Why Professional Development is Challenging?

Professional development is challenging because of various reasons that exist, such as Unambitious professional development plans, continually disconnected from the classroom, and is not collaborative.

FREMONT, CA: A meaningful learning experience should be the goal of both students and teachers. Nevertheless, this is an ambitious vision for learning and teaching. Professional development has often been ineffective. Some of the significant challenges that teachers and schools face in their professional development are listed below:

Ownership is not cultivated: For teachers to be more engaged, they need a sense of autonomy and ownership over their students' learning. As part of professional development, teachers should be able to identify their own goals and how they plan to achieve them. Teachers can make collective decisions for their long-term professional development when they work together to improve their work.

Plans for professional development are not ambitious enough: It is common for professional development programs to be designed in silos without a broader understanding of how these practices and concepts can benefit students.

To keep efforts focused, schools should plan a roadmap for professional development. Teachers should have an instructional vision that prioritizes the school's goal for students learning as well as what they should do to support them. If the school's instructional vision is to promote inclusivity, teachers' professional development efforts should aim to disrupt stereotypes and encourage student engagement.

Continually disconnected from the classroom: Professional development takes time. In the same way that touch-and-go lessons will not serve students well, schools will not achieve their goals with short-term or one-time teacher training. Connecting teachers' learning with real-world classroom applications over a longer period of time instead is needed. Following training, teachers can apply their learnings in the classroom and evaluate how they work. Similarly to gym-goers who record themselves working out on their phones, teachers can record short clips of themselves in class to review their work, find recurring gaps in their "performance," and improve.

Individuals' learning needs are not addressed by one-size-fits-all professional development: It is most effective for professional development to support teachers to develop practices specific to their areas of expertise - math, science, languages, arts - non-differentiated training cannot cover the nuances involved in teaching these subjects. Different teachers will have different needs within specific subjects, depending on their prior experience and character. Professional development should require teachers to take charge of their own training by setting their own goals, defining their own problems of practice, or making instructional plans.