If you’re a professional development provider, it can be disheartening when you think about your training’s effectiveness. The participant evaluations written at the end of your training might be glowing with your praises, but when you check in with attendees a day later, a week later, a month later, or a year later, are the changes in their practice visible? If not, how effective was your training? That can be an uncomfortable question to answer.
In reflecting on my own professional development’s effectiveness, I’ve come to realize that my work is most effective when I go beyond explaining what educators need to do and how to do it. When I also include why (a la Simon Sinek’s Start With Why) educators should be making these changes, they are more likely to implement what they learned. They move from, “That’s nice. I will incorporate it when I have time.” to, “This is absolutely critical to do. I cannot go back to the way I used to do things.”
What I’ve come to realize is that selling the why is more complex than I first understood. Jonathan Haidt has a great metaphor for this complexity where he describes a rider on an elephant who is traveling along a path. Watch this two-minute video for a great explanation.
As you saw in the video, the rider tells the elephant where to go, and if the elephant complies, all goes well. However, if the elephant has a different plan, it won’t matter what the rider thinks because the elephant is stronger than the rider. The rider represents that rational why and the elephant represents the emotional why.
In the context of professional development, a rational why might be low student proficiency data. When you see this data, you know a change is needed. However, it may not be enough by itself to compel you to change.
An emotional why might be something like this video on student responses to an impossible question. When you watch it, you can feel wholeheartedly that something is not right and that a change is needed.
What’s important to realize is that both the rider (rational why) and elephant (emotional why) are needed to make true change. This goes along with the path, which is what educators should do and how to do it. Often I realize that when my trainings are not as effective as I hoped, I’ve either failed to address the why at all or I’m only addressing the rational why and not winning people’s hearts.
I believe that rational whys are much easier to collect (think student data) than emotional whys. This is why I work so hard on collecting examples of why we need to make a change. Capturing the emotional why is simply not easy. Besides the shepherd video above, here are a couple other links that hit at the emotional why.
What do you think? What resonates with you about what I’ve shared? Do you have some examples of how you address the emotional or rational whys you can share? Please let me know in the comments.
I have found that the rational and emotional whys aren’t as easy to separate as a rider from an elephant. For instance, sometimes I have a very emotional response to data. Here’s an example:
I recently was assisting a school district in an analysis of 11th grade transcripts for A-G completion. For the “c” (Mathematics) requirement, the data by subgroup came back as following percentages on track to complete A-G requirements: English Learners 3% , Special Needs 10% , National School Lunch Program 36% , White 44% , African American 0%, Hispanic 34%, Female 49%, Male 31%. The data itself should be startling, in a rational sense. The story the data told became even more compelling — the principal, who identifies as an African American male, pointed to the data and said, “I would have had zero chance at becoming a principal if I went to this school.” Now we can argue (rationally) with his story that the statistics could indicate a chance for his demographic…maybe…. Or we could argue, again rationally, that not completing the A-G requirements doesn’t mean that he couldn’t have gone to college and eventually become a principal (completing A-G and attending a UC is only 1 of many paths that could lead to a principalship). But the story he saw in the data said that his school was failing all student like him. That was an emotional why for him, as it was for all those who respect him and heard his comment. He was near tears as he realized what ‘his’ system was perpetuating, and the doors being closed for students like him. Where did the response change from rational to emotional? Did the rider push the elephant successfully here? Or was it the elephant’s idea all along?
Even if we could systematically separate the rider from the elephant, I don’t know that the emotional or rational why is really where we miss opportunities in PD. I think it’s in the other step that the Heaths describe as “tweaking the path”. In the video, Heath describes is as shortening the path and clearing out the obstacles. How do we make sure we do this in every PD? We’ve worked to ‘teach’ something alongside ‘why’ we’re teaching it, why it matters to our participants and our students, but now what? When teachers return to their classroom and try the “something new” and it doesn’t go quite right (obstacle!), how are we helping them overcome the challenge? Where is the support embedded in their day to day travel on the path? How are we systematically providing support as we all continue to learn on the job every day?
Or perhaps we’ve taught them something new and we haven’t helped the shrink the journey. “Thanks for the help really understanding this standard, or this unit, or this PBL,” teachers say, “but what about the rest of them?” Is there a way to shrink the path? Or to boil it down to the first step(s) so the journey doesn’t seem so long? Ultimately, this speaks to what we (as PD providers) measure as change. Are we measuring the first step, or are we looking for the completed product? Are we looking for lead measures (Sean Covey) towards the intended change? Are we being realistic with the change we hope to see (Steve Leinwand’s 10% rule)?
