Too Many Mandatory Trainings — And They're the Same Every Year
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses how repetitive, undifferentiated mandatory trainings waste teachers' time and erode trust in professional development.
Key Takeaways
- Repetition breeds disengagement - Watching the same compliance videos year after year teaches teachers that PD isn't worth their attention
- Differentiation applies to adults too - Veteran teachers don't need the same training as first-year teachers
- Reduce the mandates - Every unnecessary training hour is an hour not spent on preparation, grading, or rest
Transcript
Something that is clearly out of control is the amount of mandatory professional development, or rather, mandatory training that teachers are having to do at the beginning of the school year, and especially at the beginning of every school year, and especially mandatory training that is exactly the same from year to year, not differentiated at all based on what your role and responsibilities are.
And it can take eight hours, ten hours, or even more.
Sometimes people are given time to do that on their own, or not really given time to do it, but just required to do it by a certain date.
And sometimes it's sit everybody down in the same room together and make them watch hour after hour of these mandatory trainings.
I have to wonder what is going on here.
Now, I remember we did have bloodborne pathogen training that was mandatory every year.
But it makes me wonder now, kind of looking back, where does the idea of mandatory training come from?
Who gets to say what is a mandatory training?
Because if anybody and everybody in the district can say this is a mandatory training, everybody has to go to it, but nobody really has to pay anything for making their training mandatory.
Like you said, we have 6,000 teachers, so it costs $2 million to make this training mandatory based on how long it is.
I think departments...
would think long and hard about making something mandatory.
But if teacher time is free, if principals can just be told, you have to make your teachers do this because it's mandatory, I'm not sure that is a good enough reason.
I think we need to really scrutinize the idea of mandatory training, especially that is the same for everybody, and especially that is repeated year after year.
So if you have to do the same mandatory trainings and they're the same from year to year.
It's always the same.
Let me know what you think about this.
Let me know how much of it you have to do, and let me know how you think we can cut down on just the burden of time that this imposes on teachers, especially at the beginning of the year when, what do you really want to be doing right now?
How do you want to be spending your time when school is about to start?
Of course, you want to be getting into your classroom and getting ready for the year.
If you need to chat with some colleagues, meet with some colleagues about some different issues, you want to get that taken care of, but I don't know anybody that really sees it as a particularly high priority to do mandatory training that, frankly, could be done any time of the year.
Let me know what you think.