Adventures in Professional Development
Everybody does it, nobody likes it, and it's hard to know if it works. What's going on?
The State of Things
According to TNTP’s 2015 report, “The Mirage,” the largest 50 school districts in the U.S. were (as of 2011-2012) devoting at least $8 billion annually to teacher professional development. More recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics seems to confirm this figure, showing that public schools spend about 1% of their annual budgets on professional development and related costs.
Despite this significant investment, TNTP’s study failed to discern any causal connection between the professional development efforts and other strategies being provided in their study schools, and any discernable teacher improvement. Some teachers in their study improved, while others (most of them) did not budge beyond their initial years of teaching. Induction programs and mentoring appeared to bring teachers up to a reasonably mediocre level of performance, a level at which most of them remained. Those who continued to grow seemed to do so for personal reasons disconnected from any efforts provided by the schools.
I am not surprised.
My Before Time
I don’t remember having any formal professional development during my weird teaching career, although I must have. In my first job, at a very alternative high school in Atlanta, each of us pursued our own professional learning in our own way, or in individual consultation with the headmaster. I don’t think we had any group sessions as teachers, any more than we led group classes with kids.
Later, working for New York City Public Schools, I’m sure I had training sessions on this or that, but nothing that I’d call real “professional learning.” In my first school, the relations between the principal and the staff became so toxic and strained by late October that full faculty meetings were canceled for the rest of the year, replaced with quick “stand up” meetings in a hallway right before the opening bell rang. This allowed the principal to bark orders at us and then walk away, which was all he really wanted.
In my second school, a magnet school attempting to be more progressive, we did have faculty meetings—long ones, every week: so long that they violated our union contract, a fact which we had to agree to and sign off on before taking the job. But I don’t remember what we talked about at any of these meetings, apart from the day when we haggled over the structure of the new report card and what the categories on the checklist section should be. I remember this incident only because I made a nuisance of myself, insisting that having “Improving” as the lowest possible rubric score was not honest. Some of my kids are not improving, I said. Do we think they’ll simply disappear if we don’t have a phrase to describe them?
I was not well liked that day.
Becoming The Guy in the Suit
When I left the classroom and started doing curriculum writing at Kaplan’s fledgling K12 division in the early days of No Child Left Behind, I was recruited to help lead professional development sessions to support our new test-prep products. The trainer on staff had a good background in mathematics and was happy to explain and demonstrate the math courses, but he needed a partner to lead the English side of things, and since I was the primary writer of those courses, I seemed like the natural choice. Plus, I was too new and stupid to say No.
How ancient am I? My first year of presentations was accompanied by overhead transparencies using these delightful, classic, clip-art characters…
…broadcast using these delightful, classic projection devices:
I would trot out to various schools with my folder of transparencies, careful to keep them in the correct order, and then go through my little talk about test-taking strategies, gently placing one image after another on the device, while yammering for about ninety minutes.
Did teachers love these presentations? Reader, they did not.
First of all, they didn’t want to be there. Teachers never want to be there. They have papers to grade and lessons to plan and, if time allows, families to raise and lives to live. There is nothing less engaging than being forced into a classroom or auditorium after a full day of teaching to watch some guy in a suit talk about topics you didn’t ask to learn about, don’t care about, and suspect the presenter may not be an expert on.
Secondly, of all the things to spend your theoretically spare time learning, how to help students take tests was pretty far down on most teachers’ lists. This was the early days of No Child Left Behind, and the world of annual, mandated, standardized tests was still new to many people. The teachers resented having to make time for the tests, and they really resented having to make time for practice tests and exhaustive strategy instruction to save the school the embarrassment of not making its Adequate Yearly Progress goals.
Because this world was so new, there were many teachers in my sessions who thought that, because I was teaching them about the structure and challenges of their state test, I must be the guy who wrote the test and, worse, the guy who decided that their dear children would have to take it. The first section of every session consisted of me trying to make common cause with the group: Hey, guys! We’re all in this together! Let’s help our kids succeed!
It did not go over well.
Neither did the idea of approaching tests strategically. There were many English teachers who resented the idea that students should be asked to read with blinders on, with a specific and highly transactional purpose. They didn’t seem to want to admit that while there were many reasons why people read things in life, few of them (sadly!) involved a deep and thoughtful appreciation of metaphor.
Had I been in their seats, I probably would have reacted exactly the same way.
