The Essentials of Great PD
How educators are reimagining professional learning.
From grading homework to district initiatives to technology integration, to response to interventions, to social-emotional learning — the list goes on and on, teachers are busy. Time is their most precious resource. So when they hear about the time they will spend at a typical PD, teachers let out a collective sigh. Currently, most PD sessions are led by experts “reading” from slides and distributing handouts created in 1991 (True story! This actually just happened, somewhere in Southern California in Feb. 2019). There is not a teacher alive who has the time to sit through that. Teachers LOVE learning, but they hate PD — and who wouldn’t, with this outdated model?
Teachers are lifelong learners. Passionate about knowledge, they facilitate it for their students, but they also seek out improvement and enrichment for themselves. To see this in action, head over to Twitter and watch how educators have annexed this medium to connect, collaborate, share and LEARN! Teachers post inspiring stories and videos all over social media like Instagram. They form prolific and vibrant groups on Facebook and Pinterest. Many teachers form great social networks to share best practices and make their classrooms better places. They willingly do this on their own time, but — and here is the rub — these same educators dread PD. Where is the disconnect?
Is a Virtual Learning Community the answer?
It’s not that PD itself is bad. Some of it is inspiring and very needed, like a day learning about the inquiry process or the infused classroom. But teachers need to broaden their sphere, and they can. With a Virtual Learning Community. VLCs act as both a direct PD source and a meaningful online teacher community via or a web-based platform or application. They have hubs of critical conversations, intentional learning, and powerful partnerships. VLCs require only the desire to learn and the time to curate a powerful tribe of people who will become your colleagues, mentors and, in some cases, friends.
This type of online learning exchange creates contagious ideas and becomes indispensable for true professional growth. It can serve as the PD itself, or as a significant and transformational PD supplement. Imagine learning about inquiry during a day-long session, and then having a VLC to help you germinate and grow the practice in your own classroom. A community of learners and the conversations are where the real value of PD lies. But many schools overlook this aspect, which is why most PD doesn’t really help teachers or raise student achievement.
The Community as Curriculum?
The power of the VLC is the community — the group of learners themselves! What they bring each day to feeds and videos is worthwhile because it is timely, relevant, accessible and diverse. Dave Cormier of Windsor, Canada coins this non-linear process as Rhizomatic Learning. His theory is based on the metaphor of a plant stem, or rhizome, whose roots grow continuously in many different directions. Rhizomatic Learning “recognizes that learning is a complex process of sense-making to which each learner brings its own context and has its own needs. It overturns conventional notions of instructional pedagogy by positing that “the community is the curriculum”; that learning is not designed around content but is instead a social process in which we learn with and from each other (Cormier 2010).
What Rhizomatic learning gets right is that adult learners don’t always need to be told what to learn. Think of a great dinner party: you and your fellow dinner guests get into a conversation. Each person adds their ideas, perspective, and previous knowledge. Everyone adds to the cacophony of ideas. When the evening ends, the guests leave energized and smarter by the stimulating discussion, though no one came to the table with a learning objective. Teachers need to be given the freedom to start their own stimulating discussions. Their PD needs to travel down a more pliable path of inquiry-based learning. Through random collisions with other teachers, they discover that the best resources and instructors can be each other. Find the most innovative teacher at your school — and ask them where they get their best ideas — and a VLC collaborative environment is sure to be their top source.
PD Transformation- The Virtual Cafe
Teachers are increasingly turning to online networks to find inspiration and form relationships that build community outside of their school sites. Self-directed social PD is available to teachers when they need it and have time to really invest in their learning. Think of a VLC as a virtual cafe where people congregate and float out their ideas. Those ideas are discussed, refined and then implemented from classroom to classroom in a way that conventional PD is not able to achieve. What social media platforms have taught us is that the learning that works for teachers is more fluid and unstructured.
As educators, we need to build learning experiences for educators that are so flexible that teacher learning makes its way to classrooms everywhere. Author Katie Martin puts it best in her recent blog post Do We Really Need PD? “If we want to change how students learn, we must change how teachers learn.”
For continuous and effective learning, we have to learn to swap the linear for the non-linear and the controlled for the cacophonous. To change PD, we have to take an important look at why the VLC is emerging as an influential PD source? As social media gains strength as a professional resource, will we start to see real growth in teachers and innovative learning in every classroom? I think those of us on Twitter already know the answers.
Holly Clark is the Co-Author of The Google Infused Classroom follow her on Twitter or Instagram or FB Group.
