TIME FOR PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Teachers often bemoan either the shortage or overload of Professional Development (PD) sessions, depending on their particular contexts. You are no doubt familiar with the cries of “If only someone would give us some training on this” or, on the other hand, “Oh no, not another dreary session about iPads/assessment/projects”. But teachers in many parts of the world are taking things into their own hands when it comes to PD in order to ensure that the time is spent meaningfully and for their benefit. Here is a challenge to teachers for ways to do this in-house, and join the growing trend towards self-directed development …
Firstly, identify the areas of need for PD in your department or school, and then find experts who already have something to share with their colleagues on the topic, or allocate teams of teachers to research them. There are so many good webinars or TED Talks and other informative sessions available online where one can learn all there is to know about a topic or trend or both new and tried-and-tested methodologies. Then a PD programme can be drawn up for a term or year, with set dates and times for teachers to present their learning to their colleagues.
If your school has adopted the use of iPads or tablets for learning, or if some teachers have started using them with learners’ own devices, then a wonderful idea (published by Terry Heick in TeachThought, June 2014) is that of APPY HOURS. These are hour-long presentations in which a member of the staff shares his/her learning about an App that s/he has tried out in class. So, if a group of teachers is interested in a recommended list of Apps, each one can be given one to try and to report back about it to others. Having someone share how they used it, what it could do, what the students did with it, what worked well and what problems arose is far more helpful than simply reading about an App’s potential ability to enhance learning in the classroom.
Bring the energy back into your teaching – sharing best practice or results of research is one of the very best ways to inspire and motivate to improve pedagogical processes.