One of my favorite staff developers, David Warlick, published a piece today entitled, O.k., No More Staff Development, which for a guy who makes his living doing just that.
But he is, as usual, on to something. He writes:
… their goal should not be a staff development plan, but a self-development infrastructure. Actually, I dont think I called it anything. Ive become weary of labels that get in the way of thinking outside the box.
They need to strive for a school environment where teachers:
- Have the time to reflect and retool (at least three hours a day),
- Have ready access to local and global ideas and resources that are logically and socially indexed,
- Have the skills to research, evaluate, collaborate, remix, and implement new tools and techniques (contemporary literacy),
- Are part of an ongoing professional conversation where the expressed purpose is to provoke change (adapt),
- Leave the school from time to time to have their heads turned by new experiences,
- Share what they and their students are doing with what they teach and learn their information products and relics of learning become an explicit and irresistibly interwoven part of the schools culture.
If we are trying to help our students to become life-long-learners, then this is what teachers should be right now. The question, Whos going to teach me to do that? should be replaced with Im going to teach myself to do that!
And I will say that, coming out of Beacon, this is a lot of what I was used to. We went to the occasional conferences — in fact, I think that was where I first met David, and certainly, we all read a ton and talked and reflected about practice all the time. But what also is amazing now that I look back at it was how much we did staff development internally. We ran our own workshops. People took classes at Columbia University, Teachers College and then came back and brought what they learned. I must have led a few hundred hours of technology staff development over the years. Our Academic Standards Committee chairs trained dozens of new teachers on what it meant to do performance-based assessment.
And so on.
And as a result, Beacon felt like a professional learning environment. We learned from each other. We read together. We went to the Consortium for Performance Based Assessment professional development meetings where we learned from other teachers who were doing similar kinds of work as we were.
All of that makes me very wary of the professional guru circuit — David not withstanding. And there are a lot of these folks who come to schools with their books and their binders and their 37-step process to fix our schools. And most of the folks do have something to offer, it’s true. I haven’t seen anyone who hasn’t had something interesting to say or offer or give to schools, although often it’s not as radical or new or different as the gurus might claim.
But here’s my issue — and for the record, it’s the kind of thing that David would never do — what worries about some of the "we’re going to fix your schools" gurus is that their process is their product, so to question it… or to only pick and choose pieces of it… is problematic. What I have seen of many of these sessions that they are closed environments where other ideas and other methods aren’t welcome. And that’s counter to the educational environment that I think we need to foster in our classrooms. We don’t need to make kids experts in doing things our way, we need them to be exposed to as many ways to do things as possible and then come to their own best practice.
But the problem is, of course, when professional development has become commerce as well… when districts have paid experts to come in and tell teachers and administrators what to do and how to do it, there is a powerful incentive for people to follow those rules.
All of it reminds me of a wonderful quote from Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. She was talking about trying to make sense of history, but it applies to anyone who is trying to create meaning for themselves:
And when I look at a history book and think of the imaginative effort it has taken to squeeze this oozing world between two boards and typeset, I am astonished. Perhaps the event has an unassailable truth. God saw it. God knows. But I am not God. And so when someone tells me what they heard or saw, I believe them, and I believe their friend who also saw, but not in the same way, and I can put these accounts together and I will not have a seamless wonder but a sandwich laced with mustard of my own. (…)
Here is some advice. If you want to keep your own teeth, make your own sandwiches…
The question, then, of course, is what does this mean for staff development at SLA?
Well, it does mean that we can bring in outside folks, but that the goal of bringing in outside folks is to stimulate our process… not to merely completely appropriate their process/product. It means that we have to get out to ISTE and NECC conferences… (for example) and it means that we have to create time in our schedule every week for time to work together as a staff. And it means that we have to teach each other. We have to always be reading and writing about our craft… and sharing it.
In the end, we need our process for our own learning to stem from the same pedagogy as what we do with our students.
