Elevating Teacher Voices in Professional Development Planning and Design

When Ph.D. candidate Megan Satterthwaite-Freiman was a middle and high school teacher, seldom was she asked about the specific kinds of professional development she needed to help her do her job. 

“Oftentimes, in my own experience, I was told, ‘Go sign up for a training,’ but rarely was I asked, ‘What do you need, what are you grappling with and struggling with, what's top of mind for you?’" she says.

One area that Satterthwaite-Freiman found lacking in her pre-service and professional development was guidance on how to talk to students about sensitive topics that require particular care and self-awareness on the part of educators, such as ethnicity, race, and identity.

Shallow approaches to culturally sustaining work in schools and in teacher training can cause more harm than good. However, professional development centered on the personal needs and concerns of teachers has been shown to be a successful strategy in helping teachers to communicate effectively across cultures. It’s also the method that Satterthwaite-Freiman and her research colleagues at the Ed School focus on in a new paper published in the international journal, Identity. The article explores the many challenges that teachers can face when attempting to talk with their students about race, ethnicity, and identity — and how a lack of strong professional development to help them figure out how to do this in the classroom is a problem.

The paper is part of a longitudinal study, led by Professor Adriana Umaña-Taylor on how best to prepare teachers to facilitate a curriculum called the Identity Project which assists high school students in exploring their ethnic and racial identity. 

“I was part of Dr. Umaña-Taylor’s team that was in the process of developing a teacher-training for teachers to implement her evidence-based curriculum,” explains Satterthwaite-Freiman. “We wanted to better understand what our teachers were experiencing and how we could support them in designing our training.”

Twenty high school teachers from three public schools, in what is described as a large metropolitan area in the Northeast, were interviewed for the study. The schools included white teachers and teachers of color and were intentionally selected for their different ethnoracial student demographics. 

The researchers acknowledge certain limitations to their paper, given the small sample size and the fact that the teachers’ interviews took place between December 2019 and January 2020 which was prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and the introduction of laws in some states banning teachers from discussing certain topics in the classroom including identity and race. Nevertheless, in a recent interview, Satterthwaite-Freiman said she hopes the experiences the teachers shared in her study will encourage other educators to think about what personally resonates with them in their own settings — and to push for professional development to address their own concerns. 

Satterthwaite-Freiman believes there are also important lessons for anyone who selects or designs professional learning, including administrators, instructional coaches, and researchers, about intentionally responding to the voices and experiences of teachers. 

Something that was brought up frequently in your study is needs-based professional development for teachers. Why is this important?

We, as teachers, are experts, we have agency, but oftentimes I think neither of those are recognized. How do we center and elevate the voices and experiences of teachers? It’s really speaking to teachers themselves, hearing from them, learning from them, and letting their experiences and words be something that we as researchers listen to and take seriously, and also inform the people who are designing professional development. There’s not just this one-size-fits-all off-the-shelf model. One of the challenges that some teachers told us about in our study was the need for differentiation in training. There were other challenges that also spoke to a lack of intention and responsiveness to the experiences and needs of teachers of color in trainings.

Could you share a little bit about your personal experience as a teacher? Did you receive any training about how to lead conversations on race, ethnicity, and identity?

I had a little bit of training throughout my teaching degree. I think if I were to do it now, with all of the engagement, learning, designing, and developing we've done with the Adolescent Ethnic-Racial Identity Development Lab, led by Professor Umaña-Taylor, I think I would definitely feel much more prepared and supported. Something that I didn't realize at the time, that is really important, is engaging in my own ethnic-racial identity development. That was a challenge that came up in our paper and that we have also found in other studies: the concern of teachers not doing their own work about their identity and positionality. Reflecting back, I was focused a lot on my students and not as much on reflecting about my own self. I think at the time I didn't have the language for ethnic-racial identity but, in retrospect, I think that was something my students were absolutely making sense of. 

What advice do you have for teachers who may be in the same position that you were?

I think for me, the biggest thing is really engaging in some of that self-reflection. As difficult as it is, because I know teachers are extremely overworked and so much is expected of them and oftentimes the idea of taking time to just personally reflect is not possible.… One of the things that we have done, through the lab, is to provide teacher and parent-facing fact sheets that define what ethnic-racial identity is and why it matters. There are also some general evidence-based strategies for teachers, like perspective-taking and building empathy.