Starr Explains Importance of Teachers’ Professional Development at Listen & Learn Event
by Will Gavett ‘12
Dr. Joshua Starr, the new superintendent of MCPS, held a listen and learn event on November 21 at Sherwood where around 50 parents voiced their concerns with the county. At the event, Starr discussed how he plans to address issues of professional development for staff throughout the county.
“Any good organization these days has to be constantly learning how to get better at our work … We always have a great need to learn, and some really great work has gone on in that area in Montgomery County, but we have more to learn and we’ve sort of plateaued in our professional development and our professional growth,” said Starr.
The idea behind professional development is to increase performance in the county with the teachers already in the system. The easiest way to do this is for not only the students to learn, but the teachers to learn as well.
“Everybody needs to get better at what they are doing, which doesn’t mean they’re bad; they just need to get better,” said Starr at a press conference with the student press on October 18. “So how do we do that? How do we learn? And that’s what professional development is, and we’ve done a lot of professional development over the years but because of budget cuts and organizational changes it has been kind of stagnant.”
Professional development is one of Starr’s main concerns. This is mostly because of the current economic troubles of MCPS. This makes it much harder to just hire more teachers or replace teachers if there is a problem with performance. Professional development is a more economically sound investment because performance increases without having to hire extra teachers or even replace them.
“Most organizations spend about 3 to 5 percent of their budget training people … we spend about 1 percent. So how do we constantly help our teachers get better at what they are doing?” Starr asked at the Listen and Learn event. “Because I’m going to be able to get more from that investment than I will from another investment.”
However, some parents raised concerns about teachers who were under-performing but still kept their jobs and could not improve from professional development. This issue is especially prevalent with the MCPS policy that says “last in first out” (LIFO). This means that a teacher who has only been teaching for a few years is much more likely to be let go or transferred than a teacher who has been in the county for a long time.
“We have the best teacher evaluation system in the country,” said Starr as he eased these parents’ concerns. “We have used it to counsel out about 500 teachers who were just not cutting the mustard. And the teacher’s union is just completely supportive of this effort in ways that other associations in the country just aren’t. So they have taken it upon themselves to embrace the idea of professionalism and growth.”
According to Starr, MCPS’s biggest weakness is that people do not really know what good teaching is. He believes that people think that if a teacher is fun then they are a good teacher, but the actual merit of teaching should be judged on who is doing the most work. If the students do more work then more learning is done than if the teacher does more work.
“We have this incredible opportunity before us to say that since there is so much strength in the system [and] since we know so much, let’s focus on making sure that there is great teaching for every child every day in every classroom,” explained Starr at the press conference.