An observation that struck me recently is this. Often what we do under the rubric of 'professional development' is anything but. Yes, we may have some outside expert, usually in a hotel ballroom with five hundred of your favorite people with you, tell us all about a new way of thinking about some aspect of our jobs. And some of those 'talking head' types can be great. But rarely are such experts presented as a cohesive vision of improving classroom instruction. And there is almost no follow up at all.
The rest of the time, professional development time is filled with a lot of things that are certainly useful, often necessary, but not at all related to improving teacher's skills. The truth is, that in this industry, the time resource is in such short supply that we are always robbing Peter to pay Paul. During time allotted to PD, we are doing all the other stuff that is necessary to running the institution, department or district, but not actually allowed for in the structure of our working lives. So we need to do that work (curriculum development, team planning, department and committee work), but again, very little of it is concerned with making any of us better at our jobs.
And that's okay, because meaningful improvement for teachers doesn't really start on days when there are no students in the building. Real professional development is better termed 'instructional coaching.' It starts in classrooms with actual students and real teachers. Yes, there probably needs to be some understanding of the learning goals , and some framework for methodology, but after that it is a pretty organic process. The main problem is that once you engage real instructional coaching, it is time intensive. There needs to be time in the classroom, time for reflection on what happened in the classroom, development of new strategies and the translation of those strategies into actual activities, the deployment of the new strategies in the classroom, gathering of data on the efficacy of the new strategies, reflection, and repeat.
Other than the time in the classroom, there is almost no allowance in our working day for the rest of the process. Teaching five classes a day, the rest of my working time is spent meeting with students, pulling together material for future lessons, working with colleagues on a variety of issues, all of which are important and need attention, and oh year, grading (which eats the lion's share of my non-classroom working time). I do, of course have wonderful, rich , meaningful conversations with my colleagues about our work, but they tend to haphazard. Stuck in between all the other things. If improving student learning is really our goal (and I think it is), then maybe we need something different.
The last key element is that it can't happen in a vacuum. At least not for me. The word 'coaching' is key in this model. Even Tiger Woods has a coach. No one laboring to improve in their chosen field does so without some assistance, some feedback. We need coaches who really understand teaching and learning, and who appear in our classrooms for meaningful amounts of time, for the express purpose of observing our work, in order to give us feedback that will help us to continue to improve. Those observers need to have a wide base of knowledge, both in teaching strategies, pedagogy, and (at least in my context, high school) a high degree of knowledge specific to the subject at hand in a give classroom (very tough to assess a math teacher if you really don't understand math).
I don't know about you, but no such system exists in my building, or as far as I know, my district. But I do know a boatload of people who are qualified to do this work. One of them shares my office with me, and this blog. Several of them are right down the hall. Several more of them are also administrators in my building. They are the people I talk to every day about teaching- its up and downs, our struggles, the student's struggles, the challenges of the particular material we are working with. I already trust these people because I work with them every day.
We need to be our own instructional coaches. This may be blindingly obvious, but how often is it really happening? I hear about some schools and districts that have positions like this, at the building or department level, but not very often. My experience has been that after the probationary period, no one has been watching my teaching very closely. As long as my kids don't light the room on fire and no parents are complaining, the system seems to be happy with my job performance. I'm sorry, but that isn't good enough for me. I took this job because I actually care about it. I am not a teacher because I had nothing better to do. I had a professional life before this one (and it paid better). I don't want to spend the next twenty years teaching the same lesson over and over again and blaming the students when they don't learn (we all know someone who fits that description). I don't want that for me, my students, or my own child.
So what would it take to have meaningful instructional coaching in my building? Not that much actually. It would take time, and that translates into money. But not an inordinate about I think. Especially when measured against all the things that money is spent on that don't actually improve student learning. It would take structuring some time into our day when we could sit in each other's classrooms, some time to work together reflecting on the observations and collaborating on new strategies, and ready access to some pretty low tech gear (a video camera being first in my mind).
It's not too much to ask is it? Seems so simple. Makes a lot of sense- at least to me.
So, why exactly can't we do it?
Wishing for time...
F. Scott
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