we are fortunate enough to have professional development every Thursday from 3:30-5pm, (when we are all exhausted.) In theory and as Routman has presented in her chapter "Developing Collaborative Communities," professional development is a great opportunity to meld a faculty of professionals into a cohesive team, all working together toward a common goal. In reality, in my school it has become everything and more Routman describes in "Concerns about Staff Development." It seems like the administration clings greedily onto the control over our professional development sessions. They resist allowing teachers to work together to plan, they bring in outside training that wastes money and our time, and when those on the staff have a graduate pedagogical class during professional development time, eyebrows raise all over the place.

I'm torn on Routman idea's on staff-led prof. dev. sessions. On the one hand, I feel like it's another huge burden to prepare a development session on top of planning, teaching, grading, etc., but I think the staff can grow the most by having sincere dialogue. If we sat in groups and discussed problems we encounter, new theories or research, and air grievances we have been harbouring, I think it would heal a staff that feels overburderned, isolated and underappreciated.

Sounds great, right? Here's the political part. How does the staff win over the administration without making enemies? In my school, we are without a union to safeguard us against any fallout that we might encounter trying to better the school from the ground up. There have been times when a group of teachers have gone right to the board over the heads of the administrators- only to receive dirty looks and a very scarcastic/caustic email the next day.

Ultimately, I'm starting to feel that Routman teaches in a utopia. Parents are appreciative and never hassle, classrooms are large enough for carpets, writing stations and reading centers, and there are floating subs in case you're conducting student conferences on wanna pop in and observe a collegue. Do Routman and Nancy Atwell teach in the same school in Maine where students never goof off during writing conferences? The kicker is when she writes, "I never take the stance that my students failed. If my lesson failed, it's because I didn't set it up so that the kids could be successful, which is my job as a teacher." Don't the kids ever take responsibility for ruining a lesson? I understand that if they don't meet the set objective, then the lesson should be revisited in a new way. I'm all too familiar with that. But I have some lessons in the past when the students did not do what was expected and the lesson suffered. That's my fault?

The more I read this book, the more I feel that Routman is an unreachable ideal exsisting in a manicured, museum of a school. Something we can all aspire to, but in the most generous of conditions.