What is your PD ratio?

Richard Wells (@eduwells) nails it in this post.

He is right - the thing which would seem to be the most important gets the least amount of time for PD (or PL) in schools. Now why is that? Well for one, it is harder.

Looking around at outside opportunities to do some PD on pedagogy (the art of teaching) there is really nothing on offer. BUT heaps of the other types - which is why it is so important that we stop talking about technology and start talking about teaching. Sure there are amazing tools out there but our PD sessions can't just be "Google Docs 101" - sounds great to me but only a very small percentage of teachers are into that. What teachers SHOULD be into is something like "Collaboration - tools to help students work together". Wouldn't that be a better title? Rather than focus on the tool, focus on the padagogical imperative that the tool solves or helps make better/easier/quicker/more effective. Not only the title, but the WAY that session is presented would be backwards from the usual technology session - talking about teaching and learning first, what we want kids to do and understand and then what tools help that to happen.

In this case I would argue that teaching our students to work together productively is one of the most important skills they could learn in order to thrive in the 21st Century.

But we rarely teach that.

These big ideas span curriculum, which gets the biggest chunk of our time (think Department meetings with all the admin). I applaud those heads of department who are trying to make meetings more about pedagogy whilst drowning in a sea of admin!

Another thought - why do we spend the sliver of time we get on pedagogy talking about teaching (what we do) rather than learning (what kids do)? An idea for another post perhaps!