How far can we expect teachers to pay for their own professional development? If they are employed with a school, where does the responsibility to pay for CPD lie? With the school or the teacher themselves?
I have recently started running in-house training sessions for a quite large school and I’ve stumbled on a curious situation. I was wondering if anyone else has come across the same thing. The teachers feel that, as they are staying at school after hours to come to teacher training workshops, they should be paid for their time. The school, however, feels that as the teachers are benefiting by becoming better teachers, they should not be paid anything for attending. It is a sticky situation and, unfortunately, one that could have a bad impact on the attendance to the sessions.
Unfortunately, some teachers do not seem to realise how much work goes into organising training. Schools have to organise and pay for trainers to hold the sessions. They probably have to carry out observations in order to find out the best topics to help their teachers. At the end of the course of training, they might produce certificates of attendance, so that if a teacher moves on to another school, they can take evidence of having attended the sessions with them. The whole thing involves administration and record-keeping, along with the preparation of facilities and materials to be used during the workshops. .
It is all quite a lot of work to organise and it would be a shame for the training to trail off to nothing if the school does not get buy-in from the teachers. If the school does not pay for the teachers to attend, the teachers are not obliged to come; all schools can do is “recommend strongly” that they do. So, what they decide not to go? Financially, schools cannot afford to run poorly attended training sessions. The training department would be hard pushed to justify that to the Director of Studies or whoever is in charge of the purse-strings.
Some teachers tend to think it is the schools which benefit with more satisfied customers and less complaints for the Academic Department to deal with. Also, in Malta, most teachers are paid at an hourly rate which they feel does not really cover their preparation time, let alone compensate them for staying a couple of extra hours per week for training.
Money issues aside, some teachers are not very keen to participate on the programme to begin with. They see the proposal of training as a criticism of their teaching methods. Some say that if they have been doing well so far, they do not see why they should change – The ‘if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it’ attitude. They are, therefore, not very motivated to come and not paying them for attendance seems to be the final straw to many of them.
I can see their point of view but I also know how much time and energy goes into organising courses of training!
What do you think? How does it work in your school? Does your school pay for training or do your teachers invest time and energy on CPD without any financial rewards?
