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Choosing to Pursue Relevant PD

You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.

Richard Branson

I would like to believe that most professional development is devised and presented with good intentions. It’s not as if school leaders sit down to plan teacher learning sessions and say, “Let’s make this as boring and painful as possible. We’ll gather everyone in one room and talk at them for at least an hour about something that doesn’t relate to their jobs. Let’s make sure they leave feeling unfulfilled and uninspired, and that their spirit is completely broken!”

As a former teacher who moved into administration, I believe that I have a good understanding of how professional development should work. I have sat through good and bad professional development sessions as a participant, and I have been responsible for planning both good and bad professional development days as an administrator.

It pains me to say it, but I understand why some professional development is in such a dismal state. The truth is that those who are tasked with planning professional development for most school districts are placed in an incredibly difficult position. In addition to fulfilling training requirements mandated by state and local agencies, these leaders deal with time limitations, dwindling funding, and contractual issues. Sometimes finding adequate space or suitable venues is a problem.

Add to those challenges the knowledge that their staff members are likely to resist any kind of PD sessions because they have a thousand other things on their minds and are being asked to give up their valuable time for a day of (potentially boring or irrelevant) training, and you can see how planning the “perfect” PD might seem impossible. I can tell you from experience that the reason many administrators plan one-size-fits-all professional development is that it is easier and safer than planning meaningful and relevant learning opportunities for targeted audiences.

Let me run through a scenario: Say your school or district has a professional development session coming up in one month, and you are responsible for planning it. The educators in your school or district will finish early and have ninety minutes of PD time after students leave for the day. You have two options for planning:

Option A

Present state-mandated Dyslexia training in the cafetorium. One speaker will share information via seventy-five PowerPoint slides. Your responsibilities are as follows:

Option B

Provide a menu of learning choices that includes training for a new technology initiative for educators at various levels of expertise, training for a new math program for teachers who want to differentiate instruction across a spectrum of learners, and training for new science standards and building lessons to measure the required benchmarks. Your responsibilities are as follows:

Now, as the planner, which would you choose? While most of us recognize that Option B is far more likely to be meaningful and relevant to the attendees, many planners have chosen and will continue to choose Option A because it is the safe and easy choice. With fewer options, less can go wrong. But at the same time, there is a whole lot less that can go right.

When leaders base professional development on the needs of the district, the individual schools, and on their teachers’ needs, they maximize everyone’s time and move closer to improved learning outcomes in the classroom. The trouble is that accommodating everyone’s needs can be extremely difficult. On the upside, the benefits—empowered and engaged educators and students—are well worth the effort.

My Core Beliefs

During my time as a planner of professional development, I have formed several beliefs about what professional learning should include to be successful. I’m outlining my beliefs here so that the rest of the book makes sense.

Professional learning should be meaningful. Any time educators take the time to sharpen their skills, what they are learning should be relevant and useful to their roles in education; for example, if I am the school nurse and I am required to attend an after-school professional development session, I would like to learn about something that is specific to the daily duties of a school nurse. An excellent session might include preventative measures during flu season or the latest information regarding head trauma and concussions. The best PD is aligned not only to the needs of an individual school but also to those of specific educators and helps both meet their goals.

Educators should have a say in what they learn and how they learn it. Getting my seven-year-old daughter to do homework can feel like pulling teeth; however, if my daughter is reading a book about the solar system, she will gladly sit for hours to learn because it’s a topic about which she is passionate. The same is true for adult learners. If teachers have a choice and the freedom to explore subject areas they enjoy, they will be more likely to engage in professional learning. Professional development doesn’t have to be choice driven 100 percent of the time. In fact, sometimes choice is not an option, and educators must adhere to national, state, or local professional requirements. But when educators are able to choose courses and workshops best suited to their personal learning styles, they will emerge better equipped to help their own students.

Time is a precious thing. As educators, we never have enough of it. We try to cram everything into a six-and-a-half-hour school day. We work through our lunches. We take home enough work to keep ourselves busy on most nights and weekends.

At the end of a long day, the last thing most of us want to do is sit through a faculty meeting, even if it’s necessary. One of the keys to teacher engagement is to make sure professional development sessions honor the time of the professionals participating. Meetings should start and end on time, and the session time be used for meaningful activities.

Lists of policies, reminders, and other forms of one-way communication are best left for emails. It seems like there’s always one administrator whose idea of a great faculty meeting is reading to teachers from a long list of bulleted items. We’ve all been there. Death by PowerPoint with forty-seven slides that look like this:

• Lists of policies, reminders, and other forms of one-way communication are best left for emails.

The presenter painstakingly reads aloud …

from …

each ...

slide ...

word ...

for ...

word.

By the end, your mind is so numb you can barely figure out how to get home, let alone come up with a great idea or strategy for your students. My general rule of thumb is, if it can be read to your faculty, it belongs in an email.

Professional development should focus on improving learning outcomes. I once planned a PD session for staff members who needed some help getting beyond simple fact-based questions. As an administrator, I typically participate in PD sessions, so I joined in when the presenter said, “Take out a piece of paper and a pen. Is everyone ready? You have one minute. List as many higher-order-thinking questions as you can in one minute. Ready? Go.” Several teachers were able to list three questions. Many struggled to come up with one good question. I barely finished one question! The presenter’s point was to get the participants to understand the importance of scripting higher-order-thinking questions before a lesson. And it worked. What I loved about the activity is the fact that it changed behaviors with some teachers who began to immediately jot down questions they wanted to ask their students. Aside from this lesson, the session also featured other resources and strategies that staff members could use in their classrooms right away. Getting educators to reflect upon and change their practice so that students benefit should be the goal of every PD session.

When no one else cares, you should. Your professional learning is the responsibility of only one person: you. While professional development opportunities within your school district may be limited, you have the freedom to attend sessions in other areas. It falls on each one of us to make the most of learning opportunities. If your district is not providing professional development that moves you forward in your field, take charge of your personal learning. Warren Buffett reads five hundred pages per day and often does more with his day before the rest of us have woken up in the morning. I’m not saying you have to read five hundred pages per day. What I am saying is that we should all be as intentional about our ongoing education as we are about our students’ learning opportunities. Join the ranks of educators who are serious about improving their skills by reading, collaborating, sharing, discussing, creating, and progressing in your craft every day.

Angry Administrator Update

Not every administrator believes in personalized or self-directed PD. Some think educators should be forced to sit and listen no matter what. These same administrators think it is acceptable to talk at their staff members for hours on end, presenting mind-numbing content that makes everyone hate so-called PD. In the rest of this book, I plan to show you that professional development doesn’t have to be that way.

Summary

Reflection Questions