Making the Most of Professional Development Days for Teachers

Does anyone get truly excited about the mandatory professional development days for teachers before school starts? Despite administrators’ best intentions (we’re giving them the benefit of the doubt that they do want to be helpful), it often seems irrelevant compared to our long to-do list or, even worse, remarkably similar to last year’s training (despite our best attempts to block last year out).

While it’s tempting to write these days off as a waste of time, a wasteland that punctuates the end of your relaxing summer and the beginning of the chaos that is a new school year, there are a few things you can do to make the most of them. Where you’re at in your career and whether or not you’re at a new school influence not just what you take away from your professional development days for teachers, but also what you should put into them. We’ve broken it down into two helpful categories:

• New Teachers or Teachers New to a School (no matter how many years you’ve been teaching)
• Veteran Teachers

For New Teachers or Teachers New to a School

If you’re a new teacher, enjoy the fact that this is new to you! You have a lot to learn, and this is the year (maybe two) you’ll find these trainings most helpful. Pay attention, take notes, ask questions, and participate, but be humble: you’re not an expert yet.

Remember, you’re making a first impression on your administrators and colleagues; so no matter what other teachers are doing, you’ll want to be attentive and engaged (in a normal way, not a brown-nosing way).

You will feel yourself starting to feel completely stressed, but do your best not to feel overwhelmed by all the information coming at you: it will eventually make sense, and you just need to take things one day at a time.

It also helps to remember that all your seasoned colleagues and administrators are working double time to pump themselves up for another year. These back-to-school professional development days for teachers are the time of year when everyone on campus is convincing themselves they are going to do the best, be the best, and have the most awesome year ever. You aren’t the only one feeling overwhelmed; veterans just deal with it differently than newbies.

As a result, it will probably sound like you need to do everything, be everything, and have everything under control. This is totally unrealistic. Keep your eyes open for a friendly teacher who can help you sort out what you desperately need to know from what can wait. It’s helpful if this is a teacher in your department, but it doesn’t have to be. You just need to find that teacher who’s going to be real with you and tell you honestly what everyone actually does versus what they say they do.

For Veteran Teachers

If you’re a veteran teacher, it’s hard to pay attention, participate, and have a good attitude. We hear you. Teachers, including us, make the worst students, and the longer you’ve been teaching, the more likely you are to have heard it all before. It’s hard to get excited about something that was presented to you 10 years ago with a different name as though it’s something brand new.

Double bubble maps, we’re looking at you. You’re just a repackaged Venn diagram. But be respectful to your colleagues who are presenting, especially when they are teachers from your site, and try not to distract your colleagues who are trying to listen.

As teachers, we know what it’s like to be required to give a presentation to a roomful of hostile people who aren’t paying attention and couldn’t care less if you notice. Be empathetic! You also never know when you’re going to get roped into doing a presentation. It’s helpful to build up some goodwill.

We’ve found that when it seems like no one is paying attention and our “teacher guilt” kicks in, making us extra attentive to the struggling presenter, we get more out of the meetings.

Maybe by participating, we have a surprisingly meaningful discussion or connect with a new colleague. Maybe by asking questions or politely challenging an idea we disagree with, we help to solve a problem for everyone. Maybe we hear a new tip that makes our lives a little bit easier. Maybe we provide a new teacher with the encouragement or advice they need to start the year on the right track. Maybe we just buy ourselves a few more days of feeling optimistic about a school year that will have its own inevitable troubles.

When you have the option to select the sessions you attend, be grateful and go practical.

Our most helpful professional development sessions have tended to be those where we learned how to use a program we didn’t know how to use before or came away with actual strategies, tools, and lesson plans we could put to work in our own classrooms.

We’ve also come to find the value in attending sessions about topics we don’t understand or maybe even feel resistant to. Over the years, we made a point of learning about a curriculum other teachers complained about, a district-administered test we didn’t understand the value of, and an LMS we couldn’t imagine ourselves using. In each case, the training changed our minds and enriched our teaching in ways that lasted well beyond that school year.

Hopefully, it goes without saying: if your teacher bestie is presenting, you go to their session; if you’re trying to build a better relationship with a new PLC colleague, you go to their session. This is an opportunity to network, and as teachers, we don’t always get those!

And if all else fails, bring a notebook so you can lesson plan without obviously looking at your laptop or phone (Steph’s favorite strategy) or a coffee you can nurse while letting your mind wander far, far away (Kate’s favorite strategy). Maximizing our time or indulging in self-care is always worthwhile!

If you’re looking for some back-to-school ideas to ponder as you sit through those professional development days for teachers that seem as though they’ll never end, check out this episode of the podcast: “Making the Most of the First Week of School” and this YouTube video: “First Week of School: Avoiding the Danger Zone with Icebreakers and About Me Assignments”!