Every teacher knows the sinking, annoyed feeling that comes with mandatory PD or professional development classes. Teachers feel like they sit through class after class hearing things they already know or things that do not apply or even vague proclamations of best practices with no instructions on how to implement them. That should not be that way. Nearly every profession has professional development, things they need to learn. Out of all professions, shouldn’t teachers be the best at helping each other learn and improve?
In the following essay, I will lay out a few reasons why I think teacher’s professional development struggles so much. When I talk about the following, I do not make the assumption that every lame or lackluster training suffers from all of the below maladies or that any single presenter or instructor has anything but good intentions at heart. The below described maladies attempt to accurately diagnose the overarching malady and propose potential remedies although the latter is far easier than the former. These maladies or rather symptoms- this analogy will inevitably break down before the end of the essay-affect both instructor and student, presenter and audience member.
First, many educators even before they take on their first solo teaching job have some sort of negative professional development session in educator training or student teaching. If they manage to avoid the experience during training, they will undergo the aforementioned experience soon after entering the teaching profession. These experiences leave a bitter taste in the mouth and often lead to resentment since these meetings often consume precious kid-free planning time which most teachers would rather use to grade assignments, reflect on student learning and personal performance, or even actually plan the next set of lessons. This resentment promotes disengagement which decreases the likelihood of substantive learning on the part of the student (in this case the teacher) which stymies many of even the most dedicated teacher-educators. I know from first hand experience. I have been the disengaged, overwhelmed and slightly resentful teacher sitting away from the PD facilitator working on my computer, not paying attention to the presentation. I have sat through meetings determined to give it a fair shot only to be weighed down by the obvious resentment of my colleagues. I have not yet been on the presenter side although as co-department chair this year, I will have the opportunity to improve the reputation of these meetings or trainings to hopefully avoid being on the receiving end of the resentment.
This mindset matters immensely because the majority of the time, what we expect is what we get. If you expect to get nothing out of a training you will be more likely to tun out even before the training begins. I have done this more times than I can count. What chance does excellent teaching have if the intended recipient has virtual headphones in and cannot hear a word spoken? This expectation mindset applies to the instructor or presenter as well. If I as a teacher believe that all my students should succeed, what makes it so hard to transfer that belief to a group of fellow educators?
Second, preparation matters, both long term preparation and short term preparation. As a teacher, I need to invest in my lessons before I attempt to teach my students. This preparation benefits both me and and the students. If I do not prepare well, my lesson will fall apart leaving me scrambling to hold onto my sanity. Lack of preparation on my part will also detrimentally affect my students. My “holely” lesson will lack what they need to succeed. I often wonder how much preparation and planning goes into some of the presentations I attend. One way I can tell how thoroughly someone has prepared is by how they handle the difficult, unexpected questions. Someone who has prepared and become thoroughly prepared with their material will know how to answer the question even if that answer consists of an honest, “I don’t know.” Usually the competent presenter will follow that with a promise to investigate further and they fulfill that promise. Presenters with less thorough preparations often lack the confidence to do the above. Some even attempt to fabricate an answer which can go poorly for them if anyone in the audience actually knows the correct answer. This just happened a few weeks ago in one of my Summer Academy sessions in which both I and a colleague knew the answers to the questions the inexperienced presenters flubbed answers to. (That session and a few others actually inspired this essay.) The best presenters take the unexpected questions and use them to improve the presentation. The presenter of the second to last session I attended did just that. She even updated the presentation she gave the attendees to include more information and links as a response to the difficult questions.
With regards to preparation, I believe that some of the root problems go all the way back to the preparation teachers receive before entering the education profession. While I could write a much longer essay on just this point alone, I will limit myself here to only a few reasons. One, excellent trainers require excellent training. My colleague and I have informally analyzed the educational backgrounds of ourselves and many of the educators around us. My colleague and I, and a few others we know, come from an educational background where academics reigned supreme. Our personal educational training taught us to set high standards for ourselves and helped us build the tenacity needed to meet those standards. Unfortunately, in much of education today, both public and private, such expectations do not really exist even if they are stated aloud. Thus, I approach preparation for a task much differently than other educators I know. I do not say this to brag, to claim that I’ve got it in the bag; I most definitely do not. Instead, I write this to draw attention to a potentially fatal flaw in the educational system at large.
Third, for a variety of reasons, many teachers and presenters approach professional development with a reluctance to dig deep, to put the effort into what needs to be done. Many legitimate things factor into this reluctance, like an overwhelming workload and the feeling that training will simply add one more thing to the weight threatening to bury them. Some teachers also do not have the personal educational background to prepare them for the idea of life-long learning. Educators are described as the epitome of lifelong learners and many of them are, just not enough. Although I know an incredibly small percentage of teachers out of the total in the United States, the majority of the ones I do know, simply do not care enough to put the effort in that’s required. I believe that this apathy affects the presentation side as well.
So, what is a teacher to do? How do teachers break this cycle? Like anything systemic, the change starts on an individual level both in personal response to professional development and in advocacy for change. That’s what I hope to do here and in this upcoming school year. As co-department chair for ELA, I will have plenty of opportunities to create a productive, cohesive, and uplifting professional learning community. I, also, at some point in the future, will present a PD on our assessment system in my district. I hope to make that professional development, one that people actually gain knowledge from rather than dread. Beyond those opportunities, I can change my own mindset when I attend these sessions. I attempted this last year but often found myself slipping back into old habits. This year, I will try again, knowing that change often starts with me.