'A professional development asked us to use our "Teacher Voice" so we did?'
"Infuriating professional development workshops on using our "Teacher Voice"? Don't mind if we do!"
If you're a teacher, or in one of the lots of other professions that make you do professional development or other workshops, you know that 95% of these things are utterly useless. Not only are they useless, but they also take up time we could be actually doing useful things instead of sitting and listening to people who had 2 years of experience 10 years ago telling us how to do our jobs. It's infuriating at best and actively insulting at worst.
Even administrators hate this shit and are usually on their laptops the whole time, because we must all follow the Overlords of the school board and the State Department of Education (both of whom know nothing about what actually happens in schools.)
Teachers often do professional development (PD) sessions at the beginning of semesters. Much of our ~1-week "in service" before school starts is taken up by this utter nonsense when we really need to be lesson planning and getting ready for the kids to show up.
With that background, let me tell you about the absolute travesty of Teacher Voice. This happened about 10 years ago. Teacher Voice was a multiple-session (beginning, midpoint, and end of the school year), super long workshop about how teachers can influence the policies and practices in their school and district. They were supposed to come 3 times a year--beginning, middle, and end.
These were half-day sessions in which we took surveys about how much we felt we were listened to, and what dissatisfactions and satisfactions we had with the school. Predictably, these all turned out dismal, which the Teacher Voice people loved because it gave them a jumping-off point to babble on repeatedly about how we COULD have a voice and that we should advocate for ourselves and blah blah blah.
It sounded nice and hopeful, until we saw our administrators, predictably, not paying attention and realized that the presenters were just saying vapid inspirational things over and over. So, you know.
My teacher friends and I started using #teachervoice sarcastically in our group chat, and it started bleeding over to other people as well. It was a glorious inside joke. One of the counselors set up a box of candy and other snacks labeled "Professional Development," which any staff could take whatever they wanted from with no questions asked.
Teacher Voice came back mid-year and LITERALLY DID THE EXACT SAME WORKSHOP. By that time, most of us were just blatantly doing our actual work. And then comes the malicious compliance!
People started, (mostly) diplomatically and professionally, complaining to admin. #teachervoice, in all its ironic glory, made it into an email a teacher sent to all the teachers and admin.
We used our Teacher Voices, y'all, staying professional (when talking to admin, anyway), the whole time. And lo and behold, the 3rd Teacher Voice PD was cancelled. Malicious compliance mission successful! During the time that was slotted for the 3rd session, we just got work time.
A nice epilogue to follow up: the next year, during the PD times, we got both more work time and ALSO got an in-district "conference" in which ACTUAL TEACHERS did classes on ACTUALLY USEFUL THINGS, and we could choose which sessions to go to.
I taught one of them myself on how to use Google Classroom, which a lot of people were delighted by and thanked me for. It was great. Lesson learned: when people prattle on about advocating for yourself, go ahead and do that and get rid of the prattling.
Here's what people had to say to OP:
Intelligent_Sundae_5 says:
I only taught for three years before I escaped, but the only useful development was meeting with other teachers/team members. Everything else was just like you said, a huge waste of time.
Ill_Cheetah_1991 says:
Someone where I taught always said about how these companies were staffed with people who tried to be a teacher and couldn't hack it, so I started working for companies that tell teachers that COULD hack it how to do it better. Seemed to sum it all up.
OP responded:
Sounds about right. Crazy that districts actually use real money to pay these people. I'd actually like a bigger allotment for the copy machine, thanks so much. Maybe even the fun colors of expo markers! What a treat.
Ginkachuuuuu says:
My mom was a middle school teacher so I got to hear a lot about these stupid things. Our state seems determined to not spend any money on education, but they'll happily shell out millions of tax dollars on these worthless, condescending, time wasting "consultants."