Professional Development and Reflective Teachers

In order to be good teachers, whether you're k-12 or higher education, there are several things that have to happen. You have to be aware of the ongoing conversations in education, both trends in teaching and the science informing those trends. You have to be doing the work applying those things in your classroom. And you need time. You need time to keep up with reading, follow people on Twitter, attend professional development, and reflect on what is going on in your classroom and how you can continually improve how you are serving your students.

Yet most teachers will tell you that they are overwhelmed. That they do not have the time or money to attend PD, that PD is not accessible, that educational research is not accessible.

If schools want better teachers they have to build in paid time for their teachers to attend valuable, relevant professional development that they can use immediately. They need to provide time to workshop and talk through these ideas, not just to listen to a lecture. The ideas and approaches need to be presented in such a way that it is EASY for them to implement.

This semester I am giving a series of professional development workshops on campus. The theme is "How to Serve Our Students" (and yes, this is totally why I chose that phrasing. I like to amuse myself).

There are four parts. I've present the first two, and I'll update this post with links when I present the other two.

• Designing your syllabus
• Making your class accessible
• Supporting the whole students

• Anti-racist pedagogy, a roundtable with students

Very little in these presentations is "new" and my way of doing things is not ground breaking or unique. BUT it does take concepts and ideas that are fairly accepted in k-12 and amongst educators and presents them to professors, assuming little to no familiarity. Provides easy steps, tips, and models for them to use.

The professors and staff who have attended have found them useful.

But not many have.

So we have an issue of access.

This is why I share my materials online, maybe more people find them useful them.

But I'm also thinking of starting short blog posts that deal with every day classroom issues, short posts that cover a very narrow topic or thing that happens and provides easy answers or suggestions.

It continues to be a culture shock for me the divide between higher ed "experts in content" not "teachers" I think because even if that's a distinction you make, if you've been a professor for a while, surely you've gotta see that being a better teacher is easier on you and better for students, right? Or maybe I'm just projecting. I know these things are culture shifts and those can be hard.