Opening PD Days: How to Conduct an Inservice, Both Well and Poorly
The effectiveness of an inservice always comes down to how teacher-centric is it.
As opening professional development days for public high schools begin across the country, many of which will be virtual amid the pandemic, it is instructive to take a moment to review what works and what doesn’t during an inservice — from a teacher’s perspective.
What Doesn’t Work: An inservice speaker showing off his or her knowledge or bona fides to an audience.
It was an odd start to our first morning back in the building. A man with a disheveled appearance resembling Milton from the film Office Space was busy organizing stacks and stacks of overhead transparencies on two long tables in the cafeteria while the faculty, by turns bewildered and bemused, looked on. Switching on an overhead projector, Milton’s voice unexpectedly boomed: “We will now look at my Discovery Learning Method of teaching!” At which point he snatched an overhead from the table, slammed it down onto the projector, and began reciting the words on the slide without so much as a glance downward or behind his shoulder at the screen:
“There is no such thing as educational value in the abstract. The notion that some subjects and methods and that acquaintance with certain facts and truths possess educational value in and of themselves is the reason why traditional education reduced the material of education so largely to a diet of predigested materials.”
That was John Dewey, my friends, the great John Dewey.
Quotations from other luminaries followed, all recited from memory: Gandhi, King, Vygotsky, Du Bois, Locke, Mencken, Lincoln. Even Foucault was given his due. It was like sitting through a spoken word performance of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. But the presentation, an unsubtle all-day affair, was largely devoid of anything useful or tangible to take back to my classroom, unless I intended to regale my high school students with parlor tricks masked as erudition.
What Works: Kinesthetic activities designed to get to know new staff or reconnect with the veterans.
My school’s physical education teachers were the brainchildren behind two especially effective opening PD days. The first, an obstacle course spread out in the gymnasium requiring both mind and body to navigate, found us split into groups of five or six while competing for prizes. Some lasting friendships were formed that day; at a minimum, we were all forced to interact with faculty that we typically didn’t, which would pay dividends during the coming school year when the stakes were high and the consequences real.
Another year-opening inservice found teachers frantically competing again, this time in a series of Minute to Win It games. From the defying gravity challenge, in which we had to keep balloons safely above the ground by blowing upward, to frenetic rounds of rock paper scissors, such activities not only helped us get to know the new hires, they also built community — and could thus be replicated writ small in our classrooms to do the same.
Note that no gimmickry was required for these inservices — no paid speakers, no elaborate equipment, no rental of expensive space. (Elaborate escape rooms were arranged for another year’s inservice, which were certainly creatively designed, but the links between these escape rooms and the day-to-day implementation of instruction was tenuous at best.)
How to Conduct It Virtually: Although likely not as effective as an in-person implementation, simple online cooperative games could also facilitate building community, offering critical opportunities for both new and seasoned staff to interact in a virtual environment.
What Doesn’t Work: Guest speakers who criticize “typical” inservices, but then deliver typical inservices anyway.
Faculty were alerted several days in advance to the arrival of the guest speaker, a former teacher who had penned a best-selling book on student-engagement strategies. The impending PD day was hyped up in an email sent to teachers: the author will “discuss his ideas about going beyond engagement to empower students with examples of teachers putting this concept into action. Bring your laptops and your questions!” In preparation for the star-powered talk, our district purchased hundreds of copies of the book over the summer, distributing them to teachers as we filed into the auditorium.
The author-speaker began with a few self-deprecating jokes to warm up the crowd. Then he began listing off criticisms of prototypical inservice lectures: that they didn’t offer useful or practical strategies to take back to the classroom. That they weren’t hands on. That they featured a speaker simply talking about how to teach, rather than leading a full-fledged demonstration. That they offered a sage-on-the-stage cycling through PowerPoint slides. These critiques went over especially well; the audience, though captive, was in stitches. It was like shooting fish in a barrel.
But then, over the course of the next two hours, all without a break or even a pause, the author-presenter sagely spoke to us from the stage, flipped through PowerPoint slides, and described to us — in the vaguest of possible terms — teaching strategies wholly removed from a high school classroom experience. No calls for us faculty to get into groups or to think-pair-share with our neighbors. No appeals for questions from the audience. Not even a single request for a show of hands. Nothing. No engagement whatsoever. We could have screened a video of his talk instead; it would have saved him the trip, and the district his travel expenses.
In his book Brain Droppings, comedian George Carlin illustrates the notion of irony with an especially salient example. “If a diabetic, on his way to buy insulin, is killed by a runaway truck, he is the victim of an accident,” Carlin writes. “If the truck was delivering sugar, he is the victim of an oddly poetic coincidence. But if the truck is delivering insulin, ah!, then he is the victim of irony.”
