Twenty-seven hours is a magic number, indeed. Plenty of teachers, union stewards, and administrators know this number by heart. It spells out the number of hours teachers can use for school-based professional development. What do 27 hours actually look like on a typical campus? Let's take a minute to think about the last month of work. How many meetings did you attend? You may have attended grade level, team, department, committee, leadership, and/or curriculum council meetings to name a few. These are in addition to the professional development hours that you incorporate into your work. What do you discuss at these meetings that is markedly different from what is covered during your 27 PD hours? How are the topics related? When you think about your professional learning as a whole instead of in fragmented parts, we spend up to three times the number of hours designated in a contract on professional development. In what ways can we capture time to reflect what we are actually doing?
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