Inside Public Education: Teacher Institutes

As a new school year begins, every district has its teachers in for a couple of days before the students arrive to get ready and for some training.  Like most professions, teaching requires periodic updating of skills, tweaks and revisions in our methods.  You’ve heard plenty on my belief that each teacher needs to determine for himself just what his approach to teaching will be; and that as long as his students have the skills which the consensus has determined they need, he should be left alone to use his own judgment on how best to teach those skills. (See  )  Needless to say, that holds true as well for the training options available to teachers. 

Each year, there are these days devoted to teacher training—institutes, the days when the kids stay home and the teachers become students for the day.  I gotta tell you:  It is nice to come into a classroom knowing that all I have to do is show up, that I won’t have to figure out what’s going to happen that day.  If only for that, Institute Day is a valuable variation in our normal routines.

Sadly, that is often the only value institute days have.  If you were to survey teachers across the country, you’d find that at least half of them see institutes as essentially useless.  Lots of us call in sick, leave early, or just don’t show up for institute days.  There are a couple of reasons for this.

Teachers deserve much of the blame for how poorly most institute days work.  We assume we’ve heard and seen it all before, and we can tell just by the title of the presentation if it will be any good.  And even “good” has a very limited and unambitious connotation in this context—it means the presentation isn’t boring and we get to go home earlier than the schedule states.  With that kind of expectation, we make the worst possible audience, acting in ways that would cause us to become homicidal should our students try the same nonsense. 

We are horribly rude.  We show up late, without any embarrassment.  If the presenter starts right on time, she can figure only about 75% of her audience will be in their seats, with the remainder dribbling in for the next half hour.  Often, portions of institutes take place in school classrooms (as opposed to auditoriums or gyms), so it’s pretty noticeable every time somebody comes sauntering in with his cup of coffee and unapologetically wanders around the room until he finds his friends in the far corner. 

Then, as the presenter begins going over her material, many will immediately tune her out; the better to grade tests, to read the paper, to gossip with colleagues, or to do a crossword puzzle.  You think I’m kidding?  I’ve seen teachers in the front row of an auditorium, making no effort to hide their reading of the Suntimes (a tabloid style paper is easier to handle in those auditorium seats) with the speaker fifteen feet away from them.  In big auditoriums, the lighting can often be too dim for newspaper reading anywhere but right up front.  Nobody says anything, and I guess the presenter is getting paid regardless. 

And now technology has added a new rudeness opportunity:  Laptop computers allow us to ignore the presentations even more effectively than before.  They’re also a little more discreet and don’t require any additional lighting.  At any teacher gathering taking place in Hinsdale District 86 these days, you’ll notice at least 25% (way low most of the time) of the teachers immersed in email, web surfing, and other laptop-based activities which will prevent any of the annoying presentation from being heard. 

You can probably guess what happens should the presenter be foolish enough to give us a break.  That’s right; a ten-minute pause turns into twenty or even thirty as the teachers refuse to return until they’re good and ready.  Lunch?  Just about all the teachers will be late coming back, if they come back at all.  Presenters will actually thank the teachers for returning, as if we’ve done them some big favor by deigning to show up somewhere we’re contractually obligated to go.  It’s gotten so bad that when we have a county-wide institute, lunch is skipped entirely so that we can get out early.  Yep, we’re so bad about leaving these things before they’re finished that it’s too much to expect that we’ll come back after lunch, so they just cut the institute short to accommodate our rudeness.

Actually, it’s probably better that many teachers do blow off these things since they have such a bad attitude about the material that’s being presented.  We’ll go over the problems with many of the presentations next, but just because many institutes we’ve attended have been lame is no reason to assume each and every one won’t have anything to offer us.  Yet, before the presenter’s even finished her introduction, half her audience has dismissed her ideas—you can almost hear the minds snapping closed, assuming that those doors were even unlocked when the teachers arrived. 

Sure, by the time you’ve been teaching for fifteen years, it will seem like there’s nothing new to learn, but that’s simply not true.  Every teacher should be constantly re-evaluating methodology with the eye toward improving instruction; institutes give us the opportunity to hear what others are doing.  Ken Kesey’s quote—“Take what you can use and let the rest go by”—makes perfect sense for institutes, but we have to be listening in the first place in order to determine if this particular idea has any use for us.  Plus, the Snowflake philosophy is based on our modifying ideas to suit our teaching styles, not a belief that we achieve some sort of perfect state where we can stop learning. 

