And by February, we’re already back to our old habits.

The same thing happens every time we read a new book or attend a new workshop. We come back energized, vowing to make changes to our tea

ching and leadership practices, only to fizzle out shortly thereafter.

So to help you stay on track this year, we’re exposing the top five lies professional development tells you:

Lie # 5: You just need to work harder. Many professional development workshops and books convey the message that if you just worked at it a little harder, you’d be a master teacher. They assume that the reason you are not as successful in the classroom as you’d like is that you aren’t working hard enough. If only you would put in more time, work nights and weekends, sacrifice your entire summer, and basically give up life as you know it, you too can be a master teacher! More likely, all that “hard work” will only lead to frustration and burn out. The problem isn’t that you aren’t working hard enough, the problem is that you are working too hard at the wrong things. We waste valuable time investing in fads, programs, and strategies that do not give us any return in terms of student achievement. Hard work alone won’t make you a master teacher any more than practicing scales for hours each day will make you a concert pianist. Sure, it takes hard work to be a master teacher but I suspect you are working pretty hard right now and you are just plain exhausted. Working harder isn’t the answer. Working on the right things is.

Lie # 4: This will be easy. Beware of easy. Good teaching looks easy but rarely is — at least not at first. It takes hard work in order to seamlessly integrate the principles of effective instruction into your practice so that they become your natural response to students. Over time, it will get easier, but initially, it will take a lot of concentration, reflection, adjustment, and refinement. Mastery takes time. It doesn’t happen over night and there are no quick fixes. You cannot just read a book or attend a workshop and suddenly become a master teacher. It will not be easy or comfortable or quick. Becoming a master teacher requires consistent, focused, intentional effort over time.

Lie # 3: Do this and you will be a master teacher. No one strategy will make you a master teacher. Becoming a master teacher is a process that takes time. You must rigorously apply the principles of effective instruction to your practice until they become your natural response to students. That’s it. No quick fixes. No magical moves. Becoming a master teacher takes deliberate practice and reflection over time. It’s a process. So, rather than focus on trying to become a master teacher over night, give into the process. Understand that all teachers progress from novice, to apprentice, to practitioner, to master teacher.  Focus on moving to the next level rather than trying to instantly become a master teacher.

Lie # 2: This one strategy will immediately raise test scores. Test scores and student achievement for that matter are a result of a combination of factors including teaching quality, student background knowledge and motivation, the quality of the curriculum, and the influence of outside factors. Sure there are things that you can do to significantly raise test scores but thinking that there is one magic bullet will set you up for failure. Remember, test scores represent student learning and the best way to increase student learning is good teaching. Good teaching cannot be reduced to one strategy or approach. It is the result of rigorously applying a set of principles to your practice over time. The better you are at applying the principles, the more students learn. The more students learn, the better they perform on tests. There is no magic bullet.

And the top professional development lie is…

Lie # 1: All you have to do is… If good teaching could be reduced to a single strategy or approach, there would be more master teachers. Good teaching is nuanced. It’s hard. A strategy that works beautifully for one teacher will fail miserably with another. Becoming a master teacher is not simply a response to good training. We don’t have an epiphany and instantly become master teachers. Good teaching is a result of systematically taking all that we know about teaching, organizing it into a few governing principles , and rigorously apply these principles to our teaching until they become our spontaneous response to students in the classroom.  That’s all you have to do.

All of the grade levels wanted the same basic five ins – reading skills, study skills, discipline, writing skills, good work habits. There five outs had to do with the curriculum but their five ins were entirely about soft skills.

“Wow. Look at that,” we pointed out the discrepancy.

A few teachers became immediately defensive. “Our kids don’t come to us with the background knowledge and study skill they need to be successful,” they explained.

“Where were they supposed to learn how to study?” we asked. The high school teachers pointed to the middle school teachers. The middle school teachers blamed the elementary teachers.

“If no one owns the teaching of these soft skills, it’s no wonder your students don’t have them,” we mused.

From there, we lead teachers into a really interesting discussion about why students weren’t coming in with the soft skills they needed and how they could help them acquire them. We quickly realized that while the workshop was supposed to help teams better vertically align the curriculum, we wouldn’t get anywhere unless we first dealt with soft skills.

So we did. We shifted gears and started with identifying the key soft skills students would need to be successful. We looked at both non-cognitive skills (such study skills, social skills, and the ability to set long-term goals), thinking skills (such as comparison contrast and error analysis), and thinking processes (such as decision making and problem solving). First, we made sure that everyone understood what these skills really entailed, then we asked vertical teams to work together to determine when they would help students acquire each of these skills. Would students learn study skills in seventh grade or was that too late? Perhaps students should learn error analysis in grade nine to prepare them for the problem solving tasks they would have to complete in grade 10. We even went a little further, pushing teams to identify when students would be introduced to the skill, when they would reinforce the skills, and finally, when they would extend the skill. At the end of the day, all the teams walked away with a list of over 25 soft skills and a plan for when they would introduce, reinforce, and extend those skills over time.

Too often, we spend time in vertical team meetings trying so hard to get the curriculum perfectly aligned that we miss the critical soft skills that help students access the curriculum in the first place. Instead, take time to look at the soft skills so many students are missing and look at ways to help students acquire these. Doing so will help your students reach curricular goals much easier.