Less Than Stellar Professional Development

The phrase “professional development” in the educational system is often met with a rolling of the eyes and a sigh from educators. Why is this? Is the common educator truly not interested in furthering their knowledge and skills? I do believe that is the case with some, but I don’t feel it is the case for the majority of professionals in the field. Why then is it such a struggle to find a happy medium? Here are some thoughts:

1. Many PD sessions are “one and done” or as stated so lovingly in the suggested reading by our professor, “spray and pray”. Most professional development sessions are conducted one time, usually to a mass group of people, with no follow up.

2. When constructed for entire faculties at one time many participants will have no use or relevance for the information presented.

3. Reflective of points 1 & 2, many participants are forced to attend these sessions, whether to acquire recertification credits or because the administration makes it mandatory.

4. In my experience many PDs seem as if they were thrown together at the last minute rather to fill time than to address individual needs by the faculty.

Our assignment for this blog post was to talk about the last awful professional development session we attended and why. The first example that came to mind was bad, but not for the reason that one might think.

Our school system has many tools available for our teachers to gain access to student data. The training session took place at our school in our computer lab. (Which leads to yet another compelling question: are the teachers completely “there” or are they distracted by the familiar surroundings, feeling more at ease with doing things other than what is in front of them?). There were two presenters from Chicago Public Schools conducting the session. One was presenting how to access the data through our intranet while the other walked around and made sure everyone was able to gain access.

Before the training began there was no assessment as to whether teachers had gained access to this site before or not. For those that had, they had little use for this information again (the information was an overview of how to access and manipulate the student data. For those who did not have classrooms of students, there was little relevance as well. These factors alone may have contributed to the reason I selected this as an awful professional development session. But honestly? They didn’t. My colleagues did. As the presenter was conducting the session there were many faculty members talking. More than once the presenter had to ask people to stop. Then there were those that chose to do other tasks, such as enter grades in the on-line gradebook. It reached a point that the presenter made a somewhat demeaning comment when she talked about how she liked the computer lab layout; she could see everyone’s screen at the same time. While this was a polite way of her asking us to get back on track I wondered: was this statement more demeaning for her? Or for us?

I felt extremely embarrassed for her. I felt extremely embarrassed for myself. Although I made sure to let her see I was paying attention the entire time (even though this pd had absolutely no relevance for me) I was embarrassed for the fact that some of the teachers help to fuel the stereotype that Chicago Public School educators are ignorant. While the content of the professional development isn’t what made it bad, the behavior of the crowd did.