In the midst of my day-job in education, I have been speaking at conferences and events for several years. When it goes well, somebody will say as they leave, “great session!“ And there are plenty of ways I can respond to this.
- Thanks!
- Thanks! Where do you teach?
- Thanks! What part of it was memorable to you? How will this idea change what you do in your classroom on Monday?
That last one has made people uncomfortable, and that’s why I want to talk about how we define a “good” professional development (commonly shortened to PD).
What Makes a Workshop “Good?”
I just closed out the NCTM conference in the company of several dozen strangers (led by Justin and Shelby) as we discussed the properties of a sandwich.
“An edible receptacle with filling” to define “what is a sandwich?”#SandwichChat at #NCTMLA2022 with @Sneffleupagus and @JustinAion pic.twitter.com/C86Heznoxf
— Matt Vaudrey (@MrVaudrey) October 1, 2022
The workshop focused on “sandwichy-ness” as a vehicle for students to use in formal language with vocabulary. The later versions of that structure use three criteria to discuss a sandwich: ingredients, structure, portability.
Let’s use those exact three criteria to describe what makes a workshop or professional development “good.”
1.) Ingredients
I have given a few hundred workshops in my career and a few thousand lessons to kids in classrooms. Some of them had ingredients that were satisfying to the participants and many did not.
If I use only one metric to describe a “good“ workshop, it wouldn’t matter how I packaged it, and a webinar, a lecture, a book, a conversation with my admin, and an interactive training on the computer could all have the same possibility to be “good“.
With one metric, it’s not serving the definition of “professional development.”
2. Structure
My favorite way to learn includes a break every 10 or 15 minutes of instruction. Then, I’m able to talk with my neighbor or walk around the room or do something with my new information.
This criterion is more of a challenge, because the structure of professional development varies widely, as do the preferences for how people like to learn.
I shared the stage with someone recently. They lectured for 45 minutes, reading from PowerPoint slides full of text and bullet points with no pictures. After they finished, I had people unpack student performance and flex their own experience in pairs and small groups as they walked around the room.
Every person I asked (the next day) appreciated the lecture more than my interactive session, with my principal going so far to say, “Was yours better, or was it just a style preference?“
It’s a solid question, and I still don’t like it.
3. Portability
In education, the effectiveness of a training is often measured by how well it can be applied to the classroom quickly. Early in my career, every large PD event had a dozen workshops that touted “12 math games you can use on Monday!“
While very few of the sessions that I saw this week translate exactly to my day job, I was able to take nuggets of truth from every one of them, and portability is a fair metric for the success of the workshop. “How well does the new information travel to other locations?”
A Good Workshop is a Sandwich
Earlier this week, I posed a similar question (related to the conference):
When you leave a workshop or training and tell someone, “That was a good session,” what do you mean?
— Matt Vaudrey (@MrVaudrey) September 30, 2022
(Tell me more in the replies below.)
It’s gotta be profoundly difficult to measure a “good” professional development. Every conference has their own feedback forms that range from excessive up to simplistic. Here’s the one NCTM used this week:
Too simple. There are hundreds of workshops at this event, and we’re leading with qualitative data for each one?
Conference workshops vary as much as sandwiches.
I propose an alternate ranking system:
We can infer from their measurements what is important to the organization. I would suggest adding some questions that are more nebulous, not less.
Because—just as tens of thousands of math teachers have very different preferences in their sandwich—we want very different kinds of professional development.
~Matt “My workshop is a calzone” Vaudrey