Are workshops a waste of time?

My colleague Jake Cornett and I recently wrote a chapter included in Coaching: Approaches and Perspectives, which summarized more than 200 publications discussing research on coaching.  The one most obvious finding buried in all of those articles was that workshops without follow-up do not lead to implementation.  The research we reviewed suggested that the best implementation rate you can hope for after a workshop is about 15%. In one study that I conducted, I found that the after-effects of a workshop can be negative if teachers leave sessions frustrated or disappointed. (If you'd like to read the study feel free to email me at jknight@ku.edu, and I'll be happy to send you a summary)

My recent experiences at the NSDC conference further eroded my faith in workshops.  Again and again I heard educational leaders say that stand alone workshops are simply not good professional development.  So what does this all mean? Should we stop leading and offering workshops?

This summer, when Michael Fullan was a presenter at our CRL Summer conference,  I asked him this question.  I was quite interested in his answer, especially since I am in the midst of writing a book about how to lead workshops.  Michael said that workshops are still important because "they are a mechanism for introducing new ideas into a system."  But, Michael explained, they have to be part of a broader systemic approach to school reform, one that might involve other approaches to professional learning such as instructional coaching, Professlonal Learning Communities, Japanese Lesson Study, focus, continuity,and principal leadership.

Given these concerns about stand alone workshops, I've started asking several questions when I am invited to work with a district to provide support for their development of a coaching program.  If I just lead workshops about coaching (kind of an ironic thing to do, actually), my fear is that I may actually be part of the problem, rather than part of the solution. However, my hope is that if I advocate for high quality PD, my colleagues and I can make a real difference.  

My questions are listed below. Let me know if you think we need to add or subtract any from the list or if you have any additional thoughts about whether or not workshops still matter:

1.     How many schools are being served by this project?

2.     How many coaches do you/will you have in place?

3.     What are your students’ major needs?

4.     What are your teachers’ major needs?

5.     On which teaching practices and other interventions do your current professional development efforts focus?

6.     Which teacher or student needs are/are not addressed by your current professional development?

7.     Do your teacher evaluation methods and walk-throughs target your professional development focus?

8.     Do you have too many, the right amount, or not enough teaching practices being implemented in your district?

9.     What do your coaches know about coaching?

10. What do they need to know about coaching?

11. Do they deeply understand the teaching practices they share?

12. Do they need to learn more about the teaching practices they share?

13. Do they need ongoing coaching to develop their skills, or will workshops be sufficient?

14. What do the principals know about the teaching practices, the methods of evaluation, the coaching practices?

15. What do they need to know?

16. Is there some one to coach the coaches?

17. If yes, what support does that coach of the coaches need?

18. What do we need to do to ensure that coaches, administrators, teachers, and students learn what they need to learn to make this project a success?

19. What other issues need to be addressed to create an effective professional development plan for your coaches, administrators, teachers, and students?

Twitter time for Instructional Coaches

 So how would coaches use Twitter?  To start, coaches could sign up for Twitter and then do a search for instructional coaches, or just search for Jim Knight since I'm following a growing number of coaches each day.  Then click on those coaches to follow them.  Try to follow as many coaches as possible.  Then, wait for them to follow you, and sign up when they want to follow you. Be on the look out for Twitter spam as marketers will try to get you to follow them as well.  Finally, to keep the community going, make it a point to make a post once or twice a day so that others have something to read.  If you find a cool article, do something creative at school, get a new idea, write a little tweet to let us all know what you are doing. Or, if you're facing a challenge, put out a little tweet asking for advice or suggestions. The more people contribute, the more valuable our twittering coaches community might be.  Also, consider using tinyurl as a simple way to share websites.  Finally, encourage your friends to get on, link up, and share.  How cool it is going to be when we have 1000 coaches sharing ideas and asking for suggestions all through our community.  And you can be one of the pioneers. I should mention that technology coach Cathy Baker from DuPage County, Illinois gets all credit for starting me thinking about twitter, and the use of tinyurl. And, you can follow her tweets by linking from my page, of course.

Update on Sunday, August 17, 2008 at 02:46PM by Jim Knight

Aaron Sumner pointed out this nice article about Twitter that offers a nice overview of what it is what its potential is. And, he pointed me to it on Twitter :)

Twittering Coaches

At today's Instructional Coaching Institute, I proposed we create a country wide community of twittering coaches, that is coaches who update each other on their actions and communicate through twitter. So if you're reading this, and you're interested, just sign up to Twitter.com, look for me, Jim Knight, and then start following the people I'm following.  Right now the group is small, but all things start that way. Wouldn't it be interesting to see 100 or more coaches sharing their daily experiences all learning from each other, all through twitter? 

My experiment with web 2.0 the healthy virus

In my book Instructional Coaching I talk about ideas spreading like a healthy virus.  A book I'm reading right now, Groundswell has got me thinking about how web 2.0 can be used to promote the spread of ideas, more specifically how I might use the web to get the word out about coaching.  So, I'm going to try an experiment. First, I'm going to use this blog much more frequently, updating it with book reviews each Sunday, for certain, along with other postings through out the week.  Second, we're going to create a forum on the instructional coaching website for open source ideas about education, priming the pump, so to speak, and publishing pdf. files of instructional coaching tools that you can download free.  We also encourage you to add your own materials. Also, I have added a number of links on my delicious site, including 14 articles I've written over the years about coaching.  Finally, I'm going to put tweets on twitter.com every few hours so that readers, if they are interested, can see where I am and what I'm thinking.  You just need to search for Jim Knight.  I encourage you, too, to get on twitter so that we can create an online community of coaches, using twitter as a way to provide windows into our worlds.  This is just an experiment, but then isn't just about everything we do.

State-wide Change

By an interesting coincidence, I was asked a question and given an answer in back-to-back emails this week. An excellent professional developer and state leader in Louisiana, Anne Clouatre, asked me for some ideas (questions to consider) regarding state-wide school reform. Today, a friend of mine who happens to be a great thinker about reform, Mary Little, an Associate Professor at the University of Central Florida, and the Principal Investigator for Project Central, reminded me that Michael Fullan has a great website where interested change agents can download many useful articles about state-wide reform. Anyone interested in this topic will benefit from checking Dr. Fullan's website and downloading some of his articles.