Category: Professional Development

Part of my job, no. Most of my job has me thinking about Professional Development. Today it has me wondering about how much others think about it.

As a teacher, how much importance do you place on PD? Is it something you do because it is part of your yearly schedule or is it something you actively seek out and want a say in?

The Quebec Education act tells us that we need to maintain a high level of professionalism – what does that mean to you? And does it mean the same for all of us?

It also says that we are required to be involved in the training and mentoring of new teachers. How are we helped in that area? What does this look like?

My bias is that PD is our tether line. It is what can keep us connected to others and to our own growth as we navigate the cliff sides of the ever changing classroom context.

How would you describe it?

…or chocolate covered broccoli.

However you want to call it, it’s disguising something with something else to try to make it more appealing. We might try it once, even twice, but pretty soon, once we’ve licked off the chocolate we’ll recognize the core of the thing for what it is**. Basically we should “Make the vegetables themselves taste good, and you won’t have to bribe kids with chocolate.”

This is my concern with ‘new’ ways of teaching –> We get excited about them, we try to convert what we already do to them – we try to flip our classrooms, gamify our teaching/learning, differentiate our curriculum, teach to different learning styles – but all we really end up doing is stuffing a brussel sprout into an ice cream cone and complaining when they still don’t learn any better than they did before.

So how do we make the vegetables taste good? I say – instead of trying to teach teachers how to change how they teach (and then quickly jump to another way to do the same thing the following year…) , let’s focus on working with teachers on developing their relationships with each other and their students. Let’s focus on helping teachers identify what works in their classrooms, what doesn’t and to ask and answer the questions – why do I teach this or that in this or that way? Is it working? If it is – let me share it, if it isn’t – let me stop.

We speak about not losing the student for the subject – about keeping the student at the centre of learning – but do we not do the same thing with teachers? Sometimes I swear we are so focused on Professional Development Subjects that we forget about the true subject of professional development – the professional.

**my apologies if I offend the poor cruciferous veggie. We happen to eat a lot of it here (don’t ask us how we prove it…I have a 2-yr old who has developed a certain fascination with, well, with the expulsion of certain gases as a result of having eaten broccoli and brussel sprouts … enough said.) but it makes a good metaphor, it does.