For all our complaining about how lazy and unmotivated our students are, we often fail to recognize that we are much worse in our willingness to consider new and different ways of doing things.  Just because a “touchy/feely” presentation might conflict with my firm approach to classroom discipline doesn’t mean that I can’t find a few ideas which might help me deal with those kids who seem to go out of their way to get in trouble.  At worst, I can experiment with anything that made some sense to me and abandon it if it doesn’t suit my needs.  Many of us, however, do all kinds of mental contortions to avoid having to think about the concepts we are given; it’s almost as if we perceive the presenter as an enemy who is determined to corrupt the pristine beauty that we have created.  We see ourselves as the Alaskan wilderness and the institutes as callous oil companies, intent on drilling and polluting our idealistic wonderland.  In all fairness, though, I’ve been to dozens of institutes over the years, and I’ve yet to witness a presenter clubbing any baby seals.

The presenters do sometimes bring this negative mindset on themselves.  Too often, their presentations come in forms that more closely resemble infomercials than scholarly presentations.  You know what I’m talking about—the ones where they go on and on about an exercise machine or a wok, with eternally smiling, sweater-wearing couples who demonstrate repeatedly how that exercise machine or wok is so indispensable to your life that you may as well kill yourself if you’re dumb enough not to order three in the next ten seconds.  That’s often how institute folks go about trying to convince teachers their ideas merit consideration. 

Instead of demonstrating their idea’s limited usefulness in some situations, they try to persuade us that our entire teaching methodology, not to mention our personal lives, will be irrevocably and wonderfully transformed should we adopt their methods.  Given the oversell, it’s little wonder that jaded educators start silently picking the presentation apart as soon as they sit down:  “There’s no way that this modest proposal can make that much difference in my classroom.  Thus, this clown up there is obviously shoveling a load of trash my way.  Therefore, there’s no need for me to pay much attention.  I wonder what time we’ll get out of here?”  All this takes place in the teachers’ minds as they enter the room and are looking for their seats.  I’m not sure which happened first—teacher cynicism or the presenters’ overblown hype—but the end result is a disconnect that is extremely difficult to overcome.  The best that can happen with these conditions is a steely presenter who plods ahead with a cheery demeanor as the bored teachers wonder where to go for lunch. 

The presenters aren’t oblivious to the teachers’ indifference, however, and that’s where the opportunity for improving institutes arises.  Since lecturing and running through PowerPoint presentations to people reading newspapers or working on laptops gets old quickly, the presenters have developed the “small group breakout discussion” format to supplement their presentations. The basic blueprint for these “breakout” sessions is that the presenter will pose some question or hypothetical situation, have the audience divide into smaller groups to discuss how the technique they have just learned would solve this problem, and then reconvene the larger group for “debriefing” (summarizing what each group discussed). 

There’s no question that these small group activities liven up institutes for us mainly because we get to talk to other teachers.  Usually, it’s just other teachers from the same school or department, which is hardly all that exciting, but it does beat the snot out of being lectured by the expert.  Once in a while, especially on the county-wide institute days where a bunch of different presentations are available in a variety of locations, we will be in groups with teachers from all over the place and get to hear what it’s like working in that school three towns over or in the town where we live. 

But gossip isn’t the by-product of the small groups that offers a way to make institutes more effective.  As more institutes started incorporating small group activities, I discovered that there were many teachers out there who were just as intelligent, witty, and creative as me (well, almost), who had all kinds of knowledge from which I could profit.  As we would quickly dispense with whatever task the small group had been assigned, we would digress into all kinds of interesting areas that led to the sharing of our techniques and approaches for any number of teaching issues. 

No matter how long you’ve been teaching, you always find yourself going back to grapple with fundamental issues:  Things like discipline, dealing with parents, grading papers, curriculum, motivating students, organization, assessment, and mandated state/federal laws are just a few of the things that will occupy teachers as long as we have schools.  These aren’t “solvable” problems that a single technique will make go away. 

These are endemic, perpetual concerns that ebb and flow with each teacher, that experience coupled with trial and error might ease as the years go by only to re-emerge just when you think that you’ve gotten them under control.  After thirty years, I’m still searching for ways to make grading those infernal essays easier that doesn’t compromise the standards I hold so dear. (See  and .)  I still don’t feel that I have an efficient system for communicating with parents.  I’m always looking for new things to do with my kids that will be a change from my standard read/discuss mode. 

And believe it or not, I find the most useful ideas come from other teachers, not imported experts, which will lead us next time to the simplest, cheapest method for improving teacher institutes, specifically, and schools overall.