So I’m curious –when you ask how effective the PD was, how are you measuring effectiveness? What are you hoping to see as a result of the learning experience, and how do you know you’ve designed the best PD to accomplish that learning? How big (or little) a change is appropriate for the learning experience (how far down the path do you hope they will move)? And how have we supported (or cleared obstacles) to make that movement possible?
Much to think about. Thanks for starting this conversation.
Great pushback, as always Audrey. I definitely see the messiness in the distinction between rational and emotional whys. I don’t have a good answer for that other than to hypothesize that there are more shades of gray between the black and white in the metaphor. I’ll have to keep thinking about that part.
I also like your argument for the path being the problem. That’s also tricky in a complex/complicated way because you don’t want to oversimplify it so much that they are just following the navigation program and can’t figure out how to get home when their program stops working.
Thinking of it like a vector metaphor… a vector is magnitude and direction. Direction is the path and magnitude is fueled by the why. I guess you do need both. From my experience, I feel like most PD has been abundant with the direction and not enough with the magnitude. However from your perspective, you see issues with both. Again, interesting.
And with your questions, I’m not sure either. I’ve never had the opportunity to do it, but I think that surveying people who attending a training at the end of the training day, a week later, a month later, 6 months later, and a year later would be very interesting to measure change in how a teacher responds to the same questions.
Let me know what new ideas you think up.
I want to preface this reply with a thank you. Thank you Robert for all that you do in the field of mathematics education.
At the Center to Support Excellence in Teaching at Stanford, we extract our mission and vision from the research on transformative professional coaching. Selling the Why is indeed important, but without time to practice, observation of enactment with timely feedback and reflection, sustained support for months if not years – how exactly would one expect for behavior change on such a fundamental as “the way we teach” to occur?
Here are a few slide breakdowns of relevant research:
van Driel, https://www.slideshare.net/evanrusht0n/design-features-and-quality-of-research-van-driel-x-crushton
Guskey&Yoon, https://www.slideshare.net/evanrusht0n/what-works-in-professional-development-guskeyyoon-x-crushton-76534046
Garet, https://www.slideshare.net/evanrusht0n/ies-investigates-contentspecific-pd-garet-x-crushton
BJ Fogg at Stanford has been at the forefront of behavior change research and I highly recommend his work also.
Thank you Evan for the kind words. You are certainly right that figuring out what is effective is complex and not complicated. So many variables that are hard to account for.
I looked at the slides you shared (except for the third which I couldn’t get to work) and can see that there do appear to be some commonalities and trends in the data. Thank you for sharing this with me.
I’ll keep this in mind and hope you’ll share anything else you find interesting going forward.
I completely agree with the rider on the elephant (or tiger if one prefers) metaphor by the way – I forgot to mention this in my previous reply.
My purpose in sharing was to echo Audrey’s concern around HOW do we guide the elephant, and points to some of what has been agreed upon so far in academic research. Professional development is extremely difficult to perform controlled experiments with to garner verifiable results – by controlling the experiment, the context is broken; by acting naturally, the experiment is broken. Some education researchers would much rather have a direct impact on the teachers they aim to support and collect data from, than robotically ignore their contexts for the sake of experimental validity; and even the robots have to deal with the reality that schools are not controlled environments. This is supported by Guskey&Yoon’s finding that only 9/1340 studies met the standards of credible evidence.
Odd about the third link… it should only be ~3-4 slides. Garet has spent nearly a decade now investigating what to prioritize in PD with IES/NCEE. The tl;dr of his work has been, it may help the teachers, but it isn’t helping student test scores. Relevant NCEE eval brief, https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20174010/pdf/20174010.pdf
All their pubs are free online, https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/
I agree that we need to win the hearts and minds of Ts in order to get one to CONSIDER change. My main suggestion around how to SUPPORT that change once a T decides to try (sold on the why) is to have practice-based PD that makes their context central to their practice. Ts need to see it, understand it, try it themselves, and reflect on how it felt in a more controlled environment than the live classroom – but still an accurate approximation (for example with teachers from similar contexts who can feign ignorance and act like their real students). This allows them time to consider what they would do differently in the actual class environment. Too often it is the case that an educator tries an activity, strategy, or practice for the first time on a live class of students… that is akin to a dentist trying a new technological advancement for the first time on you the next time you go for a cleaning… no thank you. Clean the fake teeth first.
