Lately I’ve been helping to organize a professional development event for CUNY Writing Fellows and have been thinking about the concept of professional development for educators in a university setting. While we have managed to find enough Fellows and faculty members to sit on the panel and to conduct workshops, I’ve been surprised by the number of experienced people who don’t feel they have much to offer.
It occurs to me that this may be symptomatic of a broader set of ideas about professional development itself. First I suspect that at least some people (wrongly or rightly) associate professional development with “climbing the ladder” or as tools for furthering one’s career without actually doing anything substantive. In this case it seems pretty obvious why people who take teaching seriously might be skeptical. Then there’s the problem of verbalizing our practice. This is a much more interesting issue to me as I often find it so difficult. How do we explain the nuances of communicating with our students or represent the complexity of understanding their needs in a few Power Point slides? Can the experience of years of teaching be easily written up in a technical assistance manual or condensed into a 45-minute workshop (despite the free coffee)?
Obviously there are more and less effective ways of accomplishing this but I’m not sure it’s ever effortless and certainly not perfectly generalizable. And, as difficult as this can be, it also seems necessary. Maybe another problem is the assumption that in order to facilitate a workshop or any other professional development activity we must speak from a position of authority. Yet this actually seems counter to the pedagogical approach that many of us have worked so hard to implement. When it comes to running a workshop so many of us (myself included) feel a certain amount of anxiety about telling others how they should teach. Of course, no one ever said professional development has to follow this authoritative model. Some of the best workshops and trainings I’ve attended have made use of the experience and skill in the room rather than starting with the omniscience of the facilitator who pretends to impart the one right way of teaching. (I’ve experienced this with training and professional development for community-based organizations as well) Now everyone sitting around in a room sharing their teaching experiences could come off as a little too warm and fuzzy, but I’m not arguing against specificity or structure. That said, I think there is something really valuable about hearing the problems that others face in the classroom and some of the solutions they have tried, whether successful or not.
I agree. It is refreshing to present a less-structured and more socratic approach to learning … allowing participants to guide how much time and discussion is spent on professional development topics/issues based on their needs and interest. This isn’t to say there shouldn’t be specific learning points or structure … it is simply an alternative approach and, if applied in the right setting, for an appropriate audience, can be far more enriching.
There have been times when facilitating workshops I’ve stuck to my prepared outline from beginning to end and regretted the lost opportunity to more fully engage my audience. It’s also about having the confidence to let go.
In my role as a Career/Professional Development Coach I use questioning, probing and listening to uncover clients’ needs and our agendas are driven by them. It is a matter of giving up some control to allow the dialogue to move in the direction of their most significant issues.
What I know for sure … professional development/communications skills are often undervalued but, in fact, they offer some of the most powerful tools for today’s students/business professionals.