I have now completed two full months “out of the classroom.” I do miss it terribly, and to be honest, one of the things I miss is the ability to go to my classroom, close the door, and ignore the “big picture” that I’m now so tuned in to in my teacher-leadership role in my district. Sometimes I just want to go talk to some 14 year-olds about symbolism and metaphor. That’s a much more comfortable place than talking budgets and systems and human resources and how to create meaningful learning experiences for teachers.

The team of teacher-leaders in my district who are spearheading our professional learning system are working hard to make changes to how we design the learning experiences our teachers engage with. When I think about the many, many hours of “PD” I’ve sat through, the experiences that impacted me positively shared a common theme: they treated me as a learner, not as some container into which to stuff information I was obligated to accept. Too many experiences, though, left me feeling like that over-stuffed container, which was then promptly shuffled out the door to get to work.

I don’t think professional-learning design has had inadequate motives in the past. I just think that there was not the kind of expectation, systemically, that the design of teacher-learning deserved the same attention we’d expect to be given to the design of student-learning.

Here are the things that I think too much teacher professional development gets wrong… despite the best of intentions.

1. It tries to respect my time…by breaking all rules of best practice.
Because teachers are so strapped for time, let’s scrub the agenda free of collaboration time, processing time, movement, engaging activities, reflection, and all the other things that we know are important for learning to happen. The assumption is that those are a waste of time, so let’s just get them the information they need. Stand and deliver, sit and get. It’s not best practice for kids; it’s not best practice for adults, either.

2. It never checks with me to see if I really need it.
Missing from professional development (most often) is any form of formative assessment that influences the facilitator’s moves. Sometimes a good facilitator will “draw on the expertise in the room,” but that’s different from trying to ascertain what a participant actually needs from the learning. I get that these PD sessions are often a one-day or two-day event, unlike the ongoing nature of a classroom where formative assessment should be foundational to instructional decision-making. However, too much teacher PD is about what the presenter or facilitator wants to share, not what the participants need. (So excuse me while I check my email…)

3. It forgets what happens outside the meeting room.
What happens outside the meeting room? My colleagues and I go back to our respective classrooms or workspaces and have to hit the ground at full sprint. I believe that this is why there is so little carryover from teacher PD into actual teaching practice. Dear facilitator, give me time to learn from you, then twice as much time during the learning to collaborate or plan how that learning will be transferred into my practice. Then (and only then) will the brilliance you impart have a snowball’s chance of moving beyond the stack of photocopies or free books handed to me for the training. If you want me to learn, give me time during the learning to work. If you don’t give me time to work with the learning, it communicates to me that the information matters more than its execution.

Last but not least: It makes demands but doesn’t offer support.
List the acronyms: TPEP, PBiS, PLC, CCSS, NGSS, SBA, BLAH³. As public school employees, like it or not, some of these are part of our job and therefore we are supposed to know about them (whether we agree with them is another matter). Any PD that tells about any policy, law, or initiative is bound to do nothing but infuriate a large proportion of the audience if the information is given without accompanying time to process, explore, deconstruct, and plan the implementation of said initiative. This is numbers one through three (above) all rolled into one. To give me information but not give me time to meaningfully engage with it is flat-out ineffective; to give information and assume that “now that I know, I’ll do” is borderline insulting (if I had time to “do” already, it’d be done).

This all boils down to the question in the title of this post: Would we teach kids the way we teach teachers? One camp will say we shouldn’t, since adults learn differently than kids do. Okay, there is slim research to support that, I suppose, but I don’t mean that we talk to teachers the way we might talk to a first-grader. I hope that every principal in every building in this state expects his or her teachers to intentionally design daily lessons in an effort to maximize the learning each kid walks out with. That intentional design of teacher learning experiences is what I think is sorely missing from too much professional development.

Every time a group of teachers gets together for a purpose other than happy hour, there ought to be intentional planning behind that experience, just as their should be intentional planning behind every time students get together in a classroom setting. Whether it is a staff meeting, an inservice day, a late-start or early-release, or PLC meeting, intentional design of these experiences as learning experiences can only serve to help move us all forward.

Image source: Etsy