I Love the Learning, Yes, I do. I Love the Learning, How About You?

Andrea Reichenberger contributed today's post. More of Andrea's thinking can be found here.

I love new learning.  But I can count the number of times I have lost hours of my life that I will never get back sitting at a terrible conference, or a bad professional development listening to a speaker with no presence or personality, or one who speaks at his/her audience for hours in a monotone voice (Bueller...Bueller.) What disappointed me the most were the professional development sessions that were designed, but not modeled, after what we know is best practice in instruction.  That was always extremely frustrating to me.

No matter how bad the professional learning opportunity, as a learner, I force myself to take something away from it.  About five years ago I attended an RtI summit in a neighboring state.  It was death.  The presenters used a register of speech and vocabulary in which I had no background for context.  It was really difficult to learn anything, but I sure tried. It was a long bus ride (thank goodness it was a coach) back to the district, so I had some time to reflect.  Upon exiting the bus, my building principal asking me what I thought of the conference.  I was frank in my response.  “It was terrible,” and then I paused, “but I took away one very important lesson.”  

“What’s that?” she asked.

My answer was simple, yet profound because it ended up being a turning point in my teaching career: “I need to go back to school and get my reading license.”

I enrolled in a reading program and began classes two months later. If it hadn’t been for that God awful RtI summit, I wouldn’t be where I am today.

As a teacher, I am a learner first. I love attending conferences, workshops, and network meetings. I ALWAYS take away something new, and I’m usually excited about it.  Recently, I attended an orientation for a class I am taking with the Fox Valley Writing Project (Shout out to Lisa Weiss!) and even though it was an orientation, I walked away with some new ideas, and  I’m really excited about this learning opportunity.  

When I plan professional development, I do my best to design it so that everyone can take away new learning and apply it in their own instruction.  I ensure that I’m not doing all of the talking, I model, explain the purpose, and offer choice,  I build in collaboration, I provide guided practice, and I create independent tasks. But there are still teachers who seem to hate professional development, and I struggle to learn and understand why.  Just as when I’m in the classroom, I ask myself, what do my students need in order to meet the standards and how can I make the task engaging and relevant?  As educators, I feel strongly  that we should all be learners and model this for our own students.

What do we do when teachers don’t want to learn or keep up with best practice?  One of the ideas we are exploring  in our district is working toward empowering them.  We’d like to offer more choices for teachers and allow them to “chose their own adventure” in professional development--make it more focused on inquiry. We even asked teachers if they would be interested in being a part of the planning and delivery in the 2015-16 school year so we can look at creating teams.  We had quite a few teachers express interest.   This idea is still in it’s infant stage and will involve a great deal of collaboration and planning.  I know I will learn a lot as we go through the process and guess what?  That really excites me because I love new learning!