TREAT TEACHERS LIKE STUDENTS


I have always said that I appreciate professional development that is well-executed and practical. With that being said, during the first two days of my summer vacation, I attended professional development workshops that focused on backward planning and improving school climate and culture. All presentations were led by the same consulting firm, but each presenter was vastly different.

The first presenter, on the first day, was engaging enough due to her personality, but she was solely “teacher-centered” and did not provide any activities to break up her lecturing, nor did she provide any handouts to accompany the many slides that she read from and referenced during her presentation.

The second presenter was excellent! Since she presented in the morning on the second day, she set the tone for the rest of the day. She began with a fun ice-breaker and implemented (modeled) practices that we could use throughout her entire presentation. She also provided handouts, included videos, and further broke up her presentation with activities for us to do in small groups. She modeled engaging and student-centered instruction.

Finally, there was the last presenter who led the second half of the second day. Although the morning presenter set the tone, there was a clear shift in the afternoon. The last presenter was all over the place and difficult to follow. Her slides were too busy with multiple images and details on each that couldn’t be seen from where we were sitting. With that said, she did not provide handouts for us to follow along, so we were completely lost. She also never engaged us. She remained behind her podium and focused her attention to the images projected on the screen and just read the script.

Here’s my concern: How are you being paid to teach me how to make improvements in my classroom and within our school when you don’t model effective practices throughout your presentation? I’m confused. And this has been the norm for professional development throughout my career. It is my belief that professional development should be conducted as if it were a class of students that we would teach. We need to see lessons modeled. We need to understand how strategies should be implemented. Much like our students, we have a short attention span and need to be engaged. Teachers are already judgmental when it comes to people telling us how to do our jobs, so they need to come correct.

Here are the do’s and don’ts for providing professional development for teachers.

Do:
- provide a clear objective so that we can follow along
- model learning activities
- provide easy to digest slides during the presentation
- include videos to break up the lecture
- bring the audience into the lecture
- include writing activities and group work
- provide handouts
- be mindful of time and pacing

Don’t:
- talk too much
- have poorly designed slideshows with too many graphics, images, or words on one slide
- move through the slides too quickly
- lack focus; jump from one topic to the next without transitions
- give a lot of information without providing hard copies 

These tips can be applied to not only the well-paid consultants that present to us, but fellow faculty members who present to their peers in-house. We retain more information when we are actively involved in the learning process, as opposed to when we are merely spoken to.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

HERE WE GO AGAIN

Image
It seems that every year there are changes in pedagogy. However, in my opinion, these new concepts are really old ones that are just repackaged and given fancy new names. With the constant influx of theories and research that dictate how we are to teach comes the teacher training workshops usually run by well-paid consultants who have rehearsed their presentation dozens of times to schools across the country, but never actually implementing them and of course not with the at-risk students that I teach. And let’s say that they have worked with students in a school district similar to mine. They most likely worked with a group of hand selected students or at a charter school. Needless to say, this is the case for me yet again this summer. My Title 1 school was awarded a grant to make improvements and one of those improvements is working with a program to improve overall academic performance and to give all  students the option to attend college. That’s perfectly fine with me, but
Read more

WHY I DON’T FEEL LIKE TEACHING TODAY

Image
Early in my teaching career, I worked at a high school that made people gasp when I told them that I worked there. It was no big deal to me. I did not encounter many disciplinary issues at all. However, the majority of the students that I taught were not motivated to learn. Each one had their own story and I understood, but on this one occasion I was a bit fed up. I had been teaching them the structure of a persuasive essay for a few days and wanted them to write with a bit more command. I was teaching the counterargument. What I thought would be one lesson took several. With that said, on one particular night I was confused and frustrated about why my students were struggling so much to address the counterargument in their essay. At that point a light bulb went off. I decided to write a model for them to analyze (I found that the exemplars that I wrote for them helped a bit more than the exemplars found on the web because I wrote about topics that they could relate to, so that'
Read more

YES, I'M JUDGING

Image
Here I go again sharing my two cents on something that came across my feed on Facebook. The title of the post “My Title 1 Kids Have $300 Shoes. And It’s Nobody Else’s Business” immediately caught my attention, because 1) I teach at a Title 1 high school and 2) I do judge the students and their parents when I see them with expensive products. The author of this article wrote with a strong tone of sympathy and compassion for her, presumably, immigrant student and his choice to purchase a pair of $300 soccer cleats. She doted on the fact that his family struggled financially and that he actually paid for the shoes himself by working with his father doing landscaping. She complimented the student’s motivation to work hard to get what he wanted and warned teachers against making assumptions and judgements about what our students and their families chose to purchase with their money. Now this is all fine and good, but it is not the narrative for most of the students that I t
Read more