Happy to connect. Have a blessed Summer.
/bow
Evan
Thanks Evan. You give lots to ponder on. I like how you clearly articulated the troublesome balance between maintaining the integrity of the training or the experiment, but rarely (if ever) both.
I’m not sure where this falls in your spectrum, but what I found to be the most effective PD experience in my career was a three-year long combination of intense content knowledge PD (8 days of 8 hours a day) followed by two pairs of lesson study days each year. It seemed to give a good balance of learning and implementing. It wasn’t quite trying it on fake teeth initially, but the lesson planning process attempted to anticipate how students would interact so that perhaps that was the fake teeth experience.
Thanks again for pushing my thinking, Evan.
What if we, as staff developers, stopped thinking about PD in terms of “OUR” training that “WE” have painstakingly developed, and turn it over to the TEACHERS to develop instead.
We are all frustrated with the lack of implementation we see in classrooms after PLC days. So this year we had teachers select a goal for themselves based on Hattie’s high impact strategies. The conversation between evaluators and teachers will NOT be focused around what the TEACHERS did to change their practice. Instead, the conversations will focus on how what they DID impacted STUDENT LEARNING. Consequently, each teacher will be required to bring student growth data to share with their evaluator. The stakes have been raised.
Because the expectation for professional development is based on SELF SELECTED, research based strategies, the way staff development is delivered in our building has completely changed. This year, professional development days are completely teacher directed. They can read articles pertaining to their goal, work with others in collaborative groups to plan, initiate book studies, invite district personnel to come in and share their expertise or visit classrooms in other districts-personalized PD-putting teachers in charge of their learning.
We had the teachers rate the first staff development day with written comments, but the final feedback question was, “On a scale of 1-5 how would you rate the day?” Seventy eight percent of the staff rated the day a “5”. Twenty two percent rated the day a “4”. Giving teachers the power to choose for themselves? Who would expect anything less than a huge success?
I couldn’t agree more. All humans want to feel successful and have impact. When we center the teachers we are working with and the strengths they bring to their own practice, we can have a much greater impact on shifting practice. Who doesn’t feel empowered when they are recognized as capable as well as self-directed? Giving space to share ideas and intentions is an inspiring approach.
Great question, and great responses. I especially like Evan’s and Kathy’s thoughts. The best professional development is through ongoing onsite teacher collaboration on common goals. This doesn’t make our work (as PD providers) useless, but it does mean we’ll be more effective if we understand and promote that.
Thanks for chiming in Henri. Yeah, I definitely agree that meaningful PD happens when it is job-embedded. I’m not sure that’s the only way, but certainly trainings like lesson study have been some of hte most valuable I’ve ever participated in.
Hi, Robert! Long-time fan. As a PD provider and consultant one thing I struggle with—in addition to the whys and how—is low expectations. I’m a former teacher and I love teachers, but how can we motivate shifting the blame away from students themselves and their families? Teachers have some responsibility, too! I find that this is the most pernicious and persistent barrier. I’ll address they why, show videos of teachers and students who look just like them and their students, and still hear—“That’s cool, but my students could never do that.” We even talk about the messy intermediary stages, when anything new feels uncomfortable for both teachers and students, but still the biggest barrier is “That won’t work in MY room.”
Hi J. Sorry but I don’t have an earth-shattering way of dealing with culture busters like this. What’s worse is that disproportionately, these deficit views are applied to people of color. Perhaps one strategy you could use is to stop everything and apply the five whys (https://robertkaplinsky.com/applying-toyotas-5-whys-to-education/). It could take people closer towards addressing the root causes.
For the past 25 summers, when the school year ends, I work as a seasonal Park Ranger at Glacier National Park in Montana. As a ranger I am part of the park’s interpretive staff, the education division of the park service. There are so many connections to my school year job of teaching both young students and adult learners. In our role as interpretation rangers, we design programs that aim to connect the visitors to the park and its resources. First, we need to know our audience. Then we need to plan specific learning opportunities. In interpretation we work to create both emotional and intellectual (rational) connections to the park resources because we know that the connections are stronger when both parts are included. In addition, our topics must relate to a universal theme that could be understood by all ages and cultures – beauty, truth, love, survival, etc. I think you are spot on with your thoughts about both rational and emotional WHYS. Thanks for helping me to make this connection between my summer and school year professions.
This is really interesting to read and I’m glad this resonated with you so much. That combination of rational and emotional whys sure packs a punch, but too often we just see rational whys.