Educators note that not all professional development is created equal

Teachers exchange advice about what makes professional development sessions worthwhile in their practice, particularly citing the need for differentiation, expertise, and collaboration with colleagues

  • “I’m in a teacher lead role at my school where sometimes I am asked to lead activities during professional development. I know we’d all rather just have prep time, but what PD activities have you liked over the years?” —High School Math Teacher in California
    • “As a teacher in a district with a steadily growing ELL population, any PD that gave me tangible tools or resources I could use in my classroom the very next day with my ELL population were the best. Unfortunately, this has only happened twice in my entire career.” —Middle School Teacher in the United States
    • “One of the best ones I’ve ever had was an ELL related PD. Our ELL staff from the district came by, one of them spoke German. They taught a lesson entirely in German, no stopping to explain or translate, no tools to help us. Nobody in the crowd spoke German. The frustration was palpable. Then they stopped and taught the lesson again with a bunch of supports. It made sense, even if we didn’t speak German. It was the most useful PD I’ve ever had that illustrated what it feels like to not speak the language.” —Dual Credit Secondary Science Teacher in Texas
    • “I have not done it, but I think the best PD would just be to sit around with other teachers, and with no admin in the room to judge, and have people describe problems they are having (students are not doing the reading homework) and hear from other teachers how they have or would handle these problems.” —Anonymous teacher 
      • “This is the way. The only useful thing I’ve ever gotten from a PD was gleaned in those ‘turn and talk’ moments and instead of talking about how to write an objective for the 40 thousandth time or whatever nonsense they tell us to talk about, we just engage in actual real talk.” —High School Special Education Teacher in the United States
      • “Exactly. To make it more PD-ish, there was a strategy called Give One, Get one. You write your probs on a sticky note, strewn around the room. Colleagues wander around with different colored stickies with suggestions or ideas to address the issues. You can even go wild with the colors of sticky notes repenting different category concerns, like green=classroom management issue, yellow=student concern, blue=curriculum issue, etc.” —High School English Teacher in California
    • “Years ago we had a presenter who had various activities that helped us get a grasp of what it is like to read when you have dyslexia. It was VERY eye opening for me.” —Teacher in Kansas
    • “This was before my time at our school, but one of my coworkers regularly talks about a PD where they took a school bus through a couple bus routes. She (who has lived in this school zone nearly all her life) was shocked at some of the housing conditions and disparities in our zone. She said it really put a lot of things into context and perspective, knowing what home actually looked like to some of our students. We know in our hearts what many of them go home to, but she said seeing it with her eyes right in front of her was a different experience. For context, we teach in a very rural area and our school zone is very large. It has a wide breadth of economic diversity.” —Art Teacher in Tennessee