As we advance professional development practice, what are the successful methods for implementing professional development programs at scale – whether across schools, systems, regions and even globally?

First and foremost, develop your professional development online, and let your teachers access the information they need when they need it. There’s very little that we do in professional development that demands a face-to-face meeting; most things can be posted online for teachers to work through. At Hunter College of the City University of New York, we have in two years brought more than 2000 teachers through a professional development program (“Technology Competency”) with more than 80% of the work accomplished online. Connect to http://soe-server2.hunter.cuny.edu/assessment/, and log in as a guest to see how it works.

Second, for sessions that require a face-to-face meeting, use web conferencing instead of traveling. Webex, telepresence, and other systems let teachers stay in their own schools (or even at home) as they listen to speakers, ask questions, and interact with their colleagues. 

I agree! In order to scale Teacher Professional Development we need to take full
advantage of technology in the form of online platforms. However, and talking
about my experience in México, where we strongly value face to face interaction,
a blended approach seems to have a greater impact among communities of teachers
that in general are reluctant to the use of ICT for their professional development.

Face to face interaction fosters a connection between
teachers and facilitator that increase the trust teachers can have on a
particular professional development program, thus, they are more likely to share the information
and bring more teachers to the programs we offer.

Another important element is to make sure professional development programs
respond to the context of teachers. A unique model that “fits everybody“ wouldn’t
be of value for all the participants. In this sense, the work with Open
Educational Resources has been very attractive in Mexico, because we take what
is of value and adapt it to our very particular circumstances and use it as the
starting point, as we bring our own experiences and enrich those resources as
well.

So, adaptability and accessibility, relevance and trustable sources are elements to take into account when planning to scale  teacher professional development programs.

I’ll start by admitting that I am not a big fan of scale, especially when it comes to teacher professional development. Large-scale professional development programs tend to treat teacher professional development as something to be done to teachers. They are rarely transformational and mostly transactional. By their very nature, large-scale programs tend to treat participants as passive recipients. We create a context for participants to come together (an online community, a face-to-face conference), we add content designed to address a particular gap or issue (electronic resources in different formats, a so-called expert facilitator or keynote speaker), and we invite the teachers. This “Just add teachers and stir” formula is not only inefficient and unengaging, it is, first and foremost, offensive to teachers. It is based on what I often refer to as “learning from.”

In order to grow professionally, to grow in a personally meaningful way, in a way that benefits the students in our classrooms, our scholols and communities, we should also focus on learning with, not just learning from.

Let me take a moment to explore the distinction. I don’t think I can learn with 300 people in the same auditorium, in an online community, in my twitter network, or through RSS feeds coming from their individual blogs, for example. I can certainly learn from them, because the technology allows me easy access to their work, their thoughts, and their experiences. But most of the time, this participation is really only observation – it allows me to watch, to read about what my colleagues are doing. So, if I learn something from my colleagues in this way, chances are this content was delivered to me, communicated to me, and absorbed without a lot of consideration for where I am, for my professional context. 

Learning with, on the other hand, is about building knowledge with our colleagues, working together to make sense of things. Effective and engaging teacher professional development provides opportunities to reflect on who we are as teachers, the context where we work every day, the needs of the students in that context, our professional learning network, and the literature we read. It also provides an opportunity to work with two or three critical colleagues, exchange stories and experiences, learn with others whose expertise and experience as classroom teachers can enrich our own.

In other words, teacher professional development should be measured by the number of reflections and conversations that grow out of our immediate context – our classroom – and connect to the reflections and conversations that grow out of our colleagues’ classrooms.

Is this approach possible to scale? Learning from can be scaled quite easily, and it’s not difficult to find examples, but learning with is a bit more challenging. Can this model be scaled? Should it be scaled?

We at Thompson Rivers University are developing a program that combines paced, asynchronous experiences for learning about theoretical constructs related to distance ed with on-demand tutorials for the more technical bits like adding weblinks in Blackboard or marking assignments with different tech tools.

I am firmly convinced that expecting teachers to learn from outside ‘experts’ in an afternoon lecture, and truly have the tools to change their practice as a result, is the wrong way to go about developing their knowledge, skills and attitudes related to teaching.

I have been influenced by the writings and ideas of Linda Darling-Hammond at Stanford with respect to how to best develop faculty.

