There’s a 100% chance that I’m paraphrasing this idea from someone, but it was a half-baked idea we discussed over lunch, and I’m expanding it here.
<triumphant voice>
The Biggest Challenge in Effective Professional Development
When getting a group of Educators in the room for P.D. (Professional Development), there are three forces at play.
1.) What the administrator or director thinks is necessary.
2.) What the teacher thinks is necessary.
3.) What the trainer or consultant thinks is necessary.
In a dream sequence, the teachers and administrators both have a shared idea of the work, and they bring in an expert to help them make progress.
Sometimes those three things are all pulling in different directions; I’ve definitely sat in trainings where I wanted practical classroom management strategies, the administrator wanted to raise math achievement, and the presenter had a litany of software tools to show me.
Not much progress was made.
Robert Kaplinsky notes (and cites some research) about how Teachers don’t often get the amount of P.D. they want/need, and it’s not a stretch to suggest that neither Teachers nor Admin are aware of that research (I definitely wasn’t).
As a classroom teacher, I was often confident that I understood best what we needed. After all, we’re the ones in the classroom with our kids all the time.
Sometimes the teachers and administrator are united in what they want, but the presenter…
⚫ might have some new research to share,
⚫might extend the idea past what the teachers and admin were expecting,
⚫or they might be all excited about a fresh idea and completely ignore the contract they signed with the school.
You know… hypothetically.
When I’m consulting with a district or speaking at an event, I’m most often the person on the right in the image above; trying to convince a room of people that they’ll like what I’m cooking, even though it’s not what they ordered.
Here’s an example: earlier this month, I kicked off day two of #AddItUp in St. Louis, and my keynote focused on bravery and transparency in risk-taking.
I gave lots of research backing up my idea, concrete examples of how to encourage risk-taking, and some free takeaways so teachers could start being braver.
Thank you @MrVaudrey for the inspiration this morning! “Being brave doesn’t mean you have no fear… it means you don’t let the fear stop you from trying something new.” Going to lead my students with this mindset this year! #AddItUP19 pic.twitter.com/raVDoxe2th
— Kim McCoy (@MathWithMcCoy) July 17, 2019
And.
I bookended the teacher-stuff with a lot of hard topics for white folks to think about.
⚫Students of color are suspended and expelled more frequently than their white peers, beginning before Kindergarten.
⚫If we aren’t brave with stuff we don’t understand, we’ll never get better, and that includes interacting with race relations.
⚫We must model bravery for students and staff, and that means failing publicly because growth is important. Watch me as I do that exact thing.
I'm committing to #ClearTheAir chat this August. Join me.
— Matt Vaudrey (@MrVaudrey) July 17, 2019
All the info you need is in @ValeriaBrownEdu's moment here:https://t.co/zbBak3gKvJ#AddItUp19
Consensus is hard, and it’s rare to get 100% agreement, even with a school site that serves the same population of students. If we wait until everyone is ready, we’ll be too late.
And yeah, I lured my audience to the auditorium to discuss risk, then offered input on whiteness, a dish they didn’t order.
It’s my hope that they will be more interested in the dish after seeing it. Maybe not today, but eventually.
My role as a P.D. provider is to smush big-picture change (Equity, racism, special education) into accessible topics (bravery, Appetizers, Desmos). On conference applications, I don’t often mention those big-picture topics, but I sure as hell will mention them once y’all are in the room.*
Equally important is a humility on my part; I must be open to the idea that I’m pulling hard on something that isn’t important, but I think it is.
Gotta keep listening.
That’d be a good sticker to put on a laptop.
~Matt “Keep Listening” Vaudrey
P.S. If you have research or ideas about this kind of thing, I recommend you hop into this thread with author and education expert Ilana Horn, who has much more academic chops than I do about this (and about everything).
*If you’re an administrator or conference-application reader, and the above post sounds like a bait-and-switch, ask yourself; how many workshops that explicitly mention the hard topics are you supporting?
Most often, it’s zero, so that’s why I smush equity into a workshop on warm-up activities.