Practice What We Preach

Okay people, several of us have end of the year trainings coming up, and if you don't, you probably have several days coming in August during back to school. I am going to share something which has been weighing heavily on my conscience because I am probably the world's worst! I am going to broach the subject of teachers as students. We are awful ya'll!! We enter professional development with stacks of papers to grade, a fully charged phone, or the newest novel. If our students did that, we would take up the homework and gloat to the other teacher we did it. We would take up the phone and gloat to the student we did it. Or we would take up the book after having a stimulating conversation about the overarching theme (shoutout to my ELA friends!) so, I propose a new approach to professional development...practice what we preach! Here are a few tips to try before entering your next PD session:

 1) Remember the key to a healthy teacher/student relationship is respect. The presenter is the teacher in this situation. Show them the respect you expect of your students. Pay attention, take notes, and only use technology when appropriate. We don't believe it when our students say, "I'm reading notes on my phone." Why should the presenter think we are when she can see the FaceBook logo reflected in our glasses?? Can you guys tell I'm speaking from first hand experience?

 2) Mentally prepare. We know the purpose of the sessions ahead of time. Try to think of one thing you would like to leave the session knowing. Write it down. Ask the presenter if necessary. No matter what, leave the session knowing that one thing. I don't care if you leave a four hour long differentiation training session only knowing how to scaffold vocabulary, you know more than the guy beside you on his phone checking his fantasy team does, and you aren't making our profession look bad. (FYI, this is self directed at a past me as well. The post is seriously pot meet kettle.)

3) Be open to change. We are living in the 21st century you guys...and that makes us lucky (in my tech loving opinion!) But that also means we have to make an effort to keep up. We constantly ask to be treated like professionals and then revolt against what other professional do. I can promise you there are doctors who have had medical licenses for twenty plus years who are using technology that has been developed in the last five. Why shouldn't that same principle apply to our profession?

It's hard! We have fifteen million things going on and are required to attend meetings which take away our time to get those things done. But we have to try to rise above and make each opportunity, mandated or not, be to the benefit of our students.