We have two forms of professional development that currently exist in my school. One has been a pretty successful attempt at teacher-created and led workshops. Another has been cross-curricular teams in place of our monthly faculty meetings.Without going into a lot of details, prior to about four years ago, there was little culture of professional development to speak of. It has been a struggle to make everyone feel like PD is effective use of their time, especially when they *have* to be there. Our goals with these teams included talking about best practices across subject areas and beginning to talk about commonalities between subjects such as language around writing and critical thinking questions.
The cross-curricular teams have met twice this school year and worked on the following:
- Look at the Profile of the Graduate we created for our Middle States accreditation. Determine our greatest areas of needed (a gap analysis of sorts)
- Discuss best practices that might help to bridge those gaps.
So we are going to have our third meeting in 6 weeks, and I feel a little lost. We have some district mandates, which include discussions around critical thinking and Common Core, and therefore I feel like we’re about to be pulled in many different directions. So I guess I need some help:
Where would you go from here? How can we use this time to continue building a culture of professional development and address some of our goals around talking about best practices and critical thinking? Any input is apprecaited.
Pete – Have you considered asking your teachers or teacher leaders on ways they think this time could be best utilized? You mentioned a few things that somewhat tie your hands, but what about giving your teachers the power to help decide how the mandate is implemented…as you know, the more people you include in the decision making process the better (especially when you are working with teachers). See if your teachers can come up with a way to streamline all of the different initiatives that are being introduced.
Good luck and keep us informed!
Justin,
Thanks for the response. I think the powerful of owning their learning is important here. We get a lot of teacher input on the workshops we run, it only makes sense to do the same here.
We too have to devote a lot of PD time to common core, aligning our curriculum, and for K-5 we’re rolling out standards based report cards. Unfortunately, due to these ‘have tos’ we will probably not be able to offer PD on some topics we really need. Here’s what we are doing-
-survey staff (we send out google survey every year to find out what their needs are so we can drive our PD based on their needs)
-identify your district initiatives and when it ‘fits’ always come back to those initiatives. Our focus is UbD (unit planning), technology integration and using data to drive instruction. So, we need to always go back to these- and of course ‘high quality first instruction’
- really our initiatives do align with other ‘top down’ things that are coming from our state and national levels (for the most part). It all starts with good quality curriculum- which is now driven by common core- (the what) then focuses on the how – which is the using data, planning units, and of course integrating technology based on the purpose not the tool. rti also fits in there and comes again back to the first quality instruction- and using data to intervene with those students who need more…
Hope that helped- good luck!
Thanks Dodie! I think we have tried to align with district initiatives, and are just working on making that work in a 50 minute session that runs every other month.
quite a lot of my musings on the exact same thing on http://h809-jm.blogspot.com
the issue of engagement is the big one for me
we have a mixture of whole school, generic opt in sessions, coaching; thinking action research as next step?
Just a thought: List areas of need (determined in previous pd) – have teachers sign up to work together to do the following:
1. Choose one area of need.
2. Find common core standards that fall under that need.
3. Begin to think about ways that current curriculum can be revised, modified or enriched to improve area of need while teaching common core standards in part through critical thinking activities.
4. In the end have everyone report back with what they come up with and next steps.
Maureen,
Thanks for the comment. I love this idea! I think its definitely worth doing at some point – once each department has had a chance to work with the common core, which is still in progress.
Here are some questions I have for you Pete (I will post it once).
How do you know this PD is effective with teachers? How does it lead to improved learning opportunities for students?
In the past year, our staff has worked on documenting how this PD has lead to increased student performance; too often we just do PD because we are supposed to, but never really measure its effectiveness.
I have our “planning document” if you are ever interested. You know where to find me
George,
Thanks for the comment. We know that our teacher workshop PD is effective because we have the feedback – anecdotally and from survey data. What we don’t have is that kind of information for our cross-curricular teams – and I think part of that is because we might be afraid of the results.
@peterodrigues,
Could everyone identify an area of need/improvement in their own practice/discipline and either work individually or in teams to strengthen that area? With action research, book studies, lesson study, etc? Ensuring their work aligned with school/district visions?
Those are my thoughts. If you put it in their hands, they’ll have little room for arguing that the PD doesn’t apply to them. Still spend time as needed examining student data and making plans to address concerns, but provide time for autonomous learning whenever possible.
Lyn,
I love this as a long term plan. Not sure we are there yet in our thinking about PD, but it is something to strive for.
I agree with one of the posts above when he says to involve your teachers in the next decisions. However, from the brief description that you included above it seems that you have determined what you want the students to know, how they are currently doing and the next step should be a plan to determine how you are going to get there. Identifying best practices is a good first step. Is there any accountability included with that? What steps are the teachers committed to taking next? Do they feel competent in implementing the best practices? I’m guessing not, otherwise they would have already been doing them. You might Wang to ask the teachers these questions:
1. Which “best practice” strategies are you willing to commit to right now?
2. What professional development do we need to be assured that all staff deeply understand the strategy.
3. Who might volunteer to open up their classroom to allow their peers to observe the implementation of the strategies?
Good luck to you. I applaud your efforts to bring effective pd to your school!
[...] some of you know, I wrote about some ongoing struggles with professional development at my school. I take professional development seriously, and I believe that it should be [...]