Reflections on PD From an Ed Tech Conference

I just spent a week in Ohio at the Ohio Ed Tech Conference (OETC 2020). One night, after dinner, I found myself wandering around the downtown area and ended up in an unusual candy shop. I ended up having a wonderful conversation with the owners of one of the few remaining “Mr Peanut” stores in the nation. The couple has owned the establishment since the mid-1970’s and they know just about everything there is to know about the until-recently departed mascot. In fact, the husband’s first job in high school was wandering around the State Capitol grounds dressed in a Mr. Peanut costume, actually having been asked to greet President-elect Jimmy Carter when he visited Ohio. The young man in his top hat and monocle, wearing his fiberglass peanut suit helped Carter out of the motorcade and handed him a can of nuts, much to the delight of the ex-peanut farmer.

Anyway, before this turns into a legume blog, suffice it to say that if you are anywhere near downtown Columbus, go visit the little candy and nut shop. And ask the owners a question or two. Talk about lifelong learning!

But the thrust of my visit was not about salty snacks, it was about Professional Development (PD). I had the great opportunity to present at three sessions while I was there. My first 3-hour session was all about Education 3.0, discussing what we know about the brain and learning science, served up via teaching practices including the use of ed tech. The second session was as part of the conference’s “FREd Talks” – like a TED talk but for education where I gave a 5 minute “Pecha Kucha” style talk showcasing 20 apps in 5 minutes. It was a lot of fun! And finally, I was able to do an hour long session about data and how schools should put together strategic data plans for student outcomes, retention, success, and more. (Also discussing how rare a holistic approach is to these kinds of experiences, seeing a lot of unhelpful data dovetailed with poorly informed practices…)

(Note – all of the sessions are available in the Downloads area!)

In addition to those sessions, our Institute purchased a booth on the vendor floor. I was surrounded by a lot of hardware, software, and even some robots (check out the R2D2 pic at the bottom of the page), but as far as I can tell, we were the only organization at OETC who specializes in helping teachers teach and helping administrators manage.

As such, I had some really meaningful conversations at the booth. The audience, which was likely 80% K-12 and 20% higher ed was an interesting mix of IT staff and administrators likely making up half the crowd, with teachers making up the other half. It probably goes without saying that most IT folks steered clear of our booth, doing that uncomfortable “look / don’t-look” thing as they walked by. (They looked to see what our Institute did and if we had any tech give-aways, then quickly looked anywhere else so as not to make eye contact…) 🙂

But what was affirming, at least to me, was the notion that more and more people came to the booth based on their experiences with my sessions. People who had simply walked by the first day now stopped to talk with me, as I wasn’t so threatening anymore. We could talk about the importance and value of PD, teaching and learning, data, the brain, and more.

It was during these conversations that I heard, yet another time in the hundreds of examples I already have, that PD in K-20 stinks. While there was one person who lauded their district for really outstanding training plans year over year, the majority of people complained that PD was typically “a joke.”

The bulk of K-12 teachers I spoke with assured me that PD was 90% dedicated to new policies or processes from the district or Principal, never really helping teachers with any aspect of teaching and learning. I was (literally) shown text conversations between teachers and other members of the staff asking why they were at PD sessions. When time away from students is so valuable and precious, why are the majority of sessions so irrelevant to teaching and learning? With so many grants and initiatives for technology, why are so few sessions dedicated to creative and/or consistent usage of technology so as to PROMOTE learning? With mountains of data about how students learn available, why are the bulk of PD events about some theory or some classroom management technique? In other words, why is most PD such a tremendous waste of time?

My higher ed professors were not any more gracious in terms of their PD. They discussed ridiculous lunch-n-learns with catchy titles and really powerful looking abstracts that were nothing more than the promotion of a single professor’s proclivities or methods that could never work at scale. These faculty described conference sessions that seemed so promising but which they left after only 5 minutes realizing nothing of value was going to happen there. And they lamented the difficulty they have finding books or sources that meaningfully describe what teaching and learning should look like, as nobody wants to put a line in the sand around the “artfulness” of teaching, even though there really is science to it all.

The whole thing again reaffirmed that our Institute really does matter. But it also drove home another point, yet again. Most schools, districts, colleges, and universities, despite decades (centuries?) of Professional Development experiences, are still really, really, really bad at it. They struggle to do it internally and don’t want to pay for it externally. And what they do offer is often seen as unhelpful (at best) to the intended audience(s).

While it is incredibly encouraging to hear over and over again how impactful my sessions are and how they are the “highlight” of conferences or “the best” PD a person has ever experienced at their school, it is also not lost on me that most institutions pay very little for that work, if they pay anything at all. It seems that there is far more value placed on meetings to discuss tenure or how to track paid leave or training on a new set of textbooks by the publishers (which is “free” of course) etc., rather than how to help students learn.

Even when we are brought in, it is often solely for a single event. Don’t get me wrong – anything is better than nothing! But we know that learning requires time, practice, regularity, cadence, accountability, and more. This is not just true of students, but of anyone engaging in an attempt to learn something. And PD, if done right and if talking about how learning happens, is likely new to just about every educator out there. We have hundreds of pragmatic things a practitioner can do specific to helping learners learn, most of which are not employed (ever) in the classroom. But a 2-hour seminar on even the top 3 would be an extremely weak introduction.

That is why our Institute, along with various experts (faculty and fellows), desire to promote development and enrichment through genuine learning techniques which model the same techniques instructors should use in their classrooms. That also means we desire to work with a group of people over time, seeing regular check-ins, time spent developing those “a-ha” moments, etc. We hope to bring in-person, online, single-session, and multi-day formats to bear while creating a portfolio experience, seeing teachers and professors generate learning, tie together research, observe effective practices, attempt learning strategies, reflect on those attempts, consult with a coach, and more. Of course, all of that requires time, effort, dedication, and yes, it will cost some money. It does not have to be exorbitant, but it cannot happen without some cost.

While I hope you will consider working with the Institute for your development and enrichment needs, and while I believe sincerely that you will find our PD to be some of the best you have ever experienced, I really hope you consider the outputs as well as the inputs. Don’t subject people to more boring presentations, to untranslatable strategies, or to information dumps dedicated to policy and not to development at all. (If your meeting is about a new system or information requirement, just call it that!)

To my new friends in Ohio, I hope to hear from you soon. I know many of you are now talking with your schools, districts, or colleges to bring us back to Ohio. I look forward to that! To everyone else, I hope that education figures this out sooner rather than later. PD is “golden real estate” when it comes to connection, community, culture, and more. The faster we start to get it right, the sooner a lot of other problems will likely start to be fixed.

Good luck and good learning.