Promoting Professional Development

I see on our academic calendar that Monday, Veterans Day, is a staff development day.  Kids stay home, staff shows up to be “developed”, or are allowed to stay in their rooms to work, grade, plan, etc.  I know which option teachers prefer.

I begin by saying that I am old fashioned, I guess.  I believe, and experience and research continue to confirm, that kids learn best when they interact with a knowledgeable, motivated, caring teacher.  They may learn some things via technology, but not nearly so much.  It takes a teacher.  The trick is promoting teachers to be knowledgeable, motivated and caring.

Promoting the growth and improvement of the adults in a school system is in many ways more challenging than promoting the learning and understanding of students.  At least students arrive at the classroom door assuming the teacher knows more than they do.  Teachers arriving at a professional growth session share no such assumption.  Many arrive prepared to defend their current practice rather than learn something new.  Why is that?  Regardless of my job description I have wrestled with professional growth for my entire career.  How does it work?  How can we promote such growth? 

I believe there are many reasons for the adult employees, the professional staff, to resist new learning.  I believe the major reason is fear.  But there are other reasons; many are structurally designed to inhibit adult learning.

One of the most difficult characteristics of the public school to explain to private sector folks is the incredible responsibility, demands and fear inherent in teaching.  Teaching is perhaps the scariest of all professions.  Regardless of grade or subject, a bell will ring and a group of young humans will enter a room, the door will shut, and an adult will be responsible for this group for the next hour or two.  Not only must the adult ensure safety, order and control, the adult must ensure common focus, common effort toward a pre-set goal, and the ability of the young humans to demonstrate what they have learned at some point in the future.  The adult must do this for 7 consecutive hours each day, for almost 180 consecutive days.  It is equivalent to requiring a preacher to preach a new sermon every hour every day for 180 days and hold the preacher accountable for what the congregation recalls; or a therapist to conduct group therapy for a new group with different needs every hour every day for 180 days and hold the therapist accountable for the emotional improvement of each individual in every group; or an actor to engage a new audience using a new script every hour every day for 180 days and hold the actor accountable via critical reviews at the end of each performance, etc., etc.  Frightening.  Exhausting. 

More so because unlike the examples above the exiting group of young humans convenes to critique what happened on a daily basis.  The audience reports to each other what others may expect, they report to their parents what they experienced, and the parents report to other adults their own non-professional review of what happened during the session, especially if the parental view is negative.  If the kid has not experienced success it must be the teacher’s fault.  Positive reviews are rarely reported.  And social media has escalated the ability of disgruntled parents and kids to promote negative perceptions to ever larger audiences on a more instantaneous basis.  Every teacher is watched all the time by students.  Sometimes they are watched by administrators.  When the door shuts, it is up to the teacher to accomplish miracles with a room of diverse little humans, and he or she is in the room all alone without support.  Just babysitting such a group for an hour without conflict and maintaining control would be a major accomplishment.  Teaching such a group is an amazing feat. 

Advanced organization and planning for the classroom is also exhausting and fraught with fear and uncertainty.  A first year teacher will typically get sick, lose or gain weight, have trouble sleeping, or start drinking too much to address the stress.  Each day’s lesson plan requires knowledge, research, and understanding of both the kids and content.  Planning for a week is exhausting.  Planning for a unit more so, planning for a year unbelievable, especially when the teacher knows that the performance of his or her kids will determine their own professional reputation and future.  The high stakes tests are high stakes for teachers and principals more than for students.  But the teachers’ focus is always on what will happen today when the door shuts and they are alone with kids.  That is why a broken copy machine is a greater tragedy than a State Board hearing that revamps the required curriculum.

As a profession we do not adequately prepare folks to enter the profession.  If one adds up all the hours college students spend sitting in education courses getting prepared to teach those hours are dramatically less than the number of hours new teachers will spend in the classroom their first year actually teaching.  Many of the college courses are taught by folks who have not taught, or have not taught recently.  Rarely are the courses designed to give prospective new folks planning tools, strategies, insight, models, and suggestions on how to survive.  Course over, grade earned, card punched, content forgotten.  I have not taught kids since school year 82-83 and I do not see myself as qualified to lead a professional development session for teachers on teaching.  I could lead a discussion group, a book study, a teacher based research seminar, or perhaps a professional learning community event. (PLC’s IMHO are an oxymoron in the current structure of public education.  Time allotted to these events is designed by administrators around a topic selected by administrators and rarely include learning by the administrators.)  

Due to the fear, the advanced work, and the pressure, teachers tend to see themselves as individual entrepreneurs in their own little shops.  They do not want to “waste” time dealing with issues outside their classroom.  They do not want to attend faculty meetings or mandatory trainings on suicide prevention or blood borne pathogens, or dating violence, or Microsoft Office, none of which will help them tomorrow when the door shuts.  They want to be left alone to run their business.  Each teacher’s room is like a separate store front in a mall where the store owners are not interested in mall issues as they have their own issues to contend with in their store.

