Adam Piggott has picked up on my criticism of professional development Over at his blog, he describes a particularly curious team-building activity involving white water rafting. It's well worth a read if you haven’t seen it.
Team building aside, reading Adam's post reminded me of the “deep thoughts” aspect of PD sessions, which serve as the pièce de resistance of those torturous events.
Deep thoughts shared during professional development are meant to be earth-shattering, life-changing snippets of information that blow your mind and transform your thinking about life, the universe, and everything.
You know they’re deep because they're usually followed by “learning nugget” activities in which the PD participants collaborate in five-minute “mini-sessions” with the learning outcome of “unpacking” the profound implications of the deep thought in question.
Unfortunately, most of the deep thoughts expressed during professional development are deep enough to be essentially meaningless.
Case in point, during one of the countless PD days I had to endure when I worked as a high school teacher, the “mistress of ceremonies” (yes, she referred to herself as that) shared the following deep thought:
Seventy-five percent of the jobs our students will do in the future don’t exist yet. Our task as educators is to utilize our best practices to prepare our students for those nonexsistent jobs.
After the sonic boom of the expressed deep thought subsided, I joined four of my colleagues in an impromptu learning-nugget mini-session during which we were supposed to brainstorm the implications of the deep thought.
I looked at my colleagues and said, “Deep. Real deep. So deep, it’s meaningless.”
It was the only learning nugget I could offer in response to the sagacity of the deep thought that had been expressed.
Team building aside, reading Adam's post reminded me of the “deep thoughts” aspect of PD sessions, which serve as the pièce de resistance of those torturous events.
Deep thoughts shared during professional development are meant to be earth-shattering, life-changing snippets of information that blow your mind and transform your thinking about life, the universe, and everything.
You know they’re deep because they're usually followed by “learning nugget” activities in which the PD participants collaborate in five-minute “mini-sessions” with the learning outcome of “unpacking” the profound implications of the deep thought in question.
Unfortunately, most of the deep thoughts expressed during professional development are deep enough to be essentially meaningless.
Case in point, during one of the countless PD days I had to endure when I worked as a high school teacher, the “mistress of ceremonies” (yes, she referred to herself as that) shared the following deep thought:
Seventy-five percent of the jobs our students will do in the future don’t exist yet. Our task as educators is to utilize our best practices to prepare our students for those nonexsistent jobs.
After the sonic boom of the expressed deep thought subsided, I joined four of my colleagues in an impromptu learning-nugget mini-session during which we were supposed to brainstorm the implications of the deep thought.
I looked at my colleagues and said, “Deep. Real deep. So deep, it’s meaningless.”
It was the only learning nugget I could offer in response to the sagacity of the deep thought that had been expressed.
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