Providing effective and valued professional development for teachers is one of the aspects of becoming a teacher librarian that intimidates me the most. Far too often, I’ve been at boring or ineffective seminars and stand-and-deliver sorts of PDs where I’ve looked around and observed teachers rolling their eyes or idly tapping pencils or staring into the abyss. I definitely do not want to be the person responsible for such lack of enthusiasm or such a waste of a teacher’s valuable time. Taking time to find out exactly what areas of professional development most interest the staff is a great first step. This will no doubt be done informally as well, but sending out a Google form that teachers can quickly respond to will be beneficial to all involved.
Source: www.tabloidX.co
There are limited amounts of full-day PD days available to the school – and some of these are board offered and therefore not school-planned. Making this time as valuable as possible is crucial, but it is also important to make teachers aware of available PD that is being offered online or elsewhere so that they may choose to participate if it is a topic that interests them. This website has some excellent ideas as to how to how to make professional development the most effective for teachers: www.prodigygame.com/blog/teacher-professional-development. In this article, Maria Kampen says that “time is a commodity that you cannot avoid using – but you can spend it wisely. This doesn’t mean spending less time on teacher professional development activities, but it means maximizing the time that you do have” (Kampen 2019). One of her suggestions is to embed the professional development into the teaching day. Hosting a lunch and learn event or a drop-in so that teachers may participate on their prep periods. Facilitating time where teachers of the same subject area can collaborate to plan or exchange lesson plans is another great idea.
Jennifer Gonzalez, on her Cult of Pedagogy site, writes about alternate forms of professional development that are beginning to become more popular amongst grade schools. You can listen to her ideas on a podcast or read the article at www.cultofpedagogy.com/pd/.
Source: www.cultofpedagogy.com/pd
One of the ideas that I particularly liked is that of Learning Walks. The idea is that small groups of two or three teachers visit their colleagues’ classrooms for about ten minutes at a time (sometimes with a particular focus in mind) and then they have a quick debrief afterwards to bring their perspectives on what they observed to the table. The following video shows the basic idea:
Source: www.edutopia.com
There are far too many ideas to go into in this blog post; however there are a few main ideas that stood out to me. All teachers are different and come with a different set of skills into different classrooms. For these reasons, teachers will have very different ideas as to what is “effective” professional development for them. The stand-and-deliver/one-size-fits-all approach is a thing of the past.
Source: www.weareteachers.com
As teacher librarians, we must offer choice to the staff so that they may get the most value for their time. Getting input from teachers is a crucial step to best meeting their needs. We also must remember that the staff are working professionals who often have a wealth of knowledge that they can share. Offering learning walks or time for teachers to work together is often one of the best uses of time we can offer them. As Bill Nye said “everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t.” We need to capitalize on that.
Works cited:
Gonzalez, Jennifer (2018, March 4) OMG Becky. PD is Getting So Much Better!! Cult of Pedagogy. Retrieved from: https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/pd/
Kampen, Maria. (2019, April 24) 5 Ways to Make Teacher Professional Development Effective [With Examples]. Prodigy Game. Retrieved from: www.prodigygