I think that professional development providers, certainly including myself, often miss the mark and commit a common mistake when they tell attendees what they need to do but don’t leave them equipped to implement it. To explain this, consider how we teach students what to do during a fire.
The two most common options are providing a map (like you see in hotel rooms) or by simulating the experience through a fire drill (like you see in schools). Giving students a map is certainly less time consuming than running a fire drill, so why don’t we just give students a map?
We don’t do that because we realize that it would be unrealistic to expect students to be prepared for a fire if all they receive is a map. Students are more prepared for a fire when they’ve actually experienced what to do in a realistic simulation. So how does this relate to teachers’ professional development? Consider how teachers are trained to be better question askers.
Teachers are often trained by being handed a list of good questions and are then expected to implement them. So, if giving students a map is unrealistic, is it also unrealistic to train teachers by handing them a list of questions? If fire drills are beneficial for students, what would be the fire drill equivalent for improving teacher questioning?
Those are the questions I keep asking myself about all of my professional development, and while I miss the mark more than I’d like, those two questions help keep me focused on working towards creating more fire drills than maps.
Do you want to see what the fire drill of improving teacher questioning actually looks like? Check out this questioning scenarios activity I co-created. You can read all about it here, but the short version is that it gets participants to determine which types of questions are better for uncovering student misconceptions through role playing a teacher/student interaction in a high pressure situation.
I believe that as professional development providers we should aim for more fire drills and less fire maps. It’s a lofty goal but one that is something we need to keep working towards. Do you have any other examples of professional development that is given as a fire map but could be done as a fire drill? If so, I’d love to read about them in the comments.
This hits close to home, Robert! My team and I work tirelessly to make sure our PD session are built around “fire drills” for teachers by having them actually DO the math their asking their students to do. It’s so interesting to see the responses to this. Most teachers are so used to being given the fire map version of PD that they have one of two reactions: 1) Reluctance to engage in the mathematics (“Wait, you actually want me to DO something? I though PD days were for me to sit and get.”) or 2) Surprise and excitement (“Wait, I actually get to get my hands on the math and understand it better!?”). Luckily, the tide seems to be shifting to more of the latter. The best is when those “fire-drills” turn into a-ha! moments for teachers. I’ve seen high fives, shouts of “YES!!!” and even some tears when teachers really dig into the math and learn something new. Thanks for calling this out!
Great reflection Christine. I hadn’t thought about your take on this. I see what you mean about having teachers participate in the mathematics like the students will being very valuable. By doing the math themselves, they are on step one of the 5 practices and are much more likely to be able to empathize with students.
I do see one difference between the way you see it and what I was intending to say. Here’s my attempt at explaining it…
For the fire map and fire drill, both are an attempt to explain something that the person will actually experience in real life. With having the teachers do the work, that is what the students will experience in real life, not what the teachers will experience. That being said, the teachers will need to do that to know how to facilitate the lesson, but it is a bit different to me. A drill might be closer to having them teach the problem to their colleagues. Otherwise they just have to envision how it might go.
To be clear, I am not saying that one is important and the other not. They are both valuable components to experience.
That’s a really good point, Robert. At these math workshops for math teachers that I attend, we should be practicing HOW we would question or explain the concepts. That would be most useful for us! Thanks for sharing and clarifying for Christine.
I’ve often wondered: what would a “Dumbledore’s Army” approach look like? That is, we spend the day facilitating to each other, iron sharpening iron. Actually have teachers facilitate a task and the like.
Interesting. Do you mean something like an EdCamp format where teachers spontaneously pick topics that interest them. If not, can you tell me more about what you mean?
In my work in PD and teacher ed, I often wrestle back and forth over whether to spend more time up front exploring math ideas before asking teachers to practice particular routines. I’m well aware of how critical content knowledge is to teaching. However, sometimes I think new teachers, or those whose understanding of what it means to teach math, don’t yet know where that content knowledge ‘belongs’ or how it helps before they’ve tried particular practices. For example: after doing lots (and lots) of choral counts myself, I can see the mathematical potential in the patterns, in addition to the “oh, that’s neat” factor. There’s lots of addition, of course – but also, grouping! Groups of groups! infinite series! Patterns OF patterns – like how 6 counts work kind of like 9s counts, but different – and for important reasons.
but.
For the novice teachers I work with, I think I’ve decided it doesn’t actually do them that much good to spend time investigating all of that stuff as if that knowledge is a ‘prerequisite’ to facilitating the activity. Instead, I have them jump right in, after only doing it (as students) once or twice. What I find is that the first time they do it with children, they focus a lot (in their reflections and discussions afterward) on things like “engagement” and “fun,” which is great, but reveals a bit of a limited view of the mathematical horizon.
