What If?

One of my mentors used to say to me, “Kate, you can’t pour from an empty cup.” I used to look at her incredulously and think, “I get it, but how can I get all of the expectations of my job done with excellence and still have anything left in me?”

The role of an educator requires them to do a lot more than just uploading information into a student’s database. Educators are therapists, mentors, stand-in parents, recess patrol, nurses’ aides, secretaries, and they are also still people. 

Educators everywhere are leaving the profession, not because of the kids or money; they knew what they were getting into. According to a National Education Association (NEA) survey of its members in February 2022, “A staggering 55 percent of educators are thinking about leaving the profession earlier than they had planned.” They are leaving because of the lack of sustainability and burnout, and the educators left behind end up even more strained due to having to cover and fill-in for their absent partner. This is a domino effect caused by vast teacher vacancies and an inconsistent substitute teaching pool. “Exhausted and exasperated, classroom teachers and other school staff are under an unprecedented level of strain, made worse by recent dire staff shortages that have plagued school systems across the country.” How do we ensure that the teachers who are remaining in the classrooms are able to do all the things required of educators and still have enough left in them to feel valued as professionals and as humans?

Proposed answers may include yoga classes, chair massages at the school, or coffee and donuts as a surprise, but none of those are a solution. It requires more than that. The solution may be a complex combination of things, but it must include valuable professional development to support educators in their personal career goals and an equitable system of educator evaluation. For this piece, I’ll focus on the first part. How can we ensure that educators feel that professional development is actually a value-add and not just a waste of time?

What SHOULD Professional Development (PD) Be? 

I have been in education for 17 years, and I have sat through some pretty exhausting sessions. I might grocery shop on Instacart, pay bills, or add things to my Amazon wishlist while the presenter would painfully read the slide deck to us. It was never beneficial and seemed more like a punishment than something that was meant to make me better. 

So, how do you make PD valuable for people? First and foremost, it is a choice. Professional development can’t be based solely on the school or district needs. That’s necessary, but insufficient. Educators have to have choice so they can find value in what they are learning and how they are spending their time. 

Just like teachers are expected to design learning experiences to match their students' needs and interests, teachers should be able to choose their PD journey based on their interests and goals in their personal career. These opportunities can be found in many different places–including at 2Revolutions in our graduate programs. In those programs, the focus is on educators–their needs and goals are valued, and they drive the learning experience. 

So how does this work? Sit down with your educators at the beginning of a school year and ask them to lay out their goals for the year and beyond. Then work together to create 1-3 goals that can be tracked and supported by the school. For each of the goals, ask the educator to find some opportunities for further growth and learning that they would like to participate in. 

Yes, there might be an expense associated with it. But you won’t have to worry about coffee or lunch orders or housing 40 disgruntled staff while someone reviews the new initiatives. Instead, you will see joy from your staff: 

• after they come back from a day of science exploration at the aquarium where they partnered with educators across the country to come up with some interactive learning experiences to bring directly back to their classroom,

• as they request to share at a staff meeting a skill or lesson application they learned during their graduate class with 2Revolutions,

• as they share the excitement from a session on interactive discovery of plot with their favorite author and have this cool activity they want to implement and let you see in their classroom next week, or

• after they have the ability to witness firsthand a Community of Practice, designed with and for your staff, and see them each open up, work together, and enjoy learning something that they need, want, and signed up to learn. 

In all of these examples, professional development changes from a punishment to a gift when you allow the learning goals to be individualized, prioritized, and valued.

Over my years of teaching, I had one manager that consistently asked me what I wanted to do next. There was never an expectation that I had to stay at the school or in a specific role. After I told him, every time we checked in, he would ask me how my overall plan was working and what I needed from him. When he would see positions that came up that I might be interested in, he would send them my way–always with a tagline of, “I don’t want to see you go, but I know you want to do this in the future, and I would be willing to be your reference if needed.” I stayed with him longer than I stayed at any other school, and I was invested in his goals for the school. I felt like he valued me and my needs, and therefore I did whatever I could to show him I valued him and his goals for the school building. 

Professional development should be about exactly that: development. And development has to be both valued by the individual and supported by managers in order to work. 

We have a practice at 2Revolutions of asking, “What if…” or “How might we…”  and just brain dumping as many things as we can that we would like to see. When asking yourself, “What if educators felt valued and heard?” just imagine what could happen.