I am not convinced that scalability is either a necessary or sufficient quality of high quality professional development. Certainly, some degree of scalability can be beneficial, especially for on-demand opportunities like podcasts or screencasts that can be accessed when the faculty actually needs to learn something. I think more important qualities are that the training is ongoing, directly connected to what teachers actually do day-to-day, focussed on what teachers say that they need and connected to some sort of community so that the teachers themselves are directing the conversation.

I suppose that the ‘connectedness’ of a professional development program can be highly scalable with modern tools like Ning (Penn State… http://psuwcfacdev.ning.com/).

Thanks for initiating this conversation.

Colin Madland

e-Learning Facilitator

Thompson Rivers University

Kamloops, BC

http://www.truopen.ca

It seems to me that there is some research into optimal sizes of groups, which relates to scaling. It goes something like

5 is roughly the size of an optimal team, working closely together

12-15 is roughly the maximum size for a network, a group that may be learning or meeting together regularly

145-150 is the maximum size for a social network, also known as Dunbar’s number, beyond this it takes too much effort to keep track of and interact with other members.

1,000′s can belong to a “politica”l network, where the chief attribute is the feeling of belonging to a group, but most members do not actually interact.

To scale PD and make it independent, we might want to model groups and group responsibilities keeping these group sizes in mind.

What I read in the postings is that:

1. The content of the professional development matters as much as the method — that if the PD does not focus on the practical perceived needs of teachers in the trenches, then no matter the group size or the technology nor the scale, it will not be effective.

2. The best method for scaling PD depends on its content, as well as the situation of the group. Some combination of online, self-paced learning (which can scale up easily) with smaller-group discussion (which needs mediation to be truly successful, and cannot be scaled easily into the hundreds) is what many have settled on.

But I wonder, unless the teacher then applies what he or she learned in the PD, and submits that application to scrutiny, can we ever know it’s been successful? Why not issue each teacher a Flip camera, and ask them to capture their practice in the classroom of what they learned in the PD, and send it to a private video server (such as Cisco’s Show and Share) for review by their colleagues? The faculty of Hunter College in New York City, which provides professional development to more than 2000 teachers each year, has found this approach to work well.

It has been such a valuable experience to share this virtual round table with all of you! Thanks for sharing your experiences and providing all those elements that will be very useful for organizations planning to scale TPD. For Maestros Sin Fronteras México, this is going to be the year for scaling our programs and some of the concepts shared here will be taken into account for sure. Through this experience I confirmed:

The content should respond to teachers needs in order to be effective and make scaling possible.The delivery mode should also respond to teachers availability and skills, always respecting the cultural background.We should be careful when introducing new technologies, test them, and make sure they work efficiently for all the participants. And not to use technology to reproduce old classroom practices. 

Thanks again, and look forward for new opportunities to share our work.

Deya Castilleja

deya@twb.org 

I think Colin made two excellent points:

“I am firmly convinced that expecting teachers to learn from outside ‘experts’ in an afternoon lecture, and truly have the tools to change their practice as a result, is the wrong way to go about developing their knowledge, skills and attitudes related to teaching.”

I could not agree more. Teachers learn best from each other, when they have opportunities to share stories and experiences, and reflect. The best kind of professional development provides opportunities for that. You cannot reflect with hundreds of colleagues, but you can with two or three critical colleagues who understand their own context and can relate to your own.

Colin also wrote:

“I think more important qualities are that the training is ongoing, directly connected to what teachers actually do day-to-day, focussed on what teachers say that they need and connected to some sort of community so that the teachers themselves are directing the conversation.”

When we talk about scaling professional development, the conversation almost always revolves around the kind of professional development that is done to teachers. What many of such strategies and programs imply is that opportunities, tools, and resources need to be created for teachers, as if teachers were somehow incapable of creating their own. In the context of such programs, teachers are treated as passive recipients, as implementers of someone else’s plans and ideas about education.

Here, again, I agree with Colin – teacher professional development must be connected to daily practice and must take place inside a community of practice. I would add that effective teacher professional deelopment, one that engages teachers and results in classrooms becoming democratic environments that, in turn, engage students, must grow out of daily classroom practice, out of reflections on what works and what doesn’t, on daily challenges and opportunities in classrooms. People who know best what kind of professional development is needed are the teachers themselves – teachers who reflect on their practice and learn from it.