Once a teacher has developed an array of lessons, a set of strategies that seem to work, a philosophy of instruction that has helped them survive, they are not at all interested in abandoning any of that for something new.  A file drawer full of lesson plans that works is more valuable than a staff development session on new requirements for their content area.  That file drawer becomes the security blanket.  The current textbook has been read and there seems to be little motivation to swap it for a new one that must be read from scratch.  Once taught, a lesson can become set in stone, not subject to change.  Especially if the lesson “worked” the first time.  If that lesson fails in the future, it must not be due to the teacher or the lesson; it must be due to the kids.

This fear, this exhaustion, these hours and hours of preparation are all reduced over time with a drawer of plans.  To take away the drawer is to re-instill fear.  No one resists and resents that more than the truly experienced teacher who remembers that fear and will do anything to avoid experiencing it again.

Ask such a teacher to attend a session to promote instructional improvement presented by someone they do not know triggers resentment.  “Are you saying I am not a good teacher?  Who is this expert?  What are his or her credentials?  Why has someone chosen this topic or this person to inflict on me?  I need more time to prepare, to grade, to work in my room.  I do not need to learn that what I am currently doing needs to change.  I would rather stay in my classroom and work than go to this session.  If I must go, let me simply meet with others who teach what I teach so that we can compare notes and find commonalities in our complaints.” 

Worse, a wide array of interest groups has lobbied legislators to require training in areas of import to the interest group.  Most of these required trainings are the result of some tragedy or some perceived slight to an identifiable group of kids.  The legislature requires it, administrators implement the training, and the teachers resent it.  I do not blame them.

So, what might we do to encourage and promote teachers every year to review, improve, abandon and/or adopt plans and strategies that are more likely to encourage and promote kid learning?  How shall we promote professional development?

I think we should first abandon all required staff development on topics not directly related to the teacher’s assignment.  7^th grade teachers are not likely to need a session on dating violence, but they surely could attend a session on suicide prevention.  Let’s be reasonable in our requirements.

We must be very smart about what staff development we invite teachers to participate in.  Very smart.  I own a computer, a laptop, an iPad and a smart phone.  I received training on the computer years ago, then after that I was able to teach myself all the software and applications I needed.  I did not need any training on the laptop or iPad.  And to my knowledge no one has ever developed, much less required, a staff development session on using the smart phone.  Every one with a smart phone is motivated to learn how to use it and do so without much help.  We do not need to be designing staff development sessions for iPhone use.  If teachers want to learn something new they will.

Secondly, let’s restructure the day so that there is time for professional growth, reflection, study and planning during the day.  That will be very expensive as we could easily need to double the size of our teacher corp.  But imagine such a thing!  If we doubled the number of teachers so that no teacher actually taught students more than a half day and spent the other half reviewing data, reading research, exploring resources, planning and applying new strategies, and/or meeting with their peers we could actually work miracles in a school.  Despite the current mantra of those opposed to public education, we literally could solve many of our problems by simply throwing money at it via payroll.  Lawyers, doctors, engineers, and the like have unstructured time to meet, reflect, interact, research for the purpose of improvement.  Teachers do not.  But teachers need such time more than any other profession if we expect improvement.

If we can reduce the time and exhaustion required to plan for tomorrow and grade from today, we have a chance at eliminating the fear of new plans.  We must eliminate that fear.  After years of observation it is clear to me that fear of newness, fear of change, fear of failure is the greatest obstacle to improving instruction.  I know teachers who argue that low performing kids should simply be retained despite all the research to the contrary.  I know teachers who support teaching math the way they learned it rather than the way it is currently tested.  Etc., etc.  We absolutely must empower teachers to learn.

There are teachers who seek new learning, who seek new research, new strategies, new applications, etc.  For these teachers professional development is a hunger that must be fed.  Their professional practice must grow, must cover new ground, must improve.  Other teachers who feel that they have already arrived at a level of professional practice they deem as excellent resent being asked to attend professional development sessions.  For these folks, the implication is they need to improve and they see no need to do so.  There is a clear difference in the attitudinal approach to this profession between those who are defending their perfection versus those who are pursuing improvement.

Would it not be exciting for everyone, teachers, administrators, kids and parents to work in a school with a hunger for professional development?  I think so.  We do not need gimmicks to make mandatory in-service sessions more palatable.  We do not need false structures like PLC’s to provide a smoke screen for mandatory in-service.  We need to treat teachers like professionals, give them the time to enhance their professional practice and give them a meaningful voice in the areas they wish to pursue. 

We can change the current response to professional development.  We can restructure the job to promote professional development rather than require it.  It will be expensive and we will have to make priority decisions regarding where we spend our limited resources.  But I firmly believe until we promote teachers to pursue improvement rather than require them to do so, we are promoting the widely held response by teachers who will defend their current practice, knit in workshops, read newspapers, or talk to their neighbors.  When not treated as a professional folks will act in non-professional ways.

I hope Monday’s staff development day goes well.  I hope teachers arrive at work that day eager to learn or accomplish tasks.  I fear they will not.  Perhaps the real professional reward of a staff development day is the option to wear jeans to work and the ability to go out to eat lunch.  So sad.