What Teachers Really Want for PD Days: Breakfast, Lunch, and Time to Work
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder shares what teachers consistently say they actually want from professional development days.
Key Takeaways
- Feed them - Providing breakfast and lunch shows respect for teachers' time and energy
- Give them work time - Unstructured time to plan, grade, and organize their classrooms is the most valued PD activity
- Less presentation, more time - Teachers get more from having time to do their jobs than from sitting through another presentation
Transcript
All right, here's the agenda for our back to school professional development days.
We will start the day with breakfast and then we will have a one hour PD session.
And then the rest of the day is yours to work in your room and lunch is provided.
And the same is true tomorrow.
And we'll have the same schedule for our third and final professional development day.
So see you then.
Now, if your school had a professional development day, kind of back to school schedule like that, what would you think?
One of the things I'm hearing from a lot of people is just that there are too many distractions from getting ready to start school.
There's too little time to work in your room.
There's too little time after the floors have been waxed.
You can actually, you know, move all of your stuff back in and get ready.
and i think it is important to do professional development at the beginning of the year i think it's it's not something that we should just skip but i also think that small doses are good right a lot of the research on effective professional development says that it is sustained throughout the year and that means we don't necessarily need to do three full days of 72 different topics and then give people 15 minutes to work in their rooms i think people need substantial amounts of time in their classrooms to get ready And we do need to do professional development.
It does need to be very focused, but we don't need to do it all day, every day.
Let me know what you think.