The Bull Sessions also known as Professional Developments

In reading about the experiences teachers are having this PD season, I see a lot of frustration and even disgust at being trapped in a grueling, insulting dog-and-pony show. Of course, I have a lot of sympathy for those of you still out there grinding, and I write to offer some context and encouragement. 

Like many of you, I can count on one hand the number of PDs I attended  that were actually helpful and that were conducted by people who knew what they were doing. Mostly these sessions were just exercises in patience, in how to hold your tongue and keep your head from exploding while thinking about the gazillion really important things you could be doing with that time.

Writing as a guy who went through PDs summers, weekends, and Mondays-then-Tuesdays for twenty-five years, I want to reassure you that your anger is righteous, you are not alone, and you can get through it if you keep in mind what’s really happening. Second in a series.

 Bullshit

This is from something I wrote called Answer Key: A Teacher’s Completely Unofficial, Fiercely Unauthorized Handbook and Survival Guide.

forty-one

Meetings are mostly bullshit.

Most of the people who call meetings do so because it’s their job. You can begin by remembering that, if your job is to go to meetings, you think having meetings is a job. It is not. As a teacher, going to meetings is most often a thing that keeps you from doing your job, keeps you from your work, makes it harder and makes it take longer.

People who have meetings are mostly out-of-classroom personnel looking for a way to justify their paychecks. They need access to you in order to check an “I did this” box, and they need a mechanism for pushing their work onto you. I think you’ll find that you can ignore most of what happens in meetings because, and this is true, I probably had the same exact meeting about differentiated instruction twenty times. Every time they were going to follow up and we were going to create a plan and report back and blah blah blah, but nobody ever follows up. That’s why you have to start from the same place and say the same shit twenty times. Check box.

Meetings with colleagues where you work together to set your own agenda and are free from bosses “checking on you to see if you need anything” are not bullshit, but they are still a pain in the ass. Everybody is busy and you always have something else to do. But even though they may include a preliminary bout between anger and exasperation, and often a detour into bellyaching and recrimination, they are still the most productive meetings I ever had. We actually did stuff that was actually relevant to our actual jobs. At least it felt like we were on the same side, mostly.

forty-two

Professional Development(s) are Bullshit.

Meetings called “professional development” are almost always bullshit. They are often delivered by people who don’t know your school or your students, and sometimes the messengers may not even know their own material. They may be there to show a video or read a presentation to you. On occasion, the meeting you were asked to prepare for may not even be the meeting you get. 

On this one I couldn’t even blame my bosses–not entirely anyway. I’ve had decent administrators turn entire PD weeks over to a teacher or team of teachers and suddenly the district sends a directive at 2:45 and it has to be done that day yadda yadda compliance. Check box. However, that doesn’t make it any easier to take.

Administrators are not teachers for a reason. Everything you know about constructing a lesson, sharing important information, following up in a timely manner, all that stuff is missing from the administrative brain. That’s how for twenty-five years, instead of what ought to be a five hour deep dive into parent outreach or child abuse recognition and response or support for special needs students, you get the exact same first hour of that PD over and over and over again.

These things will always be true:

• It’s frustrating to sit through the same PD for twenty-five years.

• It’s not always their fault, but that doesn’t make it any easier to take.

• It’s exasperating that there is never any follow up or follow-through.

• It’s maddening to have to sit through canned presentations from consultants who know a lot less than you do and get paid a lot more.

• It’s demeaning to be forced to do busy work in a workspace shared with a hundred other busy workers just so the marshals can monitor your pace of play and your attitude, you know, in order to make sure you're smiling through the bullshit.

And finally,

• It is degrading to be asked by administrators, “How can we make PDs better?”   It’s degrading and infuriating. And fucking ridiculous. They know. Of course they know. 

And if, in a moment of weakness or amnesia you actually give them an answer, they just pretend they haven’t heard you.

And that I do not forgive.