geek.teacher

On my last post, I wrote about the feelings of some teachers in my Things That Suck session at edcamp. Specifically, i wrote about their strongly negative feelings towards the Professional Development provided to them by their schools. I got a great series of questions from somebody I’ve been following on Twitter for quite some time now, Bethany Smith, an Instructional Technologist from North Carolina:

I think Mandatory PD is one of the things I struggle with the most. How do you get people that you need to attend a workshop show up? I find that the “best” teachers show up to my workshops and they tend to be the ones doing everything already. How do we provide incentives to get those other teachers to show up? I haven’t come up with a good answer. I’ve tried having several workshops to pick and choose from during a mandatory time. Also tried varying the topics, being more curriculum specific, but it is hard to get that buy-in. Did your discussions lead to any ideas on how to get everyone on board with PD?

I started to write a response, but it turned into something a bit bigger. So here’s a blog post in which I kind of dodge the questions, because it’s not really what we talked about, but bring up the other side of the coin:

Bethany,

Keep in mind that the audience I was working with was a self-selected group of people who chose get some PD on a Saturday, so their perspective isn’t necessarily going to help you with the issue you’re addressing. Their concern seemed to be much more in that a lot of the mandatory PD they were receiving wasn’t particularly relevant to their needs as growing teachers. As you say, if you make PD optional, like edcamp, all the awesome people automatically show up. Those are the people actively trying to grow as teachers every day.

When those same teachers are told to attend a mandatory PD session, it seemed to me that they expect that the mandatory PD is going to be something that you need to get the lowest common denominator on board with. For all intents and purposes, in the same way that a good school will differentiate its instruction for students at all levels, these teachers are desperately looking for the same when it comes to instruction for them. Think of the superstar teachers as your gifted students. They don’t want to spend an hour learning about some new tool they’ve already played with, or that they could figure out on their own in less than 10 minutes of the time.

As an example, here’s a personal anecdote: several years ago I was in a training to earn how to use our fancy new online Special Ed paperwork management system. This was a training specifically for a small group of people in my district, and then we were supposed to be the people who would go on to train everybody else in the district. We were generally chosen because of our excellent knowledge of Special Education paperwork procedures and solid technology skills. I sat next to a teacher that started the same year I did, who is now our district’s awesome Assistive Technology guru.

We, of course, proceeded to do what anybody who loves technology does when given something new: we started to play with it. By working together, we were able to figure out an amazing amount about how to work the system. Finally, we reached a dead end, and so we asked the trainer a question about how we would solve said problem. He actually got upset with us, saying that we aren’t there yet, and refused to answer the question. It probably would have taken less time to answer our question than to berate us for plowing ahead and learning on our own. Needless to say, we spent the next half hour getting up to date on our e-mail and putzing around the internet waiting for him to get to the point that we got confused at. We then continued our own trips down the rabbit hole, but clearly with less relish than we had before.

But I digress.

As I said before, this answer is definitely a dodge on the original questions, because it wasn’t brought up in our discussion. If anything, I can tell you that the people in the room were just as frustrated as you that many of our colleagues don’t care for PD in the same way that they do. But they were even more frustrated by having their own time wasted by poor professional development that wasn’t helping to improve their own teaching abilities in the classroom.

Don’t get me wrong, I recognize the difficulty of your position. Finding a way to appeal to the masses is difficult at best. But if a district’s PD is so poor that it loses the people who love this stuff and want to be there, then it’s already dead in the water, even if the district doesn’t know it yet.

-Dan

PS: Anybody out there able to actually answer Bethany’s question?

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