Our district had been sold a bill of goods and the irony of it hit us all like a runaway truck.
What Works: Having teachers set the agenda.
Once most of our summer break had passed through the proverbial hourglass, teachers were emailed questionnaires fishing for possible discussion topics for the opening PD week breakout sessions ahead.
When we arrived at the building on the first day, the many teacher-suggested topics were printed on a large bulletin board, and we were each given five pushpins. “Vote on which of these topics interest you most by placing a pin on the board next to the topic,” our principal instructed us.
One of those topics was “Copier Accessibility,” and it quickly became buried in pushpins. At my school in those days — several years before low-cost one-to-one Chromebook laptops became a realistic possibility — teachers weren’t permitted access to copiers in the copy room; rather, a single administrative assistant handled the lion’s share of the copying. That inevitably led to long delays, with sometimes as much as three to four school days passing before faculty received their completed jobs; the turnaround time was unpredictable. Which might have been a mere inconvenience for a long-tenured teacher, but for newer teachers (like me) it was especially onerous, since I was running only a day or two ahead of my classes, overwhelmed with planning and prep.
The Copier Accessibility meeting that afternoon was unsurprisingly well attended. Veteran teachers complained of after school trips to Staples or Kinko’s because of adjustments they made to lessons that they were set to deliver the next day. Rookie teachers were understandably concerned at the prospect of having to plan far enough ahead to have appropriate classroom worksheets ready for their kids on time. The administrator in the room sat silently and took notes during the session, including writing down our consensus recommendations, which essentially boiled down to one: teacher access to a school copier.
Two weeks later, a high-volume copier was wheeled in and installed in the faculty lounge, freely accessible to all staff. Although this was the most tangible and obvious of the recommendations that day to come to fruition, several other breakout sessions — notably, those on school discipline and climate — also yielded fruit.
The PD effort still stands as the best example I’ve encountered in my career of administrators listening to the concerns of teachers, channeling their concerns in a constructive manner, and then acting appropriately to solve the problems.
How to Conduct It Virtually: Have staff generate possible topics for breakout sessions; vote online to ascertain the best suggestions; form virtual breakout sessions unpacking the issues at hand; and then ensure that there is some sort of administrative follow-through, one way or another.
What Doesn’t Work: Soliciting teacher feedback but then offering no follow-through or follow-up.
At the start of the school year, faculty were asked to sketch out improvements that we as a school could make in the areas of instruction, discipline, scheduling, culture, and climate. “Make sure teachers and administrators communicate with each other when parent phone calls are made,” one teacher immediately suggested. “Build a system to notify teachers when a student skips a class,” another said.
“Ladies and gentleman, the administrative team and I want you to write down your suggestions, not just shout them out,” the principal interjected. “Please form groups of four or five people. One member of each group will need to grab some chart paper and a marker, and record your group members’ ideas. Then, we’ll share. I want to urge you to narrow your focus, be realistic with your suggestions, and think about how we could implement your ideas.”
We spent nearly two hours on the task, carefully considering and crafting proposals and possible policies; administrators patrolled the perimeter of the auditorium, monitoring at our progress cautiously from a distance. Once completed, we all stood up and engaged in a leisurely gallery walk, strolling by the many detailed suggestions put forth by our colleagues. Although far from perfect, taken altogether, it was an impressive display of teachers putting their heads together toward common goal: improving the school.
“Thank you so much for your participation in this activity today!” our principal enthused as we handed back the markers and unused chart paper. “I and the administrative team really appreciate these efforts. In the next few weeks, administrators will be reviewing your work and forming three or four ‘improvement committees’ tasked with putting many of your suggestions into action. We hope you will choose to participate in this endeavor as we take these critical next steps toward improving our school.”
Those words were spoken nearly five years ago. I’m still waiting for the so-called improvement committees to be formed — or for any follow-up communication at all.
The worst movies aren’t uniformly bad throughout their running time. Instead, the worst movies are the ones that disappoint you to your core, the films that show so much promise in their set up but fail miserably in their delivery.
Likewise with PD days. That’s what the “suggested school improvements” inservice, in particular, came to remind me of: a profoundly disappointing movie that began with such potential but left nothing to show for it. That PD day especially stung, because there had been a gathering of literally thousands years of teaching experience and talent and wisdom into one room, all of it directed toward one task: finding constructive solutions, rather than just throwing stones. But then the earnest efforts of so many were, whether by design or by negligence, discarded. The only lasting consequence of that day’s meeting, in fact, was a great pessimism among all who attended, as well as a cynicism evermore toward the motives of administrators asking for our feedback. Once bitten, twice shy.
So, whether these opening PD days are virtual or not, none are held in a vacuum and any one of them can have lasting consequences. Yes, these consequences can be negative. Or they can be positive, with problems solved and school community strengthened.
