Ask any teacher if they have too much going on, and they will furiously nod their head. Yes! All teachers need things taken off of their plates. Yet, most professional development is about adding yet another new idea.
If folks are already overwhelmed, we should be very careful about adding more!
Solutions In Search of Problems
So many professional development sessions begin with a random solution. They offer a cool new idea for everyone to try out.
This is backwards.
We should identify the biggest problem a teacher is facing and only then provide a solution.
- I led a session where I showed teachers how I used iMovie to make movie trailers out of students’ poetry. But that doesn’t solve a single teacher’s problem. It was just a random project I did. And now everyone thinks they have to do it.
- I saw a talk where the presenter showed how they taught an afterschool class inside the game Minecraft. Ok. That’s cool. But does that solve anyone’s problem? Is a single teacher saying, “My biggest problem is that I don’t know how to teach my class inside of Minecraft”?
- There are so many sessions with titles like, “45 Cool Tech Tools In 45 Minutes.” But no teacher is working late at night because they don’t have enough websites or apps. “More tech tools” isn’t going to solve a teacher’s problem.
Not only does this sort of professional development fail to solve a problem, each session adds new problems! They create more work. Now a bunch of already-overwhelmed teachers will spin their wheels trying to do some random new thing.
3 Questions
If you’re planning professional development, ask yourself a few simple questions:
- What problem am I trying to solve for teachers?
- Is this actually their problem? And is it a Top 3 problem for them? (We only want to tackle the most important things!)
- Is this problem solvable given their resources, abilities, etc? (Don’t try to tackle an impossible problem that no one has ever solved.)
Sounds obvious, right?
But I’m sure you’re as guilty as I am of jumping in without considering what I’m even doing.
Example: Learn To Code
I’ve written before about this silly keynote. The speaker told teachers that “everyone should learn to code” (and, no, the speaker could not code).
I’m sure many already overwhelmed teachers went back to school and started trying to teach coding.
But, they never asked, “Wait. What problem am I trying to solve?”
I guess the problem would be, “My 3rd graders cannot code.”
But “my 3rd graders cannot code” is not a Top 3 problem. It’s not even in the top 100 problems that an elementary teacher faces! In fact, it isn’t an actual problem at all. Of course your 3rd graders cannot code. They also cannot change oil, fix a leaky drain, or speak Esperanto. And that’s fine.
So, we can stop at Question 2. This problem is not actually a problem. We can move on.
Isn’t that refreshing!? Saying, “Oh, I don’t need to do this.” All professional development should be about removing work, not adding more work.
Example: Visual Aids
A teacher asked me to help design a lesson to improve his students’ visual aids.
We spent three emails just on Question #1: What is the actual problem we’re trying to solve? Because “better visual aids” is way too vague. I don’t know what it means. A visual aid’s quality depends entirely on the context and purpose.
It turned out that the teacher’s true concern was that some students’ work was sloppy. It had eraser marks. So his actual question was really, “How do I get my students to be neater?”
But “make students neater” certainly isn’t a top 3 problem for teachers, right? It’s not a problem at all. Many successful adults are quite messy. That’s fine. Here’s Einstein’s Desk. Imagine focusing on “neatness” with Albert Einstein. What a waste of your time!
So in this case, we can say, “You know what, I’m trying to solve a problem that isn’t really a big problem. Forget about it.”
And that feels so nice.
Don’t Reach For Random Solutions
So, before I go grabbing a solution, I need to make sure I know what problem I’m solving. I need to know if that problem is worth spending time on. I need to make sure this is actually teachers’ problem – they have enough as it is. And I need to know if the problem is actually solvable, given our limited energy, resources, and abilities.
As I like to say, focus on solving problems, not just giving more information.