Jailbreak your PD 

Educators can benefit from a variety of professional learning opportunities outside the education field.  

In the tech world, jailbreaking means removing a device’s manufacturer-imposed restrictions so that you can use it for your own purposes. For example, if your phone requires you to buy apps from a certain store, jailbreaking it would allow you to download apps from other places, too. I would not recommend jailbreaking your phone, but I would recommend jailbreaking your professional development (PD), giving yourself access to content beyond the education field. 

The first time I did PD outside the teaching field wasn’t on purpose. My husband, Jonathan, was attending a conference for the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science (ACBS), and I joined him just for the travel. Jonathan encouraged me to go to workshops, but I rolled my eyes. ACBS is for psychologists, I reasoned, and I’m a teacher. This isn’t for me. 

But while waiting for one of Jonathan’s sessions to end, I got bored and found the conference bookstore. Although many titles had words I associated with psychology, like depression and substance abuse, others mentioned values and committed action. I was reluctantly curious.  

As I explored further, I started to understand that contextual psychology is about helping people discover and commit to what makes their lives meaningful, even if that sometimes entails pain and struggle. I started to wonder: What if teachers could help students accept difficult feelings in the service of doing work and having relationships that mattered — to them personally and in the world? What if we could design lessons and assignments that empower students to explore and enact their values? Maybe there was something to this stuff. 

I started reading contextual psychology books and pummeling Jonathan with questions. (“What’s the difference between a discriminative stimulus and an establishing operation?” “Can you explain self-as-context again?”) It’s a miracle we stayed married. The more I read, the better I could see how I could apply this to my work without turning class into a bad therapy session. After reading every book I could get my hands on, I went back to the ACBS conference, this time as an attendee. 

Contextual psychology had an immediate, profound, and lasting impact on my teaching practice — but it almost didn’t. If I weren’t married to a psychologist, if I hadn’t wanted to visit the city where the ACBS conference was held, or if I were just a little less curious, I might never have fallen down this rabbit hole. 

Why learn outside your field? 

Before we explore why to look outside education for PD opportunities, let’s name the big reason not to. Money! It’s hard enough to fund PD when the event is for teachers. If a learning event isn’t for teachers, it might be hard to justify the expenditure to the supervisors who hold the PD purse strings. 

If you can’t afford to attend a conference, there are ways to experience other fields at a reduced cost. Some professional organizations have sliding-scale fees, although these may only be available to organization members. Online courses are usually cheaper than in-person events, although you won’t have as many opportunities for conversation with other participants. Regional events tend to cost less than national conferences but might offer fewer sessions that seem applicable to teaching. Books are less expensive than most courses and have more content, but some people find professional reading lonely and tedious — and out-of-field professional reading can be even more so. 

I don’t have a way to make expensive things cheap, but if you can put the funds together, here are some advantages of going outside the education field for PD. 

It breaks us free from established beliefs. 

A different field will use concepts and vocabularies we’re not used to. It will proceed from a different research base and a different set of assumptions. That means a lot of the content won’t be applicable to our practice, but it also means we’ll be able to think differently about classroom problems and explore possibilities we might not have imagined otherwise. 

Contextual psychology had an immediate, profound, and lasting impact on my teaching practice — but almost didn’t.

It forces us to think creatively. 

When you encounter a program designed for your discipline and population, you need only decide whether it would be a fit for you. If a 7th-grade English teacher goes to a workshop on how to conduct writers’ conferences, she can simply implement the strategies. But if that same teacher goes to a workshop for psychotherapists or engineers, she won’t be able to simply plunk the material into her classroom. She will have to think creatively about how to apply it, adapt it, and integrate it into what she already does, which may lead to deeper and more creative thinking. 

It gives us occasion to meet people who share our values. 

People attending a nursing or architecture conference might not fully understand the teaching profession, but they might care about some of the same things that an educator does, such as creating an inclusive environment or helping people persist through challenges. When doing PD outside of education, we can have new conversations — or new versions of old conversations — with new people who care about the same things we do. 

It can reinvigorate an experienced teacher.

For early-career teachers, every professional learning experience is a potential revelation. But over time, what we see in teaching books and workshops can start to seem like rehashed material we’ve seen before, and we might begin to resent expert consultants telling us what we’ve already figured out. At that point, PD from outside the education field can be refreshing. Experienced teachers will also get more out of such PD opportunities because they know enough about their work to be able to visualize how new ideas would fit in. 

