Make your Professional Development Meaningful and Relevant to the Participants.

By -
When you think of professional development, what first comes to mind?


   OR    
When I first lead a PD session it was awful. I was nervous, it was boring and I just was not as confident as I wanted to be. To be quite honest I can talk in front of hundreds of kids in the room and I feel great. However, you get me in front of a room full of teachers and I shut down. I rushed through the content, stuttered my words and just ugh...I was ready for it to be over.  After years of leading many PD sessions, I have learned some tips to create a successful PD session and this session reaffirmed them.
The session I attended the second day at the SC EdTech conference affirmed what teachers want the in professional development. They want...
  • It offers voice/choice: Teachers have different needs especially when they teach different content and grade levels. If you don’t know where to start or what they want, perhaps surveying your teachers would be a first step for you.
  • Make it relevant for their students.
  • Have a take away: Teachers want to be able to use it right away.
  • Innovative: Make it something new and worthwhile for the teachers.
  • Creative: Get the teachers creating something, making an example or creating that lesson. It can be their takeaway
  • Collaborative/sharing: Teachers can get some great ideas from each other, build upon those conversations and develop something even stronger if they can work collaboratively. Add in some time for this
There were a couple of other strategies that the presenter suggested to help make your professional development a success...
~ Flip the Professional Development
  • Give the content to the teachers prior to the learning session on a learning platform, such as Google Classroom. Make the have the face to face interactive, practical and the teachers walk away with the something to use right away.
~ Look at your delivery method
  • Make it interactive. Here are a couple of resources that are commonly used in a PD session.
    • Kahoot - Get to know what your participants may already know about the content. It can be used as a pre-assessment
    • Backchanneling - Creating conversations about the content or ask questions about the topics as the presenter is talking.
    • Poll Everywhere Live interactive website to poll participants on the topic
    • Padlet - Share ideas and add comments as the presenter is speaking.
~ Get feedback on your session, Look at it to determine how you can modify the professional development and make those improvements. We have implemented feedback for our bi-monthly meetings and our team REALLY work towards improving the trainings with our coaches. We listen to our coaches and strive to give them what they want so they are coming to our meetings ready and anxious to be there.

What can you do to improve your professional development offerings? Which one new strategy could you implement? And, while you plan your next PD  think about this ... Would you want to be a participant in your own session?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chat GPT- Your New Personal Assistant

By -
Image
What if I told you that within seconds, you could have a well-written speech, have directions on how to fix your leaky sink, or even generate a personalized workout plan? All of these things are just a small part of what can be done with Chat GPT, and it is revolutionizing how we approach everyday tasks and even the type of work we assign to our students as educators. Chat GPT is a new artificial intelligence (AI) phenomenon that emerged on the scene in November 2022. Users can type in a question and the chatbot will generate a personalized, human-like response to your question. It stands in its own category by itself, for now. Though most people utilize AI through technology like Alexa, Siri, website chat box assistants, and even that autocorrect feature that you so frequently enjoy when typing text. However, Chat GPT is a little different from these tools. It is chartering new territory and causing everyone, especially teachers, to pay attention to just what it can do. Since its arr
Read more

The 5 steps of Focused Note-taking (with Google Slides!)

By Anonymous -
Image
For years, the AVID instructional framework recommended a specific note-taking strategy, called Cornell Notes, to support students in processing the information they learn in class.  Recently, however, AVID revised the note-taking recommendations to be more broad rather than solely focusing on Cornell Notes. The new recommendation is that educators teach students to use a focused note-taking strategy.  This is fantastic because it allows for student choice and voice in how they process their learning and can incorporate technology in powerful ways.  This blog post will overview the 5 steps of focused note-taking along with some digital strategies that align with each step. Step 1: Taking the notes This is an obvious first step!  In this phase, students are capturing information using a method they feel most comfortable.  If students are new to taking notes, very young, or have instructional accommodations, teachers can just share the notes and skip step 1.  Plenty of learning, as
Read more

Reading with a purpose and teachers gathering data

By Anonymous -
Image
In our connected world, people find themselves gathering information from online sources much more frequently than print sources.  Interestingly, the way our brains work to scan digital texts has changed based on the typical layout of websites that present information.  For example, our eyes are more likely to remain focused on the left side of a webpage, where menus and additional links are typically placed rather than scan the entire page fully.  Readers, young and old, typically scan pages in an “F” pattern, tracing their eyes along the text in heavy left-to-right patterns at the beginning of paragraphs but not throughout the entirety of the passage.  Source: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/f-shaped-pattern-reading-web-content/ This isn’t altogether horrible if students are simply scanning to gather rudimentary information but when we are asking students to complete sustained and detailed reading online, these habits suggest that a support for students may help them read more
Read more