But later we study more complex instructional routines, like number talks and 3-act tasks. As we get into those, I ask these novice T’s to consider how a choral count might be a useful ‘day before’ task, strategically designed to support students with special needs or counting difficulties on a task like Graham Fletcher’s Whoppers task. THAT’s when it starts to click: holy moly, a choral count by 20s can help students who insist on adding 19 + 19 + 19… to make sense of WHY a classmate might choose to use a landmark of 20s, or WHY a classmate might choose to multiply 20 x 5 and then compensate.
Anyhow, what I’m trying to get at is, sometimes I think we place so much emphasis in PD on content knowledge and exploring math together because it’s extremely fun, it’s interesting to us, and we think they need it ‘before they can do this stuff.’ But i think I’m starting to reconsider this premise, and explore the possibility that content knowledge development might be useful if positioned AFTER teachers have recognized when and how they will need that knowledge. Design PD like we do 3-act tasks: create situations that make teachers (1) investigate and identify the problem themselves, and (2) ask for the relevant information they need to solve it.
Great perspective Charlotte. To a large degree, I’ve come to a similar conclusion, though I articulate it a bit differently. It’s good to include WHAT to do and HOW to do it, but if teachers never buy in to WHY they would even want to do it, then authentic change is unlikely to happen.
Thanks for sharing this and let me know if you come up with other epiphanies.
My fire drill is to implement a unit by another way. Some training courses have the implementation part when you have to make practice and implement what you’ve learnt in the course. By implement I mean design and apply in classroom an activity/a unit/a course with the philosophy/techniques you learnt in course.
After implementation, you have to explain what has worked and improvement proposals and you have to show the work of students working in this activity/unit/course. Academic results (grades) are also welcome.
Thanks Xavier. I totally see what you mean. I think this metaphor has applications in many areas and I like the way you’ve interpreted it.
Great analogy Robert! I am currently working on a large project in which job-embedded professional learning is a major component. The other components are off-site, full-day PL and an online community of learning. We believe that teachers need the experiences at purposeful and meaningful times in their work (as do their students).
Good luck Tiffany. It sounds like that structure has a lot of potential.
I think it is also important to note what happens AFTER the drill.. we don’t thrash a class or students who either came out later, or who took a wrong turn. We debrief, try to understand what happened and look for improvement the next time.
I have been at some PDs where the presenter, tried to do a drill, with teachers doing problems, only to belittle them for not doing it the “right way”.
If you are going to do a Drill, the positive debrief is where most real long term change takes place.
Your words ring so true! I recently hosted a team of teachers from a different school district in my classroom to present professional development on our Numeracy Project which assesses students mathematical knowledge and strategies and then uses activities to fill their gaps. I designed the day so the teachers would observe the class structure first while formulating questions. We then met and discussed the structure of the classroom.
After, I taught them to use the assessments and analyze the results. The teachers assessed one of my students using the instrument getting hands on experience immediately so they could clear up any confusion before they started with their own students. We analyzed the results together and walked through the steps to decide on what gap those students needed to fill. The visiting teachers used our database to find an activity to use to help that child understand a concept they were lacking and worked with that child on the activity.
It was a working PD day and the teachers were excited to start in their own classrooms the next day!
Way to make the drill become part of the PD! It sounds like they really valued having both to make them feel better prepared!
Love the fire drill analogy. In our district, we have committed to include sessions where teachers go into live classrooms to practice what they have learned. I think there is a fear factor we have to account for in our PD’s as well. There is no fear during a fire drill (because there is no real fire) and we train students to follow certain procedures for their own safety. We do this to ingrain this behavior when faced against fear in the situation of a real fire. The same must be done in classroom PD. Teachers are given the opportunity to try some new ideas out in a classroom, without fear of failure or judging. In fact, we embrace failure as a learning mechanism to improve our practice. We give teachers the opportunity to plan a lesson, teach it, reflect and revise the lesson, then teach it again with a different group of students. This, by far, has been the most rewarding PD model for our teachers. There is a little bit of trepidation initially at the thought of going into a strange classroom, but by the end of the session, there is an entirely different mindset, focusing on improving a practice collectively. We find that this model has shown the most transference into the classroom, and has improved the desire from teachers for more future opportunities to learn. No more sit and get, but now it’s learn, apply, adapt, reflect, and improve.
Thanks John. I like the distinction between fear and safety when doing it live versus as a drill. It’s very complex but as you said, has the potential to be very rewarding too.