Thank you @ilana_horn for resurfacing something I’ve been thinking on for the last few years about maths teacher PD...

Teachers suffer a lot from situations where “experts” are wheeled in to “fix” them.
They might be fixing the teachers’ deficit mindsets, or their knowledge of education research, or subject matter knowledge or whatever.

But teachers are already experts in their own students and in their own teacher personalities which dictate what happens when they personally try things in their own classrooms.

Any PD that fails to recognise this, and fails to let teachers engage in the act of figuring out how to integrate new ideas into their existing practice as experts is doomed to fail.

At the last maths teacher conference I went to, I really tried to honour both sides. I presented the main idea, let them experience what that was like, then deferred to their own experience to figure out what to do with it. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the best PD I’ve ever run.

What @ilana_horn has added today is a consolidation of this idea. The idea that you are never a finished expert in teaching or student knowledge. There is always more to learn. And PD is about finding the next direction to grow, and how to grow there.

What we can do when we provide PD is offer a window to see particular places to grow, suggest ideas to help with that, and let teachers reflect and figure out what they will do next in their own context and building on their current level of expertise.