“So are you ready to dazzle us with some great PD?”
This is a comment made by a colleague in reference to my new role as PD coordinating teacher. As I work on my project, all I hear is this comment. It has stuck with me because all I have been thinking about since May is how am I going to engage 50+ teachers in effective and engaging PD. A common complaint with our four school based PD days is that they are poorly thrown together and a waste of time; the morning is a staff meeting, followed by department meetings, then teacher organizational time. Occasionally, there will be a guest speaker. My new role is a new one at our school, and I feel expectations are high.
While my goal is to study Alberta Education’s new mandates and directions for high school and create a list of resources that will help me plan effective and engaging PD for staff (August 21, 2016), I decided to begin my research by asking what makes effective and engaging PD?
The article Collaboration and self-regulation in teachers’ professional development. Teaching and Teacher Education is a great start because it incorporates both SRL and PD. It looks at how professional development may be better conceived as a collaborative model where teachers coordinate new conceptual frameworks with knowledge grounded in teaching (Bromme & Tillema, 1995).
I followed this reading up with Transform Your Staff Meetings, Engage Your Faculty from Edutopia as it extends on the idea of engaging staff. In the comments, an educator posted a link to another website titled A Professional Development Framework That Empowers the Teacher. Using the metaphor of climbing a mountain, the site contains resources to help teachers through the process of planning, then presenting PD to staff and ultimately to the district.
Consulting these resources may seem like I got sidetracked trying to reach my goal, but I think this is a very important initial step. With my goal to create a list of resources, I could have simply gone online and found a bunch of interesting sites, but in order to achieve the part that says will help me plan effective and engaging PD for staff, I need to first understand the necessary steps and strategies that will help stay focused to the most important part of the goal.