The Half-Life of Professional Development
During the 80s and 90s I had the opportunity to provide many different forms of professional development to high school faculty, in my school and across the state. There were courses for credit, all day sessions, weekly workshops, and summer seminars, and inservice opportunities. Very early we learned some basic rules….don’t put a group of smart people in a room and expect them to learn a piece of software by following you along click for click. We adopted individualized instruction, small group teaming, face-to-face support and resources in print (prior to the internet). And even though we had a whole-school initiative to work on integrating technology, we weren’t moving forward very quickly...our success rate was about 10% over a year. Was it motivation, teaching methodology, availability of support, or something else?
The concept of half-life of professional development came to mind. Given the best learning experience, with all of the skills of learning design incorporated, how much time will it take before half of the new information will be forgotten? Assume activation, attention, embedded practice, multiple learning styles, connections to prior knowledge, intrinsic motivation, etc. If at the end of that event, there is no additional follow-up, thought, review and practice, reminders, or attention to the content of the learning, how much time will it take until the participant remembers only 50%?
How often do you feel as if you are starting over at ground zero?
When I ask, the most common answer is “Not very long”, with estimates from a few days to a few weeks. High school and college students generally meet every two days, and adult learning classes are typically no less frequent than one per week, with an expectation for readings and online work in between. And although teacher professional development is a key practice for moving education forward, how frequently are teachers working together on the same learning topic? Is it weekly, or less often than that?
For purposes of illustration let’s assume one week is the half-life of new professional learning. The graph below shows a the cumulative effect of exponential decay on knowledge of a given topic after a period of 8 weeks, assuming that each learning activity adds an additional full dose of knowledge to the participant. In one case, participants work on the same topic weekly; in the second case, participants rotating through a cycle and only revisit the topic once every four weeks.
Without weekly interventions the monthly group is almost at the point they started. How often do you go into a meeting or PLC and feel you are starting all over, almost at ground zero? Of course, this is just an illustration, and there are many other factors involved in learning. But if your standard design for improving teacher learning is monthly or less frequent inservice events, you may not be getting the learning return for the time invested. How can you avoid the challenges of the ½ life of PD and plan for success?
The solution is to focus on frequency of learning. For PLC work, focus each group on a single theme weekly for 6-8 weeks, then revisit quarterly to maintain the knowledge. Take advantage of collegial learning by design, to increase the frequency of on-topic conversations. Build teams with regular daily connections, office space, bumping into each other, common lunch times, etc. Take advantage of natural proximity of location to increase regular unplanned interactions, such as before or after school. Create teams with common students to generate common planning time. Create mentor/coaching relationships in your teams.
If you want help your professional staff with new thinking and learning, whether it is STEM, design thinking, making, WeVideo, NGSS, writing PLPs, or designing PBGR grading, avoid the low frequency, occasional or one shot deals, and the pitfalls of ½ life of PD.