Developing PD For A General Audience

              In my heart, I am a teacher.  Of all the things I’ve ever done, the only ones that have really been satisfying have been when I’m helping someone else get better at what they do.  As I became a better teacher, it was an easy and natural progression for me to start getting involved in providing professional development for others who teach my subject.  

              Within the realm of music teachers – and string orchestra teachers in particular – I’ve developed several PD sessions that I’ve delivered to groups around the country.  Those sessions have been very well received, and I often hear from teachers who are using my materials and strategies successfully in their classes.

              The thing is, though, these sessions are very narrowly tailored.  They focus on taking a deep dive into strategies for doing one thing.  I’m able to point out a variety of common problems related to a single skill and then address several practical strategies for fixing and preventing each one.  Virtually all of the best PD sessions I’ve been to have been like that.  I’ve tried to make the ones I deliver fit that model. 

              Unfortunately, we’ve all been to PD sessions that were not like that: a whole school gathered in the cafeteria to sit through a presentation that tries to give something to everyone and in doing so, fails to give much of anything to anyone.

              Over the summer, I was contracted to develop just such a session.  My audience wasn’t a whole school, but it was an audience that didn’t contain a single music teacher.  It was a session for a STEAM conference where the audience would be a random mix of general ed teachers and administrators.

              I spent a long time wondering what I was going to do with this assignment and how I was going to try to keep it from being one of those too-general-to-do-any-good experiences.  Eventually, I came up with The Anatomy Of A Great Lesson: How Arts-Based Lesson Design Can Enhance All Subjects.  It seemed like a good idea related to the truism that ‘great teaching is great teaching.’

              At the end of the day, my results were mixed.  On the evaluation forms I got back, more than ½ rated me in the 4/5 (best) region.  There were a good handful, though, who put me down as all 1s or all 2s.  That is to say, I think I gave something useful to a lot of people, but there were a significant number who walked out feeling like I had wasted their time.

              This whole experience has really highlighted for me the difficulty of putting something together that can effectively reach a broad audience.  I’ve been reflecting pretty deeply on what aspects of the presentation and activities that went with it could be improved to get more people engaged.  I’ve been thinking about some of the attitudes that came from the audience that were all too familiar from having been in similar audiences – ‘this all great, but I don’t have time to spend on it,’ ‘how can I spend time reteaching things when I have to cover all of these standards,’ ‘this is pie in the sky, and you don’t understand what I really do.’

              I think I might have some answers to those questions, and I’ve started working on revising the presentation.  It’s in my nature to be a little stubborn, and I don’t quit easily in the face of a challenge.  I hope that over the next year or so, I get a chance to give a revised presentation on this topic to see if I can help more people be better teachers.