It's All About Respect

Every year, schools across the country start their year with a new initiative to take their students to the next level. Ask a veteran teacher to list all of their new "great ideas to change teaching" for the last 20 years, and you'll get a long list of mixed results. I'm sure that your school has at some point hit on most of these, and a short list of results from your school will probably include at least a few of these: differentiation, data-driven, block scheduling, understanding by design, Common Core aligned, No Child Left Behind, personalized learning, cooperative learning, SMART goals, multiple intelligence's, just to name a few.

Now add up all the time that has been spent on these and all the other new initiatives during professional development at the beginning of the year and in refreshers, early releases, and other forms of school mandated pd time. If you've been teaching for 20 years, you've spent the equivalent of almost an entire school year of your time sitting in these meetings. Now think about how much of that time you spent listening to someone talk to you. How many of those meetings did you watch someone put up a PowerPoint that you couldn't see, but were told they'd share it with you later so you could spend more time going over what you are currently listening to the expert talk about? How many times did the presenter try to get you up and active but it didn't really tie into anything you could use. At my school, we still talk about a presenter in the past who had all 200 of us line up in birthday order without talking. The sheer amount of time it took was staggering, and at the end of the day we now realized that our time might have been better spent setting up our classrooms rather than discovering something that already comes out in a daily email to us (we have a teacher who sends an email shout out on teacher's birthdays).

This isn't to say it's not necessary to have teacher professional development. Teachers overall want to grow, to become better at their profession. This also isn't intended to provide you with all the answers. There is no magic wand, there is no one-size-fits-all approach that will work. But that's the point. The best professional development for teachers is just like the best teaching methods, it's flexible in the path that leads to the results we all want. Some people can watch a short video and have the concept mastered, others like to read, and still others like to listen. Some like a blend. Just be conscious of how you are using the time your teachers have, use it wisely, trust them to learn independently at times (and have an honest discussion when they break that trust), and don't be afraid to ask them to help develop the professional development drive for the district/their department. Just like all great learning, this is just meant to help start a discussion, one of the best ways anyone can learn.

Shawn Bean, Midwest Teachers Institute