One of my greatest bug bears as a teacher is professional
development, commonly referred to as PD. The issue is not whether I should do
PD: in fact, I do extra PD that is not paid for by any school I have worked at
or recorded as part of my professional learning but simply for the sake of
feeling like I am an informed, knowledgeable professional. This includes
reading books on education, doing online courses on the subject areas I teach
and watching television shows that might be useful for my classes. All these
are forms of PD I am happy to do and I really enjoy.
There is however a form of PD that I find really tough to
swallow: school based PD. This may sound strange coming from someone who
actively seeks PD in other forms but the truth of it is that I find a lot of
the PD organised by schools to be unproductive and inefficient. This belies the
good natured and well-meaning attempts by those in authority to improve the
professionalism of my workplaces and often means good money is wasted on
speakers who are politely listened to and promptly forgotten when the staff
leave the room.
All this is said not as a criticism of the schools
themselves because more often than not the speakers have expertise in areas of
importance to teachers. For instance, I attended a very informative talk
recently about the different learning styles of boys and girls. From this talk
I took some important points away about the way that I deal with students and
the set-up of my classrooms to support the learning of either sex. In particular,
I was interested in a discussion about the organisation of content into a descriptive-reflective-speculative
model as it clarified some observations I have had of students for some time.
Similarly, I have also learnt a lot of great classroom management tips from
attending Kagan workshops organised at another school.
The problem with school based PD can be summarised by the
following diagram:
Anyone who has attended a school based PD will find it
immediately recognisable. This is the diagram, or some form of it, that is
regularly trotted out when these guest speakers wish to highlight the
importance of a particular learning style or approach to classroom activities.
They will tell you that lectures are the least efficient way of retaining
information and that the best way is to get the students to experience the learning
themselves. Be it through group work or by experimentation, the act of doing is
the best way to learn and something that should be done as often as possible.
They will then spend the next 40 or so minutes lecturing you
on why you should allow people to experience the learning themselves with slide
after slide of information on how to do this. If you are lucky you might then get
some questions in at the end before filing out the door and heading home.
Do you notice the irony?
If you haven’t, look closely at the top part of the pyramid
with the lecture style and notice the amount of retention that occurs. Yes, that’s
right: 5%. So if people retain only 5% of information given in a lecture
format, how much information does the guest speaker and school expect the staff
to retain from the PD session?
If the answer to the last question is 5% then they are going
about it the right way. Taking into account that these meeting often occur
after school when staff have been teaching all day or are just about to start
holidays, the low retention rate would not be surprising. Add to the mix that
the teachers realise that the guest speaker, who often brags about being an
ex-teacher turned principal turned educational guru who lectures people, is
making more than they will in a pay cycle and only has to lecture for 2-3 hours
to earn it then the retention rate plummets further.
The question then remains why do we still use this as the
dominant form of PD? One answer could be that teachers tended to be the well
behaved students at school who enjoyed being lectured to by teachers and hence
why they are in the profession. Another could be the reality of maintaining
ones job by attending mandatory meetings and not doing a Homer Simpson performing
jury duty impersonation. Finally, it could be that teachers are actually sadists
who enjoy being tortured by largely pointless lectures.
In fact, the answer is that it doesn’t need to be this way.
Taking a leaf out of the Kagan or Tactical Teaching book is
the best way forward to produce genuinely useful school based PD. For those who
haven’t attended a Kagan workshop, the name itself implies that work will be
done. Yes, there is a component of lecturing and slides but they are interspersed
with actual movement, interaction with the other people in the room and hands
on testing of the techniques and ideas. Even better, the Kagan instructors show
you what it is like to be a student on the receiving end of these techniques
and thus you can experience what it might be like to be in your own classroom.
One of the best experiences I had on school based PD was my
first Kagan workshop on group work and techniques. Being sceptical of the
approach I really felt I wouldn’t learn anything so I only half-heartedly
participated in the workshops tasks. However, by the first break I couldn’t
help but admit that I had learnt something important about my own teaching and
what it is like to be student. Even worse, by lunch I had started to enjoy the
workshop and looked forward to trying some of the techniques in the workshop
and in the classroom. Moreover, the instructors never spent more than 10-15
minutes lecturing me about theory and spent almost half the time getting me to
DO the activities.
Looking back at the pyramid this is a clear difference to
the traditional model. Practice by doing results in 75% retention and I can
attest to the fact that I learnt more in one day then I did in a year’s worth
of lectures after school. So what does this mean for school based PD?
Put simply, we need to move past the lecture based model for
school based PD. It puts teachers to sleeps, makes them realise they could earn
more lecturing other teachers on how to be better teachers (oh the irony!) and
has little impact on teaching in classrooms. Instead, schools should invest
more in teacher led PD that is hands on and interactive. This means tailoring
PD for specific departments or ensuring that whole staff PD has ample opportunities
for departments to discuss and plan how to implement the ideas. This was the
approach used in Tactical Teaching and the pressure of having to implement and
report back on one of the teaching activities was telling: not only did I have
to use one of the techniques but it worked and I have used it ever since.
Good school based PD shouldn’t be a glorified educational
lecture but should allow professional teachers to think about their practice
and consider new approaches. This cannot be done from the anaesthetising grip
of a chair in a hall but must involve practice by doing and appropriate follow
up to ensure it is being actioned.
