Working as a teacher comes with many great perks, but there are also some serious downsides to the career.

What would you do if your school district required you to attend long ‘professional development’ workshops that were really just a waste of time?

That is what happened at the school in this story, so when the workshop taught the teachers about using their voice to make changes in the school, the teachers got together and petitioned the administration to stop making them attend the workshop.

Keep reading for all the details.

Infuriating professional development workshops on using our “Teacher Voice”? Don’t mind if we do!

If you’re a teacher, or in one of the lots of other professions that make you do professional development or other workshops, you know that 95% of these things are utterly useless.

Not only are they useless, but they also take up time we could be actually doing useful things instead of sitting and listening to people who had 2 years of experience 10 years ago telling us how to do our jobs.

It’s infuriating at best and actively insulting at worst.

Even administrators hate this stuff and are usually on their laptops the whole time, because we must all follow the Overlords of the school board and the State Department of Education (both of whom know nothing about what actually happens in schools.)

I would hate to have to do this type of thing.

Teachers often do professional development (PD) sessions at the beginning of semesters.

Much of our ~1-week “inservice” before school starts is taken up by this utter nonsense when we really need to be lesson planning and getting ready for the kids to show up.

With that background, let me tell you about the absolute travesty of Teacher Voice.

This happened about 10 years ago.

This sounds mind-numbing.

Teacher Voice was a multiple-session (beginning, midpoint, and end of the school year), super long workshop about how teachers can influence the policies and practices in their school and district. They were supposed to come 3 times a year–beginning, middle, and end.

These were half-day sessions in which we took surveys about how much we felt we were listened to, and what dissatisfactions and satisfactions we had with the school.

Predictably, these all turned out dismal, which the Teacher Voice people loved because it gave them a jumping-off point to babble on repeatedly about how we COULD have a voice and that we should advocate for ourselves and blah blah blah.

It sounded nice and hopeful, until we saw our administrators, predictably, not paying attention and realized that the presenters were just saying vapid inspirational things over and over. So, you know.

At least they are having some fun with it.

My teacher friends and I started using #teachervoice sarcastically in our group chat, and it started bleeding over to other people as well.

It was a glorious inside joke.

One of the counselors set up a box of candy and other snacks labeled “Professional Development,” which any staff could take whatever they wanted from with no questions asked.

They are letting their admin team know how awful it is.

Teacher Voice came back mid-year and LITERALLY DID THE EXACT SAME WORKSHOP.

By that time, most of us were just blatantly doing our actual work.

And then comes the malicious compliance!

People started, (mostly) diplomatically and professionally, complaining to admin. #teachervoice, in all its ironic glory, made it into an email a teacher sent to all the teachers and admin.

Wow, they actually made some positive change.

We used our Teacher Voices, y’all, staying professional (when talking to admin, anyway), the whole time.

And lo and behold, the 3rd Teacher Voice PD was cancelled.

Malicious compliance mission successful!

I bet everyone was so relieved.

During the time that was slotted for the 3rd session, we just got work time.

A nice epilogue to follow up: the next year, during the PD times, we got both more work time and ALSO got an in-district “conference” in which ACTUAL TEACHERS did classes on ACTUALLY USEFUL THINGS, and we could choose which sessions to go to.

Never Miss a Story

Sign up to get our BEST stories of the week straight to your inbox.

I taught one of them myself on how to use Google Classroom, which a lot of people were delighted by and thanked me for. It was great.

Lesson learned: when people prattle on about advocating for yourself, go ahead and do that and get rid of the prattling.

You have to wonder why school administrators and other people in charge think that teachers need to waste their time on things like this. At least in this case the teachers were able to push back and spend their time on something much more useful.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an IT department who keeps receiving tickets for a company that was previously spun off.

Read on to see what the people in the comments on Reddit have to say about this story.

Here is a former teacher who has experienced similar things. Why does this happen so often?

This person went to a similar workshop. Fortunately, it worked out for them in the end.

I think this sums it up perfectly.

This person has heard a lot of similar stories. It is not at all uncommon.

This commenter is right. The school is just trying to protect itself. Why can’t they put teachers (and students) first?

It is always upsetting to hear about how much time and money teachers have to waste on going to conferences that they really don’t benefit from. Of course, some of these types of professional development seminars can be great, but to force teachers to go to useless ones is terrible.

The teachers learned something new, but it wasn’t what the presenters were hoping for. It isn’t often that a school will actually listen to what the teachers want or need, so it is good that it finally happened.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a teacher who learns a lesson of his own from his student’s essays about personal responsibility.