The best professional development I’ve attended had one thing in common. If someone was talking to a group of teachers, they were either:

1. Preparing us to see something demonstrated.
2. Debriefing something we had just seen demonstrated.

This extends to any kind of coaching:

• If a basketball coach is talking to the team, they are either explaining a drill the team’s about to do or they are reviewing what happened.
• If a guitar teacher is talking, they are explaining something we’re about to do on the guitar or they’re breaking down what just happened on a guitar.
• If a swim instructor is talking, they’re either introducing something we’ll do in the pool or they are talking about what just happened in the pool.

You wouldn’t pay a cooking instructor who never actually gets the food out, right?

So why didn’t my professional development include any actual teaching!?

My Depth and Complexity Training

When I learned how to use Depth and Complexity:

1. My boss got the group of 8 rookies together in a random classroom in the morning.
2. She spent 10 minutes explained a concept we needed to understand.
3. She gave us a copy of a lesson plan we were about to see taught.
4. We went to a classroom and watched a teacher teach a lesson.
5. We met back in the classroom and talked about the lesson we had just seen.

Any whole-group talking from my boss either prepared us to see something in action or debriefing us on what we had seen.

Junior Great Books Training

In order to run a Junior Great Books discussion, we had to attend a two day training. At this training:

1. The leaders explained how to lead a “shared inquiry discussion” about a story.
2. The leaders acted as our teachers, leading us through an actual discussion about an actual story we had read.
3. Afterwards, we all debriefed about how it felt, what was hard, etc.

This was probably the most powerful PD I experienced as a teacher because I felt empowered to lead a complicated, unpredictable discussion with my 6th graders. I could always fall back on that experience and think about how the leaders handled difficult moments.

No More Info Dumps

Contrast these experiences with the PD that I would lead! 60 minutes of me talking in front of a PowerPoint screen. 😣

I thought it was doing a great job because I occasionally stopped talking and let teachers “discuss with a neighbor” and share out.

But these were information dumps. I never let teachers experience the real thing.

So, any time you find yourself standing in front of a group of teachers, make sure you’re introducing the real thing or debriefing the real thing. And that “real thing” could be a classroom demonstration, a simulation of a classroom with you as the teacher, or a video clip of a real classroom.