You expect to see school children out and about during holiday breaks, spring break and when the school sports team makes it to the post season state tournament.  But when it’s not for any of those reasons, it may be for a teacher in-service day.  More and more of these in-service days seem to be taking place in our school districts lately.

Jefferson-Scranton schools Superintendent Tim Christensen says the state backed off on mandating the number of in-service days.

“With funding being a problem, the state kind of backed off on that” says Christianson “so now it’s actually up to the individual school districts on how much professional development they provide for their teachers.”

Christensen says Jefferson-Scranton schools have 7 days of in-service this year and studies show that the more in-service days teachers have, the better results for students.

Professional development for teachers is extremely important.  If you look at the high performing school districts around the world, they actually spend less time with students and a lot more time in professional development for teachers and they prepare to do a great job teaching and a better job delivering content” says Christensen.

Christensen explains why in-service days are held during the school year.

“The catch 22, or the problem with all this, it would be great to do it in the summer and outside but that adds contract days and then it becomes a money issue”.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes:

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>