The hue and cry to provide teachers with more professional development continues to echo across the United States and around the world. Edu-cators have come to recognize that the old model of professional development, which served us well in the past, is no longer meeting our needs.
In the old model, we tended to bring in an outside expert for a "one-shot" presentation. Admittedly, it can be exciting to learn from an expert who appears before us in "living color," and a dynamic presenter with a substantive message can motivate us to want to change. However, no matter how important and valuable the message and no matter how enthusiastic the expert is in presenting it, the ever-increasing demands of today's classroom often overwhelm the intent and extinguish the desire of teachers to change.
We have made significant progress in redesigning our professional development programs so that teachers receive follow-up activities and support to help them apply the expert's message to their classrooms. But a critical weakness still remains because teachers are missing a basic component of the change process: time to think.
"Time to think" does not mean time dedicated to manipulating the nuts and bolts of how we run our schools. We have numerous structures already in place for that. It is also not time to bicker and complain—that will happen regardless of whether we set time aside for it.
What "time to think" means is a block of new time in which teachers can come together to discuss and debate questions about teaching and learning. In many ways, it's the kind of activity educators were involved in when working on graduate degrees. How-ever, since earning those degrees, many educators simply have not had the time, the opportunity, or the energy for such discussions.
Teaching has become progressively more difficult as our world has become more complex and the needs of our students have become more varied and demanding of our attention. Thus, "time to think" cannot be "leftover time" at the end of a long teaching day. If we are serious about involving teachers in dialogue about improving education, we need new time that is dedicated to that purpose, separate from the day-to-day realities of teaching. To do this, we have to either expand our concept of professional development to allow schools to substitute "time to think" for traditional presentation-based activities or extend teachers' work year so they have new time for this purpose.
We have learned so much recently about how the human brain functions, and we have now begun to explore the implications of that learning on teaching. We have not, however, given enough attention to the implications of that learning on professional development. In their November 1998 Educational Leadership article "What Do We Know from Brain Research?" (p. 11), Pat Wolfe and Ron Brandt pointed out:
I would extend what Wolfe and Brandt concluded to professional development. We should expect educators to be lifelong learners in their field, but that learning is more likely to make a difference in what we do day in and day out if we have processed the learning with others.
As I write this, it all seems so logical to me. Of course educators need time to think and to discuss and debate the best ways to educate our students. But I firmly believe that the general public might well find it difficult to accept that we should provide time for such activity as part of the work year for our teachers. I was once part of a district in which the teachers proposed that three days a year be set aside for them to meet, analyze, and discuss educational issues and concerns. I will never forget that a member of the board of education responded, "How could I ever justify paying teachers to think? The public would chew me up and spit me out." Needless to say, the proposal never came to fruition.
It may be a hard sell, but we must convince the public that allowing teachers time to engage in discussion and debate is valuable and necessary for professional development. Having time to think would encourage teachers to focus on their own learning once again—and this can only make them more successful. If you lose the passion for learning, you lose the passion for teaching.