To save everyone some time, I've put together the PD agenda that has been tried and true, completely unchanged, and devoid of senseless things like research or good pedagogy. In fact, like those overhead transparencies that are smudged beyond recognition that your one social studies teacher still uses (because they special ordered an overhead when their previous one was released to the historical society of the town), I would say it's safest if we just never, ever deviate from this PD agenda.
Now, like most schools, PD days have been rapidly dwindling. It must have something to do with the almanac predictions and nothing to do with the fact that people keep saying things like "irrelevant" or "lacking any real substance" or "I learn more on Twitter while in the bathroom" whenever we ask them how PD is going. As such, this plan only covers three days – three glorious days. You will walk away with so much crammed into your brain that you won't even know what hit you: new initiatives, old initiatives (just kidding – don't care about those), good research-ish op ed pieces, other stuff we pretend is research, hours of mandated information, and some quality minutes of meaningful learning.
Seriously, we have everything covered.
Okay, enough about that. Let's get to the good stuff, the agenda.
Day 1
8:00-8:15 AM - Morning greeting. Technical issues. Oh, gosh. Sorry about this. It worked last year when I tried it.
8:15-8:45 AM - Skewing of data. We'll begin by reviewing data that I've heavily misinterpreted and falsely contextualized to make sure it fits the narrative that "everything's fine."
8:45-9:00 AM - Team-building exercise. I don't want to tell you what it is, but I definitely didn't run it by our HR department. OKAY. I can't keep it in. It's prolonged eye-contact while holding hands.
9:00-10:00 AM - We literally don't know. The district is coming in for something, but I just figured it was an hour that we didn't have to plan. We're just going to roll with it.
10:00-11:30 AM - New initiative roll-out. If you had been at the admin conference where this company sponsored the dinner and drinks before giving a mediocre presentation with flashy animations, you'd understand why this is our new initiative.
11:30-12:30 PM - Lunch. A whole hour?! You're welcome. Now, eat at the pace of civilized people for once, please.
12:30-3:30 PM - Team time. Honestly, we don't care what you do with this time. We just called it this to make it sound like we have something planned, but we just got really tired of planning stuff.
Day 2
8:00-8:15 AM - Ice breaker. Technical difficulties. *frantic glances around the room looking for the new hires who know how Tik Tok works, hoping they also then know how to reboot the network*
8:15-10:45 AM - Consultant. We don't even fully know what he's going to talk about, but like, it'll be exciting. Just don't ask about the research behind their ideas. They get really mad when you do that.
10:45-11:30 AM - Q&A (AKA justification of consultant). During this time we'll patch together an explanation of how this consultant connects to our new initiative because, to be totally honest, we had already forgotten about the initiative we introduced yesterday.
11:30-12:30 PM - Lunch. Please, don't get used to this hour thing. You'll be back to shoveling food down your throat with kids in the room soon. Maybe practice for that this time around.
12:30-1:30 PM - Mandated...something. The district sent us a PowerPoint. It's on like how to bully others or something. We'll click through it and read all the words on the slide. We would hate to assume you all can read.
1:30-3:00 PM - Student-centered learning lecture. We have some great professional learning for you. It's a lecture about how not to lecture. The irony is what makes it so good. We will ask that you close your devices because we like to control when you can check your email and when you can't.
3:00-3:30 PM - Awkward milling. We really thought everyone was going to be more interested in the content and have lots of questions. But, oh no, you can't leave yet. You're still on the clock, so, you know, just talk and stuff amongst yourselves.
Day 3
8:00-8:15 AM - Fun welcome back video. Technical difficulties. Does anyone still have a projector? None of these SMART boards are functioning anymore, apparently. I was so hopeful, despite a lack of research and general sentiment that they're a waste, that these would work so well.
8:15-9:00 AM - Team-building activities. HR presentation on physical contact. Turns out making people hold hands and stare at each other goes against some sort of policy, but instead of just having HR talk to the admin team, we thought it would be a good use of time for them to address everyone (thank goodness because we only had the one team-building activity!).
9:00-9:15 AM - Break. We saw all of you just get up and leave about this time yesterday, so we thought we'd build in time for you to be a human today.
9:15-9:30 AM - Awkward wrangling. I'll just be up here awkwardly laughing as you all ignore me. No, I'm not frustrated. I promise this isn't frustrating. It's like the furthest thing from frustrated. I'm fine. Fine. Really. I'm f-f-fine.
9:30-10:30 AM - Technology training. We have seven new platforms for you to use, and we figured an hour would be enough time to master them all. We asked the teachers who know how to use TikTok to explain them to you. We're looking forward to evaluating you based on how well you use these in your classroom.
10:30-11:30 AM - Classroom set up time. We really forgot about this one. Okay, this one's on us. We wanted to give you classroom setup time, but that's just not going to happen. There's a mandated video that we are supposed to watch.
11:30-12:30 PM - Lunch. I know, an hour. Like, I don't understand how we are so nice.
12:30-12:45 PM - Finish the video. Okay, so we really thought the VHS player was plugged in when we were trying to play the video before lunch. Because it took 15 minutes to figure it out, we'll take these 15 minutes to finish the video.
12:45-3:00 - Team time. Seriously, I was just out of gas for this planning business. Only rule is that you can't go to the bar. Oh, and you have to stay in your teams because collaboration is the most important thing ever, so please don't spend time setting up your room. That's what your unpaid weekends are for.
3:00-3:30 - Closing meeting. This meeting is mostly just to make sure nobody left early. We'll give a lighthearted speech about how important it is that we don't give any students Fs (but don't worry, we won't address grading practices – wouldn't want to make people uncomfortable).
3:30-4:00 - Seriously? I don't know why this person is asking questions that pertain only to them and keeping us all late right now. I just, oh, yeah, I can just say goodbye to the rest of you.
Again, as always, please make sure to do as we say and not as we do. Actually, maybe don't even do as we say. You know what, let's just chalk this up as a good learning experience for all of us, and I will see you in May when we have our next and last PD day. We have already started planning when we're going to start planning for that PD day. We're getting excited to see how we can pack this three day plan into one day. It's going to be awesome!
