Imagine you’re going in for an important surgery. In the pre-op appointment, your surgeon mentions she doesn’t really like the new laser technology, and she uses the same procedures and tools as she did in the 90s. As you’re working on your 2025 return, your tax lawyer states the new tax laws don’t make a lot of sense, so he advises clients based on 2005 statutes. Chatting with the pilot as you board a commercial flight, he reveals he’s a little behind in his flying hours, but he’s been taking a parasailing class which has absorbed most of his time and energy the last few months.
Of course we wouldn’t allow any of these professionals to neglect their obligations in this way, but we often nod sympathetically when teachers tell us how they have intentionally or by fault not had an active role in their own professional learning.
Teacher responses to professional development in education are varied. Some teachers are voracious learners and early adopters of new techniques. They crave exploration and experimentation and they are always seeking a better way of perfecting their craft. Most teachers accept PD as a necessary part of their jobs. They’d rather spend time with their students, but they are able to take tidbits from the PD activity and incorporate them into their teaching. Some teachers do almost anything to avoid PD. They complain that they’ve already heard everything that was said; the content doesn’t apply to their grade level or subject matter, or the information is faulty, flawed, useless, fluffy, biased, overly complicated or irrelevant.
Honestly, sometimes those complaints are fair. Educational leaders have not always taken all of their staff into consideration when designing professional learning opportunities, and new legislative priorities have driven specific PD requirements that are not always universally applicable.
However, we know that students learn more from teachers who learn more. Research in adult education points to the importance of job-embedded professional development. This means that teachers need to learn about their job while they’re doing their job in authentic settings with their peers. They need time to collaborate with their peers about the new learning and they need structured time to purposely reflect on their individual learning. Like our students, teachers need to know “why I need to learn this.”
Nodaway Valley schools embrace the Professional Learning Community model which incorporates all of those components. Our teachers work with their peers to address four key questions originally credited to Robert and Rebecca DuFour: What should all students know or be able to do? How will we know if they’ve learned it? What do we do if they don’t learn it? What do we do if they already know it?
Don’t let the simplicity of those questions fool you. Therein is an unending capacity for continuous learning in every facet of curriculum, instruction and assessment. The key is for teacher teams to wrestle with these questions, use student work to drive their instruction and to push in a new direction when/if student data indicates a weak area.
In the past, a significant percentage of our teachers have not been able to engage in this work on a regular basis, primarily because of our calendar limitations. With an hour on Wednesday afternoons at the end of the day, coaches have needed to facilitate practices. In cycling through various needs, we have tailored our professional learning planning to fit the time given rather than to fit the needs of our staff.
We are currently working on the 2026-27 school year calendar and we may have some changes in store for professional learning and staff time collaboration. Teacher learning is not only for those who have weak skills or areas; it’s arguably more important for our strongest educators to share their successes and reflect on how they can extrapolate success from one area to another. We want our students to be lifelong learners and we need to model this expectation ourselves.