A significant portion of teacher professional development focuses on collaboration among staff members—discussing student needs, analyzing data, and generating new instructional materials. While that type of learning is essential for student success, in my 19 years of experience, I have seen a significant need for content-based professional development and experiential learning.
As a social studies teacher, when I can meet with experts, hear firsthand accounts of historical events, and visit historic sites, the experiences change the way I teach students. Teachers cannot teach what we do not know.
Many of the government agencies and private organizations that work to fill this gap are facing uncertain futures. Recently, for example, the Trump administration terminated more than 1,000 grants and roughly 65% of federal employees at the National Endowment for the Humanities, which has long offered valuable experiential learning opportunities for teachers in the summer.
As teachers find it more difficult to access programs that provide these unique opportunities, they will be looking for solutions within their own districts. I have a radical suggestion: Let’s start using students to plan and lead high-quality professional development.
Hear me out. When students know the research they are conducting in their classes has a real-world impact, they are more motivated to create work of a high caliber. When students are given an opportunity to become experts on a topic and share their expertise with instructors, they become engaged and rise to expectations.
I am the adviser of a student group at my school called the Black History Project for students with a strong interest in historical research and a passion for exploring local Black history. The volunteers in this group come from grades 9-12 and participate on their own time as an extracurricular activity. We began during the 2023-24 school year by creating a traveling exhibit about our town’s Black history. For this year’s project, the group’s nine student volunteers researched the history of Cambridge, Md.
Cambridge, a city only a couple hours from our school, played a pivotal role in the Civil Rights Movement. After sifting through primary- and secondary-source material for months, students prepared a walking tour of the city. In March, they then led an all-day event for 20 educators from middle and high schools across our district.
First, the student volunteers curated a list of secondary sources for participating teachers to read prior to the walking tour. Drawn from the sources the students had used in their own research, these readings offered background knowledge about Maryland’s history of slavery and the Cambridge movement in the 1960s. Throughout the tour, the student guides shared images, newspaper clippings, and other primary sources with participants. Teachers saw firsthand the places where significant events unfolded within the city.
After the experience, the participating educators created activities and lesson plans to use in their own classes. Importantly, they also received credit from our district toward their recertification requirements. I was able to negotiate this credit for the experience by designing a professional development course that incorporated the pre-readings, in-person tour, and post-tour activities. The district was very receptive to developing a learning experience that involved student-led instruction.
The project benefited students, who were able to sharpen their historical research and writing skills. Several found conflicting information in the sources they read and had to consider the credibility of their sources. Many had to grapple with how to address outdated or racist language when citing historical documents.
Overall, the experience provided them with an opportunity to engage in work that had a meaningful, real-world impact. They were not completing an assignment just to earn a grade; they knew what they were doing was going to have an impact on how and what their fellow students would be learning, and this knowledge motivated them to put forth their best effort.
The educators benefited just as much as the students. In a pre-tour survey, about 80% of the participants reported having no or very little knowledge of Cambridge’s Black history. For the first time, many learned about the Cambridge movement and developed ways to incorporate this local content into their own classes.
This professional development model could easily be followed in other school districts and applied to other disciplines. Imagine the benefits of having a group of Advanced Placement Literature students read and analyze a novel to lead a book study for educators. What if English learners conducted interviews in their native languages to be used as instructional materials in the world-language department?
The possibilities are as numerous and diverse as the students we teach. I would like to see more schools utilizing this untapped resource.
If I get my wish, we will see more students engaged in authentic learning experiences and more teachers receiving valuable content-based professional development.