It might stimulate you to invent practices that will benefit other educators and their students. 

Once I started learning about contextual psychology, I began integrating its concepts and processes with what I already knew about teaching, which meant that I could help students connect their work to their values. For example, contextual psychology involves deictic framing, or imagining one’s current situation (I-here-now) from the perspective of a different person (they), place (there), or time (then), as well as the concept of values or qualities of action that make our lives meaningful. Based on these two concepts, I created an activity called Values-Activating Questions in which students would listen to my summary of an upcoming unit and answer three questions: (1) What about this unit interests you, or how will you make it interesting for yourself? (2) What about this unit will challenge you, or how will you make it challenging for yourself? and (3) Imagine a future version of yourself and explain why this future version of you will be glad you did the work of this unit (Porosoff & Weinstein, 2017). 

The first question invites students to compare the work they’re about to do in class (here-now) to interests they developed outside the classroom in the past (there-then). Similarly, the second question invites them to compare the work they’ll do here-now to experiences that have challenged them, either in my class (here-then) or beyond (there-then). Both questions also ask students to imagine how they might create interest and challenge if none is inherent, which means they’re choosing how they might approach their work here-then — as opposed to merely receiving it as I have constructed it. 

The third question asks them to imagine themselves in another place, at a future time (there-then), and from that perspective, to consider why their work here-now might be worthwhile. A different, simpler way to ask this question would be: Why is this work important? But that’s asking them to consider its importance from their perspective here-now, and their present selves might not care about the work. However, when they imagine that same work from the there-then perspective, they might find reasons for engaging with that work here-now. Taken together, the three questions help students begin to explore how they want to be in class and bring those values to their work. 

Building on these and other ideas from contextual psychology, Jonathan and I started presenting workshops for teachers and writing what would become our books EMPOWER Your Students and Two-for-One Teaching. We built this work on a strong foundation laid by educators and psychologists, and that combination enabled us to share original ways for teachers to help students connect their assignments and relationships to their own values. Reading about contextual psychology and attending related conferences opened the way for me to share ideas that have the potential to benefit not only my students but also other people’s. You, too, have the potential to develop innovative work that meaningfully contributes to education. 

Selecting PD beyond teaching 

This expansive view of professional development raises a question: If all kinds of professional learning events might be applicable to your teaching practice, how can you decide which ones are worth your time? 

The more different the event’s intended audience is from what you do, the more leaps you’ll have to take to apply what you learn — which can be an interesting challenge and lead to innovation. However, the further you get from your knowledge base, the less likely you are to understand the content at all. My brothers are both chemical engineers, but their conferences wouldn’t be good for me because I barely understand what they do. But Jonathan’s psychology conference gave me a wholly different way to think about teaching while also being accessible to me. After all, a lot of psychotherapy involves teaching — maybe not about literature or composition, but about how people want to live their lives. 

To find PD that might inform teaching, try looking to fields involving health and wellness (such as psychology, social work, nursing, physical therapy, and nutrition); design (such as architecture, urban planning, visual communication, and interior decoration); business (such as marketing, public relations, strategic planning, and leadership), and politics (such as campaigning, advocacy, and activism). 

In addition to finding a topic that feels new yet somewhat familiar, consider the values you want to develop through your professional learning. We define values as “qualities of action that make life meaningful” (Porosoff & Weinstein, 2017). To name an action, you need a verb like read or teach, but to name a quality of action, you need an adverb like imaginatively or generously. Other qualities of action that matter to some people include behaving justly, inclusively, productively, compassionately, intentionally, playfully, authentically, and courageously. For example, it’s important to me that I teach inclusively, equitably, and compassionately. I can bring those qualities to every action I take, from designing lessons to addressing disruptive behavior to giving feedback on student work.  

What about you? What qualities of action make your life meaningful? How might a professional learning experience in another field help you think and act in these ways — and create opportunities for students to think and act in these ways, too? 

Getting the most from PD outside your field 

If you decide to try doing PD from outside the teaching field, here are some tips to help you not only get the most out of your time and money, but also find the experience satisfying and revitalizing. 

Have a buddy who is an insider in the field. 

When I first started to learn about contextual psychology, I had lots of questions about how it worked. Lacking a background in clinical psychology or behavioral science, I had trouble following some of the speakers and books. They used terms like motivative augmental whose meanings I had trouble remembering and other terms like experiential avoidance that seemed to make sense but had technical definitions that didn’t always line up with my layperson’s understanding. Jonathan could answer my questions and point me to more resources. 

