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NMSI Blog

Teacher Training Success

Every year, teachers from around the country attend training or professional development. And when you ask teachers if they appreciate what they are doing, most of the time, they will tell you it is a waste of time. But ongoing learning for teachers is critical, especially in a time of great change to the classroom and creates improved teacher retention.
 
The 2012 MetLife Survey of the American Teacher showed that educators who expressed a higher job satisfaction shared a common experience: They were more likely to have benefitted from effective professional development opportunities and collaborative time with fellow teachers.  So what does it take to have great professional development?
 
The team at NMSI researched this closely to create the best possible training. That involves:
 
•Created by teachers for teachers – it takes classroom expertise to create great teacher training
•Provides lessons and strategies they can use tomorrow – if they can’t use it, they don’t time to train on it. 
•Specifically calls out standards – teachers don’t have spare time in the classroom so if it is not helping meet standards, they don’t have time for it
•Allows for customization  - teachers want help but want flexibility to make the call on what goes where and when in their classroom
•It is not one and done – NMSI built three years of training to help teachers truly change their teaching practice
•No drive by training – NMSI built in ongoing support with over 500 lessons accessible to teachers, online forums and now online modules to fully support their work during the school year
•Rigorous content with highly effective strategies –  
•Not stuck in their seats – teachers become the students as the trainer moves through lessons so they are getting up and working in groups instead of just sitting there bored
What is the impact of this shift in teacher training? According to the latest internal survey of over 9,000 teachers who attended our teacher training in 2013, here is what teachers think of the NMSI Teacher Training Program: 
•93% think the quality of the information presented was Good or Excellent
•91% of the teachers evaluated the usefulness of the training as good or excellent
•94% agreed or strongly agreed that the training day contained new or challenging content
•97% agreed or strongly agreed that the training contained strategies for promoting higher order thinking in the classroom!!
•96% agreed or strongly agreed that the model lessons are educative for teachers
That is a pretty incredible response to teacher training. Teachers have become so cynical about training, it is great to see training that gets them excited about inspiring their students.  We continue to expand the training to more and more districts and states and we doubled the number of teachers who attended in 2013.  These results demonstrate that we can expect even more growth in 2014.