When Teachers Become the Students Who Won’t Listen

Professional development, professional scepticism, and the uncomfortable truth about how teachers respond to new ideas.

Author introduction

Elizabeth Giles taught English in NSW public high schools for 25 years and has served as both Head Teacher Literacy & Learning Support and Head Teacher Curriculum. She now works in learning and professional development design, and vocational education. Elizabeth writes about teaching, professional learning, educational innovation and the future of schooling.

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Every teacher knows the feeling.

You’re sitting in a staff meeting or professional development session. The presenter is ten minutes in. Around the room laptops are quietly opening. Someone is marking essays. Someone else is answering emails. A few people are already leaning back in their chairs with the unmistakable expression that says: this is going to be a long afternoon.

Sometimes, teachers are the most reluctant learners in the building.

Every day teachers stand in front of students asking them to do something difficult: open their minds to new ideas.

We ask them to try hard, to engage with concepts they don’t immediately see the value of, and to learn things they’re quite certain they’ll never need. We expect curiosity. We expect persistence. We expect them to keep listening even when the learning feels uncomfortable, confusing or irrelevant.

Put many of us in a professional learning session, though, and something curious happens.

The same people who expect intellectual curiosity from teenagers suddenly become the most resistant learners in the room.

Arms folded. Eyes rolling. Quietly marking papers under the table. Checking emails. Prepping the next day's lessons.

I know this because I’ve done it too.

Teaching is a profession full of thoughtful people with strong opinions about how learning works. That’s not a bad thing. Education has always had competing theories, competing pedagogies and competing interpretations of research. Every few years a new framework arrives promising to transform classrooms. Every conference introduces the “next big idea” that will finally solve the same problems teachers have been wrestling with for decades.

After a while, teachers develop a healthy scepticism.

Sometimes, though, that scepticism arrives before the thinking does.

Anyone who has presented professional learning to teachers will recognise the moment when the room quietly divides. Some people lean forward, curious. Others lean back, waiting for the presenter to prove them wrong. The questions start early: Where’s the evidence? Has this been tested with real students? How does this work with behaviour issues?

These are good questions. Teachers should ask them.

But sometimes the questioning quickly turns into resistance before the idea has had a chance to breathe.

To be fair, teachers have good reasons for their caution. Professional development hasn’t always respected teachers’ time or expertise. Many teachers can recall at least one PD session that consisted largely of policy summaries, acronyms and educational jargon, with very little practical value.

I still remember one mandatory after-school session on resilience. The presenter spent an hour explaining what resilience was, the different types of resilience, and the various forms of adversity young people encounter. None of this was new information to a room full of experienced teachers.

Eventually someone asked the obvious questions — the ones everyone had stayed back after school to hear answered.

“So what actually makes a child resilient?  What can we do to make it happen?”

Her answer was simple.

“We don’t know.”

The reaction in the room was almost physical. We had given up family time, marking time — the small scraps of time teachers guard fiercely at the end of the day — and received nothing practical in return.

Experiences like that stay with teachers. Over time they create a kind of professional scar tissue. Teachers learn to approach PD with caution, and sometimes outright cynicism.

Research suggests this frustration isn’t unusual. The Teaching and Learning International Survey conducted by the OECD has consistently found that while teachers value professional learning, many report that it often lacks relevance to their classroom practice. At the same time, Australian teachers report some of the highest workloads in the developed world. Analysis from the Grattan Institute suggests teachers commonly work around 50 hours per week during term time, much of it spent planning lessons, assessing work and managing administrative demands.

When people already feel stretched to breaking point, it’s understandable that they guard their time carefully.

Context matters as well.

Secondary teachers will recognise the frustrating experience of sitting through professional learning that would work beautifully in a primary classroom but would get a high school teacher spit-balled out of their own room. Strategies designed for enthusiastic eight-year-olds land rather differently with thirty sceptical teenagers who have already decided you’re the least interesting person they’ll encounter all week.

Sometimes it feels like being handed a brightly coloured tricycle and told it’s the ideal vehicle for a Formula One race.

So yes, teachers have reasons to be cautious. We’ve seen fads come and go. We’ve sat through sessions that delivered more buzzwords than substance. We’ve watched well-intentioned initiatives collapse under unrealistic expectations.

But there’s another uncomfortable truth hiding inside this conversation.

Sometimes the problem isn’t the professional development.

Sometimes the problem is us.

Teachers spend their professional lives asking students to learn things they don’t think they need. Every teacher has heard the familiar questions: Why do we have to learn this? When will we ever use this? Can’t we just skip this part?

And every teacher has given roughly the same answer. Learning doesn’t always reveal its value immediately. Some knowledge pays off later. Sometimes you have to try something before you understand why it matters.

Yet when we sit in professional learning ourselves, we sometimes reach for the very same arguments our students use.

“I already know this.”

“This won’t work in my classroom.”

“This isn’t relevant to me.”

If our students approached learning with the same level of resistance we sometimes show in PD, we would be deeply concerned.

The truth is that every profession evolves. Medicine evolves. Engineering evolves. Technology evolves. Education can’t be the one field that stands still while the world around it changes.

That doesn’t mean teachers should accept every new idea without question. Professional scepticism is healthy. Teachers should interrogate research, challenge poorly designed initiatives and demand strategies that actually work in classrooms.

But scepticism is not the same as disengagement.

Curiosity should come before dismissal.

Perhaps the most productive mindset for professional learning is a simple one: instead of asking Why won’t this work?, ask What part of this might work in my context?

How could I adapt this? What might this look like in my classroom? What small idea could I take from this session and experiment with tomorrow?

In other words, approach professional learning the same way we ask our students to approach learning: with a willingness to suspend disbelief for a moment and see what happens.

Because if teaching is a profession built on learning, teachers themselves must remain learners.

Even when the idea feels unfamiliar.Even when the presenter hasn’t quite landed it yet.Even when part of us is thinking, I’ll never need this in real life.

And if we expect our students to keep an open mind in the classroom every day, perhaps the real question is this: Are we willing to do the same when the learner in the room is us?

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I’m curious what other teachers think.

What has been the most valuable professional learning you’ve experienced — and what made it work?