Learning vs. Training: The Power of Real Professional Development

Last Friday I had the honor of presenting at the annual fall conference of the University of New Hampshire’s Learning through Teaching Program, and as I looked out at the audience excitedly talking, I was reminded that it was exactly a year ago that I had sat in a room, not all that dissimilar from the one I was currently standing in, in Reggio Emilia, Italy. Last year I was the one listening as the teachers and pedogogistas from Reggio shared the utterly amazing work they were doing with children, and rarely a day passes that I don’t think back to the experience I had there as a learner.

As I wrote about on my return, seeing and hearing the work that both teachers and students were doing in Reggio made me question all sorts of things I had taken as givens, such as helping students build stamina in reading, creating charts to help students hold on to learning, and equating engagement with students being ‘on task.” For me it was the best sort of professional development, the kind that left me reflecting on my practice, questioning my assumptions and coming away with a vision of teaching and learning that I wanted to work toward—despite the fact that I didn’t fully know exactly how I’d get there.

What passes as professional development these days, however, is often simply training for the implementation of a program. That’s not to say that kind of PD is inherently bad; I’ve been trained in many things over the years that I’ve found some use in—from how to take a running record to how to do guided reading. And God only knows how many times I’ve been trained to use a particular rubric to evaluate everything from a standardized test essay to a complex text. But to use a distinction made by the educator and writer David Warlick in a wonderful blog post titled “Are They Students or Learners?“, I think I was a student in those training session, not an actual learner.

As Warlick says students do, I came away equipped “with packaged knowledge and tools for recording packaged knowledge [through] prescribed and paced learning” rather than “with tools for exploring a variety of content, experimenting with that content, and discovering, concluding and constructing knowledge,” which is what learners do. And like students at the end of a lesson, the success of those training-like PD sessions could be assessed by “measuring what has been learned,” not by “measuring what the learner can do with what’s been learned,” which can only happen over time with much thought and often many mistakes.

This shift from professional development that invites teachers to discover and construct their own knowledge to PD that trains them to implement a program seems unfortunate in many, many ways. All the highest performing schools, for instance, from Finland to Ontario to Singapore, have invested in the very kind of PD that we seem not to value much here, where teachers are given time to explore and collaborate. And if David H. Pink, the author of the best-selling book A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, is even half-way right, we need to be able to do much more than deliver a script. As he writes in the introduction to his book:

“The last few decades have belonged to a certain kind of person with a certain kind of mind—computer programmers who could crank code, lawyers who could craft contracts, MBAs who could crunch numbers. But the keys to the kingdom are changing hands. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind—creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers. These people—artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers—will now reap society’s richest rewards and share its greatest joys.”

Making meaning, recognizing patterns, and seeing the big picture were all on display in the work I did with the teachers in New Hampshire, where I designed what the teachers in Reggio would call a “context for learning.” Rather than training the group to teach the process of meaning making that Dorothy Barnhouse and I describe in What Readers Really Do, we read one of my favorite short stories together,”The Raft” by Peter Orner, which allowed them to experience and construct an understanding of both the story and the process of thinking that supported that.

Using the simplest and most adaptable of tools—a T-chart that kept track of what we each noticed and what we each made of that (i.e., a question, an inference, a hunch, a connection or an interpretation), we shared out our ideas and talked in a way that allowed us to do the following:

We then explored how we might engage students in the exact same process we’d experienced by setting them up to explore a text by attending to what they noticed and discovering what they could make from that. And to better understand the thinking that involved, we explored a number of texts to notice what kinds of problems they posed for readers and how a student could solve those. We then ended the day with the participants sharing out what they wanted to hold on to—which as you can see from the take-away charts below were as varied as the ideas they’d constructed about “The Raft”:

Of course, the real measure of their learning will be what they discover as they explore and experiment with what they learned back in their own classrooms. And my hunch is that, just as with readers, that will depend on who they are, what they notice about themselves, their students and the texts they read, and how they fit those pieces together to create  a meaningful classroom.

And as for me, I learned something, too. As happens every time I’ve used “The Raft,” a few teachers made something from what they noticed that I’d never considered before, which expands and enriches my own understanding of this wonderful story. Also seeing the power of these take-away charts, I was reminded of the kind of pedagogical documentation I saw in the Reggio schools, where the walls were adorned not only with student products but with quotes that captured the students’ thinking as they engaged in the process. I want to work on that more this year, since quotes like these seem as much evidence of learning as any score on a rubric. In fact, I think I may have discovered the next step on my own learning journey.

And that’s the power of real professional development and real, authentic teaching: the teacher always discovers something, too, because she or he is a learner.