Michigan Virtual University professional development training. Dave Trumpie
Andrea McKay Dave Trumpie
Chris Thomas Dave Trumpie
In July, Andrea McKay chatted over lunch with teachers who were developing a Chinese immersion program leveraging Skype chats with students in China. Earlier that day, she was inspired by five other teachers discussing what drives their passion to teach. Later, McKay, the lead social studies instructor for Michigan Virtual University, sat on a panel to share her blended learning expertise with others.
"It was wonderful," she says. "You got to learn from a variety of people about how things are working out in their classroom."
The event was Michigan Virtual University's MyBlend Summer Learning Day Camp, and it was an example of teacher professional development, or PD. In Michigan, teachers must complete a certain amount of these experiences every three years to maintain their certification. PD can be accomplished through continuing education credits at an accredited university, or by accumulating hours of educational opportunities offered by their district or other qualified source.
And when the teacher PD experiences are positive, reactions like McKay's to MyBlend Summer Learning Day Camp result — as do benefits to student learning in the classroom. Unfortunately, ask any public school teacher in Michigan, and you'll find there's another common kind of PD as well.
"It's a love-hate relationship teachers have with professional development," says Chris Thomas, a science teacher at Scarlett Middle School in Ann Arbor. "Sometimes, it's literally changed my world, and other times I count the seconds until I get to leave."
The good news is, the latter option doesn't have to be so common. Great teacher PD experiences — the kind that can truly impact student learning in a meaningful way — have a few things in common. Keeping these features in mind, teachers can seek out and administrators can design PD opportunities teachers love.
A differentiated experience
How's this for dull? Imagine thousands of teachers in more than a dozen countries having to sit through an identical PowerPoint presentation. Before Ann Arbor, Thomas taught abroad for the Department of Defense, and while he had plenty of good PD experiences there, the mass PowerPoint scenario happened as well.
"Our administrator said, 'I'm supposed to read this word-for-word. I'm going to go as fast as I can so we can all go home,'" he recalls. And even though Thomas was genuinely interested in the topic, he calls the impersonal, top-down way it was implemented "just rotten. "
Great PD, on the other hand, is personalized for the teachers in attendance. That means they're often in smaller settings and targeted for teachers with shared interests or challenges.
McKay, for example, when teaching in Jackson, found opportunities though her local ISD to learn about how to make outside learning resources available to her students, including placing tests online that they could take multiple times.
"As an AP psych teacher, it was really important for my kids to continue to develop these testing skills throughout the year as they were learning the content because their goal was to pass the AP psych test and earn college credit," says McKay.
The formula was simple: When the PD addressed her specific needs, it was directly beneficial to her classroom.
"One of the best ways to increase student achievement is to have really quality teacher PD," says McKay. "We are often told as teachers that we need to differentiate for our students, but that's not always what happens with teacher PD."
Time for comparing notes
Another important feature of effective teacher PD, says Jamie DeWitt, director of blended professional learning for Michigan Virtual Universities, isn't what the administrator of the PD will say, but what the teachers say to one another.
"It's really important to always give teachers time to talk about their students if you want to impact those students," says DeWitt.
That's why PD like MyBlend Summer Learning Day Camp builds this time into the event. The lunch during which McKay learned about the Chinese immersion strategy was a planned experience. Not only were teachers encouraged to sit together and discussed their classrooms, but facilitators joined the groups to ensure everyone had the chance to share.
In traditional PD, this often happens off the clock.
"When your meeting is done, you kind of hang around and talk to people about what they're doing and what this might look like in your classroom," Thomas says. "That's where a lot of the value happens for me."
Teachers as teachers
Finally, says DeWitt, another sign of teacher PD with the greatest potential to positively impact students is who does the instruction. Sure, subject matter experts can be helpful for some topics, but by and large, the best teachers are, well, teachers.
"We don't need to stand in front and say we know everything that's happening in their classrooms," she says. "We can facilitate the conversations with those who are doing great work."
That's why teachers were featured as panelists during MyBlend Summer Learning Day Camp to share blended learning best practices.
"They look at teachers as the experts and use their expertise to help people grow," says McKay.
And when teachers grow, so do their students. DeWitt hopes the experiences teachers had at MyBlend Summer Learning Day Camp encourages teachers to start taking risks in their classrooms, differentiating their curriculum for kids with different needs and reaching out to the community of teachers they met at the event for support.
Those are results McKay would like to see every teacher have after every PD experience — even if it takes seeking out opportunities outside their district.
"For teachers who don't feel like they have access to good PD, I would encourage them to see what they can find," she says. "There's a lot available that your district might not take advantage of that is there for you."
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