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In this post Anna Loseva considers what we mean by trying to make PD stick.
When you hear or read discussions about sustainable professional development (SPD), what comes to mind? What is often meant is long-term, contextualized professional learning activities that result in active implementation of the learning in the classrooms. It is common to criticize one-off workshops; we know they do not work as the learning won’t stick. There is more than enough research proving that – yet, for some reason, we keep doing it, stringing several workshops together in the hope that it will change everything. We may also assume, based on research, that longevity of a program equals value for the participants, equals value for the students in their learning, equals value for the institution for whatever rankings it aspires to be on. Knowing these variables, we should be able to devise a perfect PD program and call it sustainable.
But what exactly is supposed to stick: a program itself? a set of practices offered in the program? a lifelong learning mindset? Truly, if we pause here, is this understanding of sustainability helpful?
In theory, sustainable professional development is a continuous process of organized learning activities with long-lasting significance on teacher practices. In reality, that lasting impact is quite tough to measure. How can we track what is working and what is not?
The impact of a particular PD program is difficult to isolate. Imagine a teacher in your school attending an obligatory annual internal PD course, an activity that the manager organizes and colleagues can confirm has been done. The same teacher can be taking various online classes throughout the year on the topic of their professional interest, journal about their classes and participate in several local conferences. Does the fact of participation guarantee professional development? Who is to judge, and how can the impact of one PD event be separated from the impact of another? And what about those thoughtful, reflective daily conversations that this teacher has with their colleague in the staffroom?
Maybe measurable implementation is not the most useful rubric for SPD as development is a deeply personal, often confusing process that is tough to dissect for “data analysis.”
Choi and Kang (2019) bring in what for me is another contentious idea: they say that if PD has a significant impact on teachers’ competencies, it can be considered sustainable. But that view seems rather simplistic and narrow, almost technical. Consider the complexity of sustainability as a broader issue. Do we want the impact of a PD course to be reverberating in observable teacher practices? Do we want to have a good institutional track record of offering SPD? Do the offered PD programs help education at large to adapt to the swift changes in the unstable world in a meaningful way?
Maybe competency gains, however valuable, do not reflect the inherent complexity of education and put us right into the trap of simply measuring outcomes.
A case study: The RP Tokyo group
The RP Tokyo group was my passion project from 2016 to 2019. With the help of several other facilitators taking turns, the group managed to meet every single month for 3 years. We would get together to talk about teaching. The attendance was quite inconsistent at times, ranging from ten people to two, and that includes myself (you can read about those particular meetings here and here). It was a community of the like-minded, organized in a bottom-up way, with the purpose to talk through the teaching experiences that mattered to us in the way that seemed right. Beyond an outline for each meeting, there was no long-term plan or structure for this PD.
In 2019, the group came to an end as the conditions that made it possible changed. Some of us changed jobs, others left the country. The RP Tokyo group was no more. However, while the form disappeared, the seeds of the impact had been planted and several new projects took root. An online RP group branched off (since then it has ceased to exist, alas), a reflective group in the Language and Communication Centre of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore has become a regular PD initiative with the help of one of the original RP Tokyo members… who knows, maybe there are or have been more.
Although the original community in its original form didn’t stick, can we safely say that this particular PD initiative failed if we marked it on an imaginary sustainability scale? And how do we measure the value of the 3 years of meetings for each of its participants? It was the type of conversations the Tokyo community had that left an imprint that got transformed into other shapes in other contexts. I cannot measure the effects of those original group meetings, nor can I fully trace the legacy, yet something tells me the influence lives.
Perhaps the problem is that we are trying to sustain programs when what we should be sustaining is something else. Sustainability to me means my own growth and that of my community, the impact that I feel in the moment and years after, the reflection that comes with the experience – and stays. Sustainable professional development to me is not (at least at this point) about my practical teacher competencies, but rather about ideas, mindsets, changing beliefs that come in a myriad of interrelated but unplanned instances of learning, organized and not so much.
As an example, the most influential professional development “event” for me was not an institutionally organized program, nor a webinar series. It was getting to know John F. Fanselow, and specifically, internalizing the mantra “Believe nothing I say.” Questioning everything, making small changes to deeply-rooted, habitual practices – acquiring this mindset has helped me to sustain my own PD in a thoughtful, personally relevant way for almost 15 years.
That kind of a conclusion puts an uncomfortable truth under the spotlight: that maybe, just maybe, what is sustainable is uniquely personal and lies in transformation that cannot be measured or controlled. Managers cannot fully account for it, and curriculum designers cannot plan for it in their best-worded course learning outcomes. Maybe what gets sustained is a little bit random, a little bit a stroke of luck.
“Passion projects” – like RP Tokyo was for me at the time – might not be sustainable in the traditional sense. Yet they can be beautiful and inspire others more than we know, more than we might be able to track for records. For organizations that employ teachers and want them to develop, what that means (in my opinion) is that there is a need to design professional development that affords teacher agency. When teachers are empowered to grow in ways that feel meaningful to them, and when their initiatives are supported and championed, even on a small scale, institutions create the conditions in which a lasting mindset of development can take root. That is where the real enduring value of professional development lies.
References
Choi, J., & Kang, W. (2019). Sustainability of cooperative professional development: Focused on teachers’ efficacy. Sustainability, 11(3), 585. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11030585
About Anna:
Anna Loseva has over 15 years of experience teaching English and academic skills across higher education contexts in Russia, Japan, and Vietnam. A passionate educator, she has presented internationally, contributed to online teacher development communities, and facilitated reflective practice groups. Her interests include professional development in higher education, curriculum design, communities of practice, as well as teaching academic research, writing, and critical thinking.