A superintendent recently commented to me that his teachers were "very trainable." This raised a question: what is the appropriate role of training in professional development? Actually, a more relevant question might be, "what is training, anyway?"

Training often begins with an administrator deciding what educators should know and be able to do. Educators are then required to participate in a process where they passively receive instruction about a program or practice they're expected to implement.

Most training doesn't take into account the needs, expertise, or experience of its participants. That's because participants have no hand in shaping the training. It's simply assumed that participants come with the same knowledge, skills, and "readiness to learn," and that they all learn the same way. The training is often complex and content-heavy, but time for real learning is limited. ?

Not surprisingly, this type of training often has little impact. An administrator's judgment about educators' needs may not be on target. There may be a lack of clarity about what educators should learn, and a lack of precision about how they should apply that learning. And there may be no effort to determine the training's impact on either the performance of educators or their students. In short, no one may be held accountable for the results of the training.

Of course, quality training that is data-driven, narrowly focused, and sensitive to the unique strengths and needs of its participants can have positve, lasting effects. This type of training is thoughtfully conceived, efficiently organized, flexible, and occurs periodically over months rather than days. Its primary concern is not the "delivery" of the training, but whether and how well it enables participants to "get it," and subsequently apply their learning.

But no matter how effective training is, educators should not assume that "professional development" is "training." Training should not constitute the whole of professional development, or even a major portion of it. ?

An inherent limitation of training is that it is externally driven; school systems and school administrators take responsibility for educators' learning, rather than the educators themselves. However, educators and their subject- and grade-level colleagues understand what they don't know and what they aren't able to do better than anyone. When educators acknowledge the professional development they need, they are more motivated to take full advantage of it. They are also more likely to identify an expert with a good track record and choose that person to guide them in developing the knowledge and skills necessary to improve the educators' performance. Professional learning has greater impact when participants seek it, rather than have it imposed on them.

In the new era of professional development, teachers and principals must take greater responsibility for identifying and learning what they need to educate their students more effectively. If they do so conscientiously, always seeking to perform at increasingly higher levels, the training they now abhor will no longer be "necessary."

Hayes Mizell is NSDC's Distinguished Senior Fellow.