Most of the teachers I met in Chicago were frustrated with a great deal of the professional development provided to them by the district and in their schools. I suspect this sentiment is shared in a lot of settings and probably outside of teaching as well with required professional learning, or human resources modules for jobs. However, teachers tend to have especially high expectations for what good learning looks like, and the professional development provided to them often doesn’t even live up to minimal expectations.
Let me get one thing out of the way right away. Of course, nearly all jobs necessarily have boxes that need to be checked to protect an institution from liability and provide important information to employees. This is not what I am talking about, although to be sure, Chicago Public Schools has plenty of requirements for watching videos that are followed by brief quizzes on topics ranging from how to administer epi-pens to how to support transgender students. Despite being annoyed by the proliferation and repetitiveness of these videos (you have to watch some of the same ones each year), there is value in engaging with these topics.
What I am talking about is professional development provided by districts and schools that is intended to prepare teachers to teach better. Professional development is important. All teachers have room to grow and develop their practice, but unfortunately, unlike the education that teachers are expected to provide students, not only does professional development not offer the strategies and tools we know that help make learning “stick,” but also professional development is rarely successfully differentiated for the teachers engaging in the professional development. Teachers come in with different levels of experience and comfort with the topics being discussed and are provided with a limited experience that doesn’t adapt to what they already know or feel comfortable with.
Too often, a leader of professional development will spent far too long lecturing about their topic, or provide opportunities for engagement and discussion that are too limited to deeply engage. They go through the motions of creating an opportunity for peer talk about a topic, but have misjudged how engaging the topic is, or how willing teachers are to engage. Or, the experience is so overstructured that there are no authentic ways for teachers to influence the way things proceed. These are problems that teachers face on a day-to-day basis, so seeing these failures in modular professional development without real attempts to fix them can be irritating at best and offensive at worst. Plenty of teachers will play along and engage anyway out of a sense of obligation to the presenter, but on the inside, it is clear that many educators feel their time is being wasted.
I am definitely in the group of teachers that will do their best to engage out of respect for the presenters, but engagement doesn’t always mean exciting learning is happening. That’s something to keep in mind as a teacher – students may engage, but it doesn’t mean that what you are doing is necessarily that compelling.
There, are, of course, exceptions. Facing History and Ourselves generally does a wonderful job of engaging educators in the actual strategies that teachers might employ, and as a result, has some of the most engaging professional development I had the privilege of engaging with over my four years in Chicago. And, I personally generally had positive experiences in a variety of professional development experiences. However, I was new to the district and relatively new to the profession. Hearing the grumbles of expert and novice teachers alike made me wonder – how many years can one sit through professional development that fails on these levels and still feign interest?
I have hope that a learners mindset will allow me to continue to engage over the course of my career, but I also have hope that teachers will be given more agency in their professional development to pursue topics of real interest and that they are able to engage those topics at their level of expertise.