5389 Professional Development

As I read through the articles for this week and watched the video, this sentence kept popping into my head. For the majority of my teaching career, I have found most of my professional development/learning experiences to be not-so-memorable, at least not in a good way. If there was anything I found amusing, it was the irony of sitting in lecture style training after lecture style training whose main focus was the importance of hands-on learning and collaboration for students. When I encounter this type of training, I always ask myself “Why don’t they present the information to us in this manner that they are telling us is so important? This would allow us to truly gain an understanding for how this method can work in our classrooms.” This particular style of professional development has never made sense to me and I have always felt that it needed to change and I needed more from it. Therefore, I was so excited to see that there has been a change in the standards for professional learning to focus on the importance of educators taking an active role in our continuous development and learning and allowing us to determine the content of our learning, how our learning occurs, and how we evaluate its effectiveness (Standards for Professional Learning, 2011). I believe that utilizing these professional learning standards along with the current state of virtual learning in our education climate will assist me greatly as I aim to change professional learning practices on my campus.

The recent Covid-19 pandemic has forced most educators, regardless of their tech ability level, to work virtually. There is no way around it. As a result, this has created an attitude on my campus of more openness from both administrators and fellow teachers towards alternative, innovative ideas when it comes to teaching and learning how to use technology than ever before. And, because there are so many different levels of technology proficiency on my campus, many of them are wanting to have professional learning that meets them where they are and fulfills their immediate needs for their classes. This presents the perfect opportunity to suggest and promote professional learning that provides individualized, collaborative learning experiences that build educators’ teaching repertoires and set the foundation for effective teaching that meets students’ needs (Standards for Professional Learning: Quick Reference Guide, 2011). Using their desire to learn at their own pace and fulfill their individual classroom needs, I will promote this style of professional learning to fellow teachers by highlighting the power and continuous support they will have in this type of professional learning. They will know that, unlike their current training, they will have choice in what they desire to learn more about and that this will not be a one-time occurrence. Through ongoing meetings, modeling, and observations (Gulamhussein, 2013), they will be provided with plenty of assistance as they aim to master and implement new technology practices into the classroom. For administrators, I will promote this type of professional learning by appealing to their hearts, which is student learning. I plan to emphasize that students come to school every day expecting the best from their teachers and highlight how our current system of professional development is not giving students the absolute best according to the Standards for Professional Learning. I will then explain how we can keep our promise to students by changing how we prepare their teachers for classroom instruction.