iEat, iRun, iBlog

Forgive me from deviating from my normal ramblings about food and running, to bring you my thoughts on another subject near and dear to my heart…teaching.  Well, actually what has motivated me to write has been the completely rejuvenating experience(s) I’ve had with professional development over the past few months.

Every so often in my career I’ve had various “epiphany moments” that have caused me to re-evaluate the way I see myself as an educator.  I’m always amazed how many times these moments come just when I need them most and serve to awaken my passion for teaching in a whole new way.  This current school year has been one of those “epiphany moments” in my career and it can all be traced back to the remarkable PD I’ve been a part of.

It actually started this fall when I decided to try a very different type of PD than anything I had participated in before.  Most of the PD in my career had consisted of taking graduate-level classes for my Master’s degree or for the purpose of continuing ed to satisfy my career ladder requirements.  This, along with the standard 1-2 workshops all faculty members at my school attend in a typical school year, was the extent of my PD.  I always managed to learn a few new things that might help me in the classroom but nothing really “got my juices flowing”, as one might say.  However, when I attended EdCampKC and got my first taste of how completely different and stimulating PD could be, I was hooked

EdCampKC was my first taste of what is a fast-growing paradigm shift in the way educators look at PD.  The “un-conference” model is not only a great way for educators to share ideas, but it breaks down the walls of typical educational hierarchy that can prevent a real fostering of ideas.  What I mean, is that for the first time in my career, I was having meaningful discussions about education while sitting in the same room as superintendents, principals, instructional coaches, and teachers.  The unique thing is that the “leaders” of the session were not the people at the top of the totem-pole.  I was sitting next to a school superintendent and talking with a middle school assistant principal, while an elementary school teacher led the discussion.  I had never been to a PD where it was’t some  master-teacher, school administrator, or other “expert” delivering the message to the lowly classroom teachers who were then going to take this wisdom and use it for the forces of good.  After a while, those of use who are just regular ‘ol teachers begin to feel like only those people with the fancy titles can deliver PD and give us what we need.  EdCampKC began to break down that wall of stereotype for me.

The walls completely crumbled last month when I attended EduCon 2.3 in Philadelphia, PA.  For starters, this was the first time I’d ever taken a professional day from school to attend a workshop.  Of course, I hate to call EduCon a “workshop” because that just isn’t the right term.  But then again, that’s kind of the point.  Whatever word I use…workshop, conference, etc…just doesn’t fit because of the stereotypes people have with those words.  Basically, EduCon is a 2-day experience held at SLA, a school in Philadelphia.  Educators from all over the continent come to share ideas about what’s working in education and to try and find ways to fix what isn’t.  These “conversations” are meant to be a collaboration with everyone there, not presentations led by a few people who already have all the answers.

I attended conversations led by a college professor, a school superintendent, a high-school English teacher, a school librarian, two kindergarten teachers, and an education consultant.  All of these sessions had the same common theme…let’s get together with a bunch of high-quality educators, talk about a topic that is important to us, share what’s working in our schools, and see if we can leave with some new strategies that we can implement when we get back home.  No lectures, no boring 45-slide powerpoint presentations, and no BS.  It didn’t matter if the person leading the discussion was a 2nd year teacher making $25,000 a year or a 30th year superintendent making $250,000 a year.  All that mattered was that everyone in the room contributed to the discussion and that we left EduCon with more knowledge than what we came with.

This remarkable experience led me to take a huge leap of faith in my own district this past week.  For our February inservice, our Professional Development Committee decided to have our own faculty lead various PD sessions instead of bringing in a big-time keynote speaker for us all to listen (nap) to.  I decided to throw my hat into the ring and volunteered to lead a PD session.  After 12 years of teaching, I’m very comfortable in front of a room of kids leading a discussion.  Leading a group of peers, though, had me scared to death.

However, the whole time I was preparing my plan for the PD session I was going to lead, I kept reminding myself of the great things I’d experienced at EdCampKC and EduCon.  I didn’t need to have all the “answers”.  I wasn’t the “expert”.  I simply had something I really wanted to share and felt that it could benefit my fellow colleagues.  If I approached my session in the “conversation” model instead of trying to be Mr. Bigshot, then hopefully we’d all walk out of that inservice feeling excited about the topic.

As I write this post in the middle of the night, about 36 hours after our inservice ended, I guess you could say I’m pretty excited with how things went.  I know I wasn’t the most polished presenter or lacked the charisma to captivate an audience for 2  hours…but I think the 16 fellow teachers who sat in that room with me came away with something they could use.  We had a great time with plenty of laughs (several at my expense), and I learned a lot about myself as a teacher.  Hopefully those teachers in that room with me got something useful out of our conversation that they can really use in their classrooms or in their daily routine.

I don’t see this leading to a future career as a well-paid consultant or being asked to speak at a national convention.  In fact, I’m sure at our next inservice, I won’t volunteer to lead a session.  But I know I won’t be afraid to lead a PD session again if I feel I have something useful to share.  And I know that my idea of what makes for good PD has forever been changed.  From now on, I want to be in a room with people who share my passion for a subject, are eager to learn, don’t care about job titles, and are willing to look for ways to become a better educator every day.  And it doesn’t matter where in that room I sit, I just want to be a part of the conversation.

Images:

Light Bulb No 1 by Chuck “Caverman” Coker on flickr

Toppled by leadenhall on flickr

AFC Bournemouth by Lucy Boynton on flickr

This entry was posted on February 19, 2011 at 11:19 pm and is filed under iBlog. Tagged: education, professional development, schools, teaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.