Towards an Emergent PD: Professional Development in the Time of COVID

Can you imagine the space between your eyes?….. ….. The space that fills your head…Can you imagine the space between your shoulders?…

My head softens back onto my pillow, eyes closed, and I let Tara Brach’s voice sink in. I focus on my physical body, bringing awareness to what’s happening on the inside by sensing the spaces in between — the space that fills my heart, the space between the front and back of my hand — meditating into spaces I didn’t know were there.

In The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and the Body in the Healing of Trauma (2015), Bessel Van Der Kolk describes the importance of the body to “[put] us in touch with our inner world, the landscape of our organism. Simply noticing our annoyance, nervousness, or anxiety immediately helps us shift our perspective and opens up new options other than our autonomic, habitual reactions” (p. 210). By observing the interplay between thoughts and physical sensations, we can begin to understand and transform our responses to discomfort and engage in a kind of “limbic therapy.”

As I lay on my pillow, I think about the challenge of equity work in education in the time of COVID. And about ways to carve out a space between the constant shifts in policy, protocols, learning environments, and platforms, so that all teachers engage with equity work.

COVID has exacerbated educational inequities while drawing attention to the urgency of systemic change. But constant shifts have caused many to erect protective walls which are impermeable to (more) waves of change.

Is it possible to find an opening? To shift the focus and structure of Professional Development (PD) to foster a space for critical reflection & inquiry?

Since September, PD days have been packed with mandated sessions (COVID protocols & reporting, best practices for hybrid…no, remote…no, in-person…no, remote learning, human trafficking awareness training, CRRP & anti-oppressive pedagogy, concussion prevention training, ELL and remote learning, inclusive design, equitable assessment & evaluation).

While sessions have been designed with prompts to support teacher engagement, there is never enough time to process the content. Each topic seems to roll into the next, flooding minds, spilling onto to the ground.

In addition to the pace and volume of content, an influx of “innovative strategies” continue to flood inboxes (guilty, as charged). While intended to help teachers manage pivot after pivot, initiative after initiative, the content is developed and delivered by different groups and there is a lot of overlap. This contributes to confusion & exhaustion as each resource presents a slightly different approach to “best practices.” Seeming contradictions emerge within and between theories and practice as teachers attempt apply PD to their instruction.

These contradictions seem to come up most frequently around equitable practices. For example, teachers are expressing confusion about the emphasis on passing all students and also upholding high expectations (Grading for Equity bookclub, fall 2021). Others are befuddled by the focus of taking an asset-based, marks-free approach to assessment and evaluation within a system of reporting achievement using percentage grades (Coaching conversation, fall 2021). One teacher, working with a class with two students on the spectrum expressed the challenge of both following guidance to decolonize their classroom through constructivism & exploratory learning, while also differentiating for those students who need teacher-led instruction, clear overview of tasks and expectations, structure, and deadlines (Coaching conversation, fall 2021).

When the rubber hits the road, what one teacher believes is equitable (as they are following guidance from the ministry, board, or community partner), seems to contradict what someone else is saying, doing, or what that they are experiencing in their own classroom. And while “passing all students” and “upholding high expectations” are not necessarily antithetical, they can be expressed, interpreted and experienced as such when delivered across multiple contexts. Without a dialogical process to guide the application of theoretical maxims to site-specific contexts, confusion, inconsistencies, and inequities emerge.

Caswell, Esmonde & Takeuchi touch on this in “Towards Culturally Relevant and Responsive Teaching of Mathematics” (2011) where they note that delivering PD across multiple contexts can present contradictory messages which mean teachers “sometimes take up ideas that served conflicting goals of education” (p. 70).

The authors suggest administration and school boards should “[c]apitaliz[e] on the contradictions and discuss them explicitly” to allow teachers to explore the broader context and to support teachers in the application of theory to practice (p. 70); to explore how the interplay of beliefs, assumptions, knowledge (BAK) (Woods, 1996), identities, and contexts impact the application of theory.

None of this is new. We know that the metacognitive — critically reflecting on our thinking and instructional moves — is the key to learning. But how do we make space to activate the metacognitive in the time of COVID?

One important strategy is filtering out “less urgent” issues. But filtering process takes time because it requires a system adjustment to manage the influx of information (streamlining of memos, resources, and support). Filtering is also highly political and requires boards to prioritize some issues over others. This can become highly divisive and contradict board-wide priorities and strategic focuses, so much of this seems to be left to site principals to maintain a delicate balance between the urgency of issues and staff members’ capacity to take in information.

The intentional design of site-specific PD, on the other hand, does not require admin or the board to make difficult decisions about prioritizing certain issues over others. It can emerge through active listening. For example, an examination of what “passing all students” and “upholding high expectations” means in the context of specific classes. Or what a focus on constructivism and differentiation means in a class with students with different learning preferences or Individualized Learning Plans.

What teachers need is a kind of emergent PD that is responsive & embedded, where teachers can name and explore contradictions as they come up.

An emergent PD deliberately focuses on carving out a space for exploring how theory translates into practice and can serve as a kind of limbic therapy that allows teachers to observe the interplay between thinking and action.

If we carve out and hold a space for this, perhaps teachers responses to PD will transform, and so will the system, despite the stress and exhaustion and inequities that have resulted from teaching in the time of COVID.

Emergent PD: A Conceptual Cheat Sheet

• Less is more.
• Dialogical & focused on site-specific application of theory
• Space, time and permission to name and reflect on contradictions that emerge with the application of theory to their site/classroom (collaborative inquiry)
• Trust & a metacognitive focus — fostering teachers’ “instructional moves,” rather than providing directives or content-based instruction