What are your motives?

Ok, practitioners: So you’ve taken your courses. Some for the pay raise, some for recertification, some for conditions as part of accepting a position with your district. All valid and reasonable. Fair enough.

To whom are you ultimately held accountable? Your immediate supervisor? Wrong! Whether or not you or “Mr. Big” want to admit it, it’s your clientele: students, taxpayers, the public. Want to get really nitty-gritty? There’s a difference between self-serving motives and those that promote student achievement.

Simply put: After you get the pay raise, the certification, the position, whatever, are you going to apply your knowledge and skills in such a way as to bring your students further along? You got yours. Are you going to give the students theirs? In your courses, you more than likely created or proposed projects that were, hypothetically, going to be implemented in the classroom. Well? Have you implemented them yet? That’s a yes/no question. If so, have you made note of what needs to be refined? (yes/no)

School districts: You laid out some resources for your personnel to partake in professional development. Have you reviewed your employees’ completion rates and ratings? Have you reviewed their project portfolios? Have you sent district personnel into the schools to observe their course projects being implemented? Have you showcased their projects with the rest of the district and celebrated their successes? Have you attempted to correlate their efforts to student achievement in ways that are quantifiable? Yes? No? If not, why not? Simply accepting a “certificate of completion” from professional development providers doesn’t cut it. If that’s all you’re interested in, some serious introspection is in order.

Bottom line: Do you feel comfortable reporting to those to whom you’re accountable, the measures you have in place to monitor your investment in professional development and its impact on student achievement? If so, you’re in good shape. If not, those “butterflies” you feel in your gut aren’t going to go away by themselves. Don’t feel them? Interesting. “Denial” isn’t a river in Egypt.