Turning PD into a Positive

Professional development, it’s mandatory but it can also be jarring, there’s the expense, pinning down what PD the teachers will actually do, justifying the time spent outside of the classroom, finding enough people to cover …

And as learners, teachers can be difficult. They’re discerning, they have expertise in education obviously and if the PD isn’t learner centred and relevant, teachers can very quickly become critical.

Trent Driver, an economics teacher by trade who has run PD courses and is just about to take over the principalship at Scotch College in Adelaide says, “Teachers can be really big cynics, they can be highly critical when they are working with someone else, they spend their days individualising work and tailoring and differentiating it and making it work in the context of the kids that are in front of them.

“When they feel that professional development isn’t about them and their context and placing them as centrally as the content, they can sometimes ask questions as to whether it really applies to them.

“I think the real challenge of good quality professional learning is to put the learner at the centre … we ask teachers to go through experiences in their professional learning that we would never put a kid through and that never tick any of the boxes that great looking pedagogy and great looking learning do.

“You never put a kid in a lecture theatre with 200 other people and ask them to listen to somebody and watch slides for two hours and then learn something and act on it and make a change to their practice or behaviour in any way. But how often do we do that with teachers, how often do we flick them a random video out of context that might be based in evidence but doesn’t apply to them or their needs in that point in time?”

Tes’ recently released Professional Development Survey confirms those suspicions, it found that only 46% of teachers found professional learning that they have undertaken enhanced their performance in the classroom, underlining the need for compact, high quality, very tailored PD options.

Done well, PD can play a role in attracting new staff and retaining existing ones and a quality PD program resonates strongly with the current crop of young teachers.

Mel Bryden the Head of Junior School at St Luke’s Grammar School in Sydney’s northern beaches says, “Teachers increasingly know what they want in their careers and they’re very intentional about that, they really want schools to support their professional goals, and they have become more reflective, so they are very attracted to that strong community of learners and they hear about schools that support that. They really want to be valued and their learning recognised and they want schools to support them in their professional career development.”

Ari Guha the Head of Junior School at Redlands says, “That Gen Z population of teachers want that career progression quickly. They’re looking to move quickly with professional development.”

Bryden believes shorter, webinar-based PD courses are easier to fit into a schedule and should be the way forward. “Finding cover for teachers to go off for a whole day is really tricky so it’s not always possible that they will be able to go to the course of their choice,” she says.

Bryden adds, “There is a school in Queensland that has a mantra; ‘Just in Time, Just for me and Just enough’ and I think that’s a really good way of putting professional development into those bite sized chunks for teachers.”

Ian Holden Senior Education Consultant at Tes says, “Our statistics indicate that teachers are very keen to engage with that cycle of professional growth and development.”

According to the findings in the Tes PD Survey, 74% of schools champion the raising of teaching standards to improve learning outcomes and 75% of teachers would prefer a mix of offsite (in person) and online training.

Trent Driver says, “I think that for someone to be able to take great quality, evidence-based learning that is paired to the stage of experience and needs of the individual would be a wonderful step forward and would solve a lot of problems.”

To download a copy of the full Tes Report, ‘Professional Development – what is the state of play?' click here 

To watch the webinar ‘Professional Development: the link to recruitment & retention’ click here.

Image by Tirachard Kumtanom