From Training to Learning
As time went on, our work in test-preparation broadened to include basic skills review and then core curriculum development for large, urban school districts whose central office capacity had been hollowed out in budget cuts, and where new leaders had ridden into town on white horses, promising Big Change. We started working with districts on rewriting their core curriculum, providing pacing plans, unit guides, model lessons (daily lessons, in some ill-advised cases), and benchmark assessments. I helped develop and lead PD sessions on the curriculum, our backwards-designed approach, what constituted good “essential questions,” what it meant to unpack learning standards, and so on.
These were also not particularly well-received. No one loves a mandate, and people sent into a school to implement a mandate are never exactly seen as heroes. What the district leaders tended to ignore or overlook was the challenge of managing institutional change and cultivating a healthy culture of mutual accountability (things I developed workshops on, years later). They simply mandated things and expected people to comply. But teachers can be very effective at nodding their heads, saying “yes, sir” or “yes, ma’am,” and then closing their classroom doors and doing whatever the hell they want to do. Which is why teachers tend to outlast administrators. And why things tend not to change.
Later, with other organizations, I got to work with authors like Robert Marzano, Eric Jennings, Jay McTighe, and Baruti Kafele, designing online PD courses or producing PD videos. Later still, I got to design and lead workshops on the Common Core State Standards, and create a day-long program called “Teaching for the Stretch,” all about effective questioning techniques and helping students manipulate and “play with” their learning, instead of simply ingesting it and then vomiting it back up on assignments and tests. From the reception I received and the number of times I was asked to deliver these sessions, they seemed to be a lot more engaging and useful to teachers. They were certainly more fun to lead.
Some of what I talked about in that series of keynote addresses and workshops, I’ve rewritten in more narrative form and published here on Substack: here, here, and here.
Why It’s a Mess
Professional Development is a tricky business. Schools often try to shove it into a day or two of mass, formal presentations, rather than supporting professional learning authentically throughout the year. Schools rarely let teachers drive and guide and organize their own learning—deciding on their behalf, paternalistically, what they need and should care about. That’s not a recipe for team happiness.
Another problem is that schools—and the companies providing PD services—rarely engage in any real analysis of the work’s effectiveness. At most, you tend to see single-page evaluations handed out at the end of a session, asking teachers to rate whether the AC was working, whether the snacks were good, and whether the presenters know what they were talking about. Schools rarely learn more than this very base level of “loved it/liked it/hated it,” which makes it very hard for them to know if they’re spending their PD dollars wisely.
In theory (or, as I try to stop myself from saying, “you would think…”), administrators would want to know whether teachers actually learned anything—and then, some time later, whether they put that learning to use—and then, some time later, whether those changes to practice led to improvements in student performance. There is even a system devised to measure and rate these levels of effectiveness.
I have never seen it put to use. Never once.
In my darker hours, I’ve sometimes felt as though administrators, teachers, and PD providers were all in cahoots together, engaged in a massive conspiracy to check off a requirement without demanding too much of each other: just sit there, be quiet, and don’t ask for too much, and it will all be over soon.
If you don’t rock the boat, everyone gets what they want. Everyone except the children, of course.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
Do we need to rock the boat? Do we need to do better in supporting the professional learning and growth of our teacher corps? I mean, if no one’s really complaining, why worry?
Here’s one reason:
This year, in 2024, the National Education Association (NEA) is reporting that there are about 567,000 fewer educators in public schools compared to pre-pandemic levels. A recent Department of Education report puts the number of lost public education jobs just in the first year of the pandemic at 730,000, or 9% of the total. The shortage is particularly acute in subjects like math, science, special education, and bilingual education.
The shortage is expected to worsen if current trends continue. According to the NEA, more than half of our educators plan to leave the profession earlier than expected, due to burnout and stress exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
We’re losing our seasoned veterans and their depth and breadth of knowledge. We’re having trouble holding onto our new recruits and building them up into tomorrow’s veterans.
When I hear people talk about the problem, they talk about one thing only: money. Teacher pay. And that’s an element of the problem, for sure. But it’s not the only one. The physical conditions under which teachers work, the emotional strain of teaching, the emotional state of their students—all of these things seem to be getting worse. And if our teacher corps is getting younger and younger, they’re going to need some serious help—some ongoing coaching; some real, instructional support; some ways to learn and grow throughout their career. Something that works.
We need a bigger boat.