Reason #1: You're Not Listening to Me

A sample of how I spend my PD time

We each fill out our Buzzword Bingo cards with a strong sense of the educational jargon the speaker will use.  The rules are simple: a teacher must have five in a row and four corners BINGO doesn't count.  It's difficult to find words that others won't use.  We all go for "expectations," "accountability" and "data."  However, I'm thinking the corporate words of "mission," "vision," and "transparency," might earn me a quick win.

When I grow tired of Buzzword Bingo, I begin drawing cartoons.  The first is an edgy political rant, comparing the War on Poverty of the Sixties to the War on Drugs in the Eighties and the War on Public Education from today.

I glance around the room.  Seven teachers are grading papers (cursed paperless classroom!).  Two teachers are reading novels.  Five teachers are passing notes.  Yet, most of the staff is playing the bobble head game. Nod your head and smile for a bit and eventually the speaker assumes you are listening.

At first glance, it seems that teachers don't care.  Yet, that's not the case.  They care deeply about student learning and about their own professional development.  However, on this late September afternoon, the teachers feel beat down by the barrage of graphs explaining why collectively they suck.

"This is really unprofessional," a teacher comments.

"I know.  Lecturing us with graphs on how crappy our test scores are," I answer.

"I meant the teachers," she responds.

"Oh, yeah.  I guess so."

The speaker walks by during a brief cooperative learning activity and checks out my BINGO card.  "What is this?" she asks.

Busted.

"I am making a list of educational jargon.  As I hear it, I check it off.  I'm putting together a master list of the phrases we use without defining the vocabulary.  One of the areas that really piques my interest is the concept of a semantic environment.  How often does a speaker use corporate language, industrial language or organic language?   It becomes the unspoken metaphor."

"Very interesting," she says.

"Thanks."

"Mind if I take the words and make a glossary on the chart paper?"

"Fine by me," I tell her.

So, she writes out the vocabulary and I feel guilty about the Buzzword BINGO cards.  Yes, I lied to her.  At the time, I told myself it was to avoid hurting her feelings.  Looking back, I did it to save face.

When the session ends, the speaker passes out yellow feedback forms.  Everybody plays nice and gives her decent scores on everything that she's assessing.  It's not that they're lying.  It's that the form doesn't measure what counts:

• Is this relevant? 
• Was this worth my time? 
• How will this change the way I teach? 
• What are the practical implications of what I learned? 
• How did this tap into my expertise, my passion or my personal story? 

Take a sample of staff meetings, workshops and professional development sessions throughout most districts.  The teachers don't care. They'd rather grade papers, play games, pass notes or draw pictures than listen to a speaker explain the rules of grammar.

"Teachers are the worst students," I've heard people claim. 

Not true.  

Visit a classroom at the end of a day and listen to teachers talk about lessons.  They share ideas.  They offer advice.  They tell stories about their classroom experience.  It's meaningful.  It's organic.  There's one hundred percent engagement that leads to deeper learning.  Teachers are capable of being great students.  What they lack is patience for bad teaching.  

The social contract between trainer and trainee has been broken and the culprits are shame and irrelevance.  Teachers want to learn.  What they don't want is to sit through a long meandering lectures imploring them to fix the broken system.

Solutions:

1. Take a staff survey of PD and keep it truly anonymous.  Then take the results and find the overall trends.  Is it the presentation style?  Does it have to do with the irrelevance of topics?  
2. Scrap the current PD models and find a more organic, relational and research-based solution.  Tap into the expertise of the staff.  Again, this requires listening to teachers and occasionally abandoning the original agenda.