$20-$30 billion
That’s Doug Lemov’s estimate for what districts are spending each year on professional development (PD). It’s a gargantuan amount that few argue is well spent (though that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t spend more!). With plenty of pressure on school districts to come up with some decent alternatives, particularly as they move to more high stakes evaluation systems, Lemov (with a couple of his colleagues) has an idea for improvement that he lays out in a new book Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better. The idea: teacher practice and a lot more of it.
As the authors* note, PD traditionally has been about having teachers listen, reflect, discuss, and debate. Instead, they propose that the simple act of having teachers practice their craft would lead to much more transformative success. And they assert it’s what really good teachers do relentlessly.
As a starting point, schools need to recognize the difference between simply doing something over and over again — which often just ends up reinforcing failed methods — with mindful, focused practice. Teachers need to routinely engage with each other outside their classrooms: role playing, observing video, and asking a lot of probing questions. It doesn’t sound too dissimilar to what is routine practice in Asian schools — and why their teachers make such full use of daily non-instructional time.
One of the 42 rules put forward is the “80/20” rule, in which teachers need to dedicate 80 percent of their PD time to relentlessly practice the 20 percent of skills considered essential to success. For example, the book describes how one teacher needed to prevent her students from throwing a discussion off-track with irrelevant or confusing responses. It took a lot of role play with another teacher to come up with a set of routine responses that kept students from deep-sixing the flow of a classroom discussion.
Another rule. Teachers shouldn’t just learn about a skill; they need to work on it until it becomes second nature. A PD session about the effective use of nonverbal cues is unlikely to work unless it is accompanied by plenty of practice, allowing teachers to master those subtle hand signals that, for example, make a student who is slouching sit up, or that communicate without words that an over-eager hand raiser needs to tone it down.
So how do we shift away from PD programs in which teachers are herded into the auditorium to hear some $2,000/day guru lecture at them and towards a system that looks more like play practice? Change the way schools function on a daily basis. PD simply can’t be relegated to formal PD days but instead needs to involve routine opportunity for informal practice, principal to teacher, teacher to teacher, teacher to student teacher.
*Authors: Doug Lemov, Erica Woolway, Katie Yezzi
Ruth Oyeyemi