Advocating for Professional Development

"Why do those teachers need meetings during the school year, they don't work all summer.  Can't they meet then?"
"I know.  It's hard to shuffle the schedule around all the time and get someone to watch (name of child)."

I heard this exchange as I was attempting to find a birthday card recently.  I was in the card aisle at the neighborhood grocery store, last minute of course, before heading to a little get together.  I am rarely good at gifts and I always buy cards last minute.  It gives me a sense of adventure.  I know...living dangerously. 

Let me clarify something for a moment, I don't always eavesdrop.  However, as an educator, it has become somewhat second-nature to listen to the conversations of others and monitor whether or not they are appropriate.  Maybe that is just a lame excuse.  Either way, you do it too. The two women conversing about the dreadful number of in-service days made me forget my initial search for a card and enter in to a monitoring mode.  As I pretended to look at cards, I listened to these parents lament about the uselessness of teacher work days. I could have easily jumped in to the conversation and stuck up for my comrades.  However, I wanted to understand what their particular beef was with professional development.  Then it came to me...
"We never do anything in our meetings.  We meet for a few minutes but then get back to our rooms as fast as we can to catch up on work."

What?!  Have my ears lied to me?  One of these women was also a teacher?!  How could this be?  She doesn't like PD?

Let's be realistic...teachers across the quality spectrum struggle with PD.  When in-service time is used wisely, is designed with the goal of teacher quality and improvement, and inspires the teacher to set new goals and find pathways to achieving said goals, PD is a powerful tool. It is increasingly powerful when teachers have input regarding the structure of the professional learning time and a role in knowledge sharing with their peers. If it is like PD that the card-aisle-lady has experienced, it is easy to view it as useless, time wasting, and leaves teachers wishing they had time to work in their rooms. PD that is just thrown together is similar to the kid who hands in a "midnight special," something they clearly stayed up late working on, because they thought it was due next week, with little to brag about as an end result.

I am lucky to work in a school district that utilizes faculty input, through a leadership team, in developing the scope and sequence of professional learning.  Using your resources, connections, and in-house experts can be the beginning of building a solid, enjoyable, and most importantly, useful learning experience for teachers and staff. Going one step further and creating a Professional Learning Community can be an even more powerful opportunity for educators to collaborate and challenge each other to grow and learn.  However, PLC's, like other PD tasks, will become useless if the time is not used in the best possible way.  If you are an administrator in these settings, providing a focus for the groups, monitoring and evaluating the learning groups effectiveness, and providing opportunities for input will all assist in creating a culture where professional learning is valued and used wisely. 

It may be a great idea as well to share with parents and community members what is done on learning days for staff.  If you have a website, maybe you would like to post pictures or video of these groups in action.  Perhaps you can include a summary of the activities in your weekly newsletter home to parents.  Perhaps through bringing in community agencies to work alongside these learning groups, you will be able to strengthen your relationship with these shareholders and showcase your talented staff.  When parents and community members are in the know about professional learning and its importance to keeping faculty and staff at their best, then everyone wins.  Kids win through teachers who try something new in the classroom.  Teachers win as they collaborate and share knowledge with each other.  Administrators win because they are able to learn alongside their colleagues and see the benefits.  Parents win because their children are learning from the best educators around.  When we are moving together, I doubt we will hear the complaints echoed in the voice of the frazzled parents that I listened to in the card aisle.  Good day!