Imagine sitting in professional development surrounded by your fellow chairmen.  What do you picture?  If your picture of PD is a good one, you imagine productive and thought-provoking conversations about content and instruction, engaging activities that you can share with your teachers, resources and materials that can be taken back to be used in classrooms, and all the other things that would make you better than the bearer of bad news about grading, assessment, accountability, etc.

If your image of PD is bad,  you have probably lived through a series of PD that involved someone’s worn out, go-to activity for engaging you in learning that is far from relevant or useful to you or your teachers.  You’ve probably also sat through the development of norms about how you should play nice during the PD, all the while, thinking about how this will go over like a lead balloon with your department.  Or maybe the PD was everyone’s favorite, the ever so engaging PPT covering the latest required initiative that in no way assists you in carrying out the initiative effectively in the classroom.

Hopefully, you have experienced the “good” more often than the “bad”.  More importantly, I hope you have never experienced “The Ugly.”  Unfortunately, I have experienced “The Ugly” recently.  “The Ugly” occurs when looking around the room you with much sadness observe that everyone has given up.  What I mean by given up is that everyone has finally come to terms with the fact that we are on a consistent drip of “bad” PD that continues to get worse.  It isn’t that chairmen don’t want to learn or grow professionally.  They are yearning for resources and ideas to take back to their teachers. With repeated meetings lacking open discussion,  many, if not all of us, are just discouraged with the thought of returning home to our schools without any resources or ideas that will solve our problems or provide answers to our teachers questions and concerns.

I wonder if those in charge of PD recognize the signs of “The Ugly” or even the signs of bad PD?  When the entire room is openly checking email, grading papers, knitting, and surfing the web without any response to the presenter’s ongoing questions isn’t that a sign the PD is not going well?  Too often, the leaders of professional development view “The Ugly” as the fault of the participants.  Their excuse is that the participants are not following their beloved norms.  As observers, they would never write off a bad lesson lacking student engagement as the students’ fault.  They would ask the teacher why the students weren’t engaged.  Why don’t they do the same with professional development?