If you have friends or family members in helping, design, business, or political fields — or any other profession that you can imagine being meaningful to your practice — try asking them to read a book or blog with you. Participate in an online chat together and discuss what you learned. You could even tag along with them to their next conference, which might be a fun way to spend more time with them and to learn something you wouldn’t have encountered through education-related PD. 

Start with low-stakes options. 

When learning about contextual psychology, I eventually attended their multiday, several-hundred-dollar conference. But I didn’t start with that event (at least not as a paying participant). I started by buying a book, then attending an online course, and finally shelling out for more when the learning proved valuable. When dipping into PD outside your field, start small and cheap so you can see whether larger investments of time, money, and energy would be worthwhile. 

Listen to explore before listening to apply. 

During any professional learning activity — including those designed for educators — we could just listen for the useful tidbits we can put into practice. Or, instead, we can proceed from the assumption that we can’t know how useful something will be unless and until we’ve fully explored it. For example, at the ACBS conference, I initially sought out sessions designed for people who work with children and adolescents or for people running therapeutic groups (reasoning that I work with adolescents in groups).  

But eventually I found that almost any session I attended had something for me if I looked. A session on compassion-focused therapy helped me develop lessons on the elements of compassion so that my English students could recognize these elements in literature and in their lives. I also went to a session on using acceptance and commitment therapy with prisoners, because although school is not prison, it sure can feel like one to some students.  

So, even if certain parts of a talk, book, or other experience seem irrelevant, ask yourself: What’s here? What does this remind me of? What’s new or different? How does this connect to the mission of my school or to my personal mission as an educator? What’s not here? Whose perspectives are missing? What do I want to know more about? 

Look for conceptual terms and organizing frameworks. 

In learning about contextual psychology, I kept encountering the hexaflex (Hayes, Strosahl, & Wilson, 2012), a six-part model of psychological flexibility. One of the six parts is values, but the connections between values and the other five aspects (committed action, self as context, present moment awareness, acceptance, and defusion) helped me conceptualize values in a different way than what I’d seen before. 

In doing PD outside your field, listen for new terms (like defusion) and try using them to describe something you or your students do. Also look for tables, flowcharts, diagrams, and other visual presentations of interconnected sets of ideas. See what happens when you try to fit some aspect of teaching into that framework. You might find yourself paying attention to aspects of your teaching that you hadn’t noticed or thinking about them in new ways. 

For example, political scientist Elinor Ostrom (1990/2015) developed eight principles for governing a common resource. Although educators aren’t her target audience, some of these principles — including matching rules to local needs and conditions, giving everyone affected by the rules the ability to modify them, and using graduated sanctions for those who violate the rules — apply just as well to managing classrooms as they do to governing cities and nations. Or to take another example, the concept of permaculture — which comes from the field of agriculture — involves designing a garden that works with the ecosystem instead of against it and that becomes self-sustaining. In reading about permaculture, you might be inspired to develop child-friendly and self-sustaining learning routines for your classroom. 

The better you understand how such concepts work in their original contexts, the more ideas you might come up with for using them in your own work. But even if you don’t apply them with fidelity, you still might come up with great ideas for your teaching. For example, in some of my early work on curriculum design, I used the food pyramid as a metaphor for including different types of assignments in different proportions to create a balanced writing diet for students. Even though the food pyramid has fallen out of favor, the idea of a writing pyramid still holds up. 

Share your learning with colleagues. 

One mistake I made when I first discovered contextual psychology was assuming that my colleagues wouldn’t be interested, just as I wasn’t interested when Jonathan introduced it to me. Only when I became more confident sharing my own applied work did I begin explaining the psychological science behind it — and I discovered that while some participants at my workshops tuned out when I talked about deictic and hierarchical framing, most were interested. I only wish I’d shared my learning with my colleagues sooner. Who knows what other ideas I might have come up with or what we might have come up with together? Maybe I could have gotten colleagues to come to an ACBS conference with me, or at least discuss an article. If you attend an out-of-field professional learning event, don’t keep that learning to yourself.            

References 

Hayes, S.C., Strosahl, K.D., & Wilson, K.G. (2012). Acceptance and commitment therapy: The process and practice of mindful change. New York, NY: Guilford. 

Ostrom, E. (2015). Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1990) 

Porosoff, L. & Weinstein, J. (2017). EMPOWER your students: Tools to inspire a meaningful learning experience. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree.