Professional Development and Personal Renewal

Making Time For Professional Development

And Personal Renewal To Meet

Tom Hunter
&
Richard Scholtz,
Co-Founders & Co-Directors
Northwest Teachers Conference

There are fourteen of us here, sitting in green plastic lawn chairs on the porch outside a lodge at a conference center north of Seattle. We're part of a larger group of teachers from around the country – Boston to Los Angeles, Alaska and Arizona to Wisconsin and Illinois -- gathered for the Northwest Teachers Conference (NWTC). It's late June, soon after school is out for the summer, and many of these teachers are tired. It's been a bumpy year with budget cuts, increasing requirements, and test score pressures.

For ten years, NWTC has offered teachers five days together in an event that combines professional development and personal renewal. It's tried to help them smooth out the bumps, or at least be honest about their teaching and what affects it in ways they don't often get to. It's also invited them to wrestle with fundamental issues of education – things like classroom behaviors, diversity and inclusion, who decides on curriculum, the value of the arts and different vocabularies of expression, whether the most important outcomes can ever be measured, and what's the place for a teacher's own interests and passions when everything becomes standardized. Each year, we've noticed how well this event fills these teachers up, and how much they need that.

Each year we've also noticed how many teachers simply long for more time. Staff development generally hopes to help teachers become better at what they do, and these days that is often defined by administrators focused on raising test scores. But what if what is really needed to improve teaching is more time and the freedom to choose what to do with it? What if teachers could reflect on something they had just read or just heard, or something they'd been wondering about for a while? What if they could take more walks with friends, or write their own poetry after a year of encouraging third graders to write theirs, or join a group to talk about something that really mattered to them?

This conference opens up time, big chunks of it. During much of each day, participants have to decide what to do, and, for some, that's new. It's not easy to decide how to direct your own education when you're so used to others telling you to do things you don't think are helping. It's not automatic that people will know how their teaching can improve simply by asking them. But part of the satisfaction of this conference is being able to make those choices, and then feeling something of themselves come alive, something that might just make them better teachers.

The group on the porch is a good example. Sitting around the circle are teachers who work with preschool children, elementary and high school grades, special education, drama and music. We've gathered in a focus group to talk about what happens at the end of the school year when we have to say good-bye to students and families, when the intimacy of teaching brings grief and sadness. We've all chosen to be here because it's a topic that interests us, a topic that wasn't even on the schedule when the conference started. A participant added it to the big sheet of paper on the wall because it interested her enough to want to talk about it with other teachers. That is how this conference works, at least in the afternoons.

The daily schedule reflects the goal of giving participants different kinds of experiences throughout the day. Mornings are scheduled for everyone to be together in presentations given by an experienced and talented staff. The topics are generated from what matters to that morning's presenter. There's less interest in age- or curriculum-specific presentations and more interest in topics of general interest that teachers are invited to translate into their daily teaching lives however they want to.

The staff is hired with three main abilities in mind. They need to have something to present that's useful to teachers, something they, themselves, are passionate about. They need to be able "to sit in the back row," be a participant when someone else is presenting, and be responsive when participants ask for their expertise. And they are expected to be collaborative and help make the over-all event better and more lively. To make that happen, the staff meets each day after lunch to "check in" and share observations about how things are going. For the Co-Directors, creating a team that really does help shape the event as it goes along is one of the great pleasures of this conference.

In contrast to the mornings scheduled with one session for everyone, the afternoons are open, and here's where the group on the porch comes in. Afternoons wait to be filled with whatever the participants want to do, and the possibilities are limited only by what interests them. The big sheet of paper on the wall is entitled "Free Time and Focus Groups," and it announces 1:15pm and 3:15pm as starting times for those groups. As the conference begins, the paper is blank. It's all self-generating, time to make of it what the participants will. Nobody is required to go to a focus group. Equally important and listed first on the paper on the wall is "free time."

After dinner evening time is for all-group gatherings with people singing songs, telling stories, or teaching the group a game. Children are a big part of these gatherings because some teachers have accepted the invitation to bring their children with them to the conference if they want or need to. Sooner or later, almost everyone leads or presents something, sometimes with great skill, sometimes as beginners. The space is open and supportive with the audience playing a major role in hearing and receiving whatever is shared. Some evening sessions include a campfire with s'mores, and there are always after hour gatherings for more singing and talking. There's typically a lullaby night too, when we lie on the floor after dark with pillows and blankets to share whatever lullabies anyone knows. There's such sweet power in filling a room with the soft sounds of one voice or many, and it's a highlight of the time for many teachers to listen, sing and be sung to sleep.

Teachers end up taking a lot home with them when the five days are over. Some of it is practical, like a new song or new ways of dealing with behaviors or a new book or lesson plan idea. But for many, what they take with them goes deeper and is more important than anything practical. Many take home a new sense of their own vitality. Time for themselves and time to explore and wrestle with education and their own teaching fills them up with energy that spills out when they get back to their classrooms. The Director of an early childhood center told us, "The best workshop for our staff this year was presented by our teachers who had returned from NWTC."

So here we are on the porch, and the teacher who wrote this focus group idea on the big sheet of paper tells us about her home child care center, twenty-one years of it. Some families bring their children from as far away as thirty miles every day. There are reunions each spring when families, some now with teenagers, come back to remember. More than a hundred people come and they celebrate because even though they don't come to her center any more, they're still part of it and always will be.

"Is it hard for anyone else to say good-bye when the kids and their families have to leave in the spring and move on?" she asks. "Absolutely!" says a high school drama teacher, and she leans in to tell about inviting the graduating seniors in her class to come into her office to paint their names on the wall. It's an annual ritual. Every senior class gets to do it but this group is one of her favorites, so they paint their names in the favored spot just above her desk. A fourth grade teacher says she has "looped through" two years with the same group of children, and they made books of their favorite times – proud moments, times when they struggled, where they'll be in the future. Later, they talked about what it meant simply to be together, and that's when she choked up, like suddenly the details of two years got all balled up in her throat. A preschool teacher says he loves how the connections continue past the good-byes. One mother brings her daughter to see him on her way to another school, simply stopping by for a hug.

Around the circle on the porch, the stories spread out, the way a quilt does. The silence spreads out too as we linger with each other and what's being said. It's warm here, and comfortable. There's time. Colleagues share their experience, and experience reveals their wisdom. We cry because the stories and the silence fill us too full not to. We laugh too, when what's shared needs the celebration of laughter. We ask questions and listen intently. Practical ideas are exchanged. There's no "expert" here to answer the questions, just a lot of expertise. It's more conversation than presentation, and the conversation matters.

Someone says this time together is so much more useful to her than the last professional development day she went to in her school district. "No tears there," she says, "and no laughter either; just more stuff to put on a shelf. And who ever gets to talk with teachers who work with so many different ages, and from around the country?"

The teacher who organized this focus group says she had hoped to get suggestions from others about how to deal with the emotions of good-byes. "But I'm not getting that at all," she says. "This is much better. It confirms that teaching well is all about relationships. That's what helps kids learn and grow best. And when you get connected to people like that, saying good-bye is just plain sad." Around the circle, everyone nods.

Then it's time for another focus group, or at least that's what the schedule says. Or maybe it's time to continue this conversation with a few people who want to, or time to sit under a tree, or learn a new song or take a nap. No one hurries. We don't have to. There's time, time to become a better teacher.

About the authors

Tom Hunter and Richard Scholtz are Co-Founders and Co-Directors of the Northwest Teachers Conference.

Tom Hunter is a modern-day minstrel with a busy national schedule of speaking, workshops and family concerts. He presents seminars for the Bureau of Education and Research, teaches teachers, makes recordings designed to encourage everyone to sing, and works to integrate songs into school and family life. Email him at tom@tomhunter.com

Richard Scholtz was a Co-founder of Antioch College West in 1971. Since then, he has worked primarily in music and education: performing, recording, teaching and organizing. He has taught classes for Western Washington University, Fairhaven College, and Whatcom Community College. He has a particular interest in designing and implementing collaborative teaching/learning environments. Email him at rscholtz@aol.com