My father taught sixth grade in the public schools for thirty-odd years, and always griped about the teacher training workshops that they were periodically subjected to, in which some expert would be brought in to talk about the wonders of the latest fad in pedagogy, while all the teachers in the school struggled to stay awake.
I’m sure he’ll be amused to know that the same thing happens at the college level, where Laurence Musgrave is cranky about faculty development workshops on teaching with technology. This bit ought to sound familiar to, well, anybody in academia:
[O]ne of the reasons I’m cranky today is because most faculty development workshops I’ve attended assume no knowledge and experience on the part of those being lectured to about the latest advances in technology, learning style, and interconnectivity.
Nobody asks us what we already know and do. Nobody wants to know what the personality of our learning is. Nobody really wants to hear what we have to say. We’re stuffed into row after row of folding chairs facing the PowerPoint torture of illegible pie charts, tables, and data we need to remember so that we’ll be better prepped to perform in the learning community breakout sessions just after the chicken wraps at lunch.
A lot of the time, it’s even worse than that. An alarming number of technology training workshops start with explanations of how to use a mouse, or topics just slightly above that level. I’m not actually all that good with computers, but I can usually figure out most of the features of a new program in the time it takes the trainers to explain the start-up screen.