Disrupting the Status Quo of Boring PD

“PD needs to be the primary vehicle through which adults acquire the tools, skills, strategies, and knowledge to ensure every child gets what they need every day to thrive.” - Elena Aguilar & Lori Cohen

We dream of classrooms where every child is engaged in a meaningful, culturally-sustaining way.  We desire rigorous instruction, rooted in relationships.  We hope for students to be met on their “own cultural and emotional turf” (Emdin, 2016), to have choices in what and how they learn, and to develop agency.  We want every child to thrive in school. 

But when we teach teachers, we tend to miss these values altogether.

In PD, we bore teachers. To tears. 

Or at least until they disappear into their laptops. 

Unfortunately, we consistently revert back to the status quo of PD: one facilitator (typically not a teacher) with a slide deck talking at teachers in a large, echoey room about a subject that really doesn’t apply to most people in attendance.  If teachers are lucky, they’ll have an opportunity to talk with the colleagues at their table or plan lessons together.  In many contexts, teacher PD is rarely fun, meaningful, thought-provoking, or tailored to the exact group of teachers in the room.   

What’s more, the technology we lean on for facilitating PD tends to promote the status quo of PD, instead of disrupting it.  The use of projectors, slide decks, and even some remote delivery of PD perpetuates a “sit and get” mentality, which we know is ineffective for learning.  “Extensive research and personal intuition say the same thing; when people are ‘talked at,’ they retain very little” (Bambrick-Santoyo, 2012, p.149; Moore, 2011, p.298).  Teachers have adapted to ineffective PD with their own technological response: using laptops or phones to do something they find more meaningful or interesting. 

We’ve known for decades that one-off workshops and wordy presentations don’t work, but still I frequently see it replicated in schools, and am occasionally guilty of falling back into this mode myself.  In a 2014 survey of 1,300 educators, a study found that just 29% of teachers were highly satisfied with their current professional development offerings (Gates Foundation, 2014). In the same survey, teachers suggested that their ideal PD experiences should focus on application of learning through demonstrations, modeling and practice, and focus less on presentations and lectures. 

The goal of PD is simple: supporting teachers in getting better at their jobs.  “PD needs to be the primary vehicle through which adults acquire the tools, skills, strategies, and knowledge to ensure every child gets what they need every day to thrive” (Aguilar & Cohen, 2022, p.27). Teachers grow so that students can thrive - that’s the goal of PD. 

But we won’t be able to achieve this goal if we can’t first disrupt the status quo of boring PD. 

The Post-Pandemic Promise, Broken

After several months of disrupted or virtual schooling in the Covid-19 pandemic, we saw inequity, unengaging curricula, and assessments in a new light and declared, “We’re never going back!” 

And then we went back. 

As Sonja Cherry-Paul writes in her reflection on the phrase “learning loss,” “But now, nearly three years later, the learning loss narrative has boomeranged the nation back to its bedrock approach to education—a hyper-fixation on data that measures student achievement… Despite all our hopes that the dramatic shifts needed during the pandemic might ultimately change education for the better, it seems we are in many ways back where we started” (2023). 

We’ve similarly boomeranged on PD.  Schools were forced to get creative by focusing on connecting with teachers and meeting their unique needs through innovative uses of technology during the pandemic.  But now we find ourselves comfortable to return to a low-interaction slide deck. 

The pull of the status quo is strong, but with imagination, community, and practical tools, we can redefine PD.  I’ve found a unique subgroup of educators who have done this particularly well: virtual instructional coaches. 

The Virtual Coach’s Innovation

After having been a virtual coach for more than a decade, I’ve found that effective virtual coaches rely on the same tools as in-person instructional coaches, including rapport with teachers, feedback grounded in data, strong models and demonstrations, and plenty of practice opportunities.  

But they also have a unique challenge that has caused virtual coaches to innovate: disengaging from a meeting with a stranger is much easier than with a colleague in person.  Because of this, effective virtual coaches work to make their coaching meetings highly engaging, rooted in relationships, and very active.  And they do this all mediated by and leveraging current technology.  

I acknowledge that certainly not all virtual coaching is successful, especially if coaches don’t do these things. But virtual coaches who intentionally select technology that promotes engagement, rigorous thinking, and purposeful learning are effective in helping teachers grow through coaching.  And I’ve seen a trend in their highly successful and engaging facilitation of PD that’s worth learning from.

Continue to Part 2 of this post for a story of a virtual coach’s PD that feels like a party (to borrow the term of Elena Aguilar) and six different uses of technology to make teacher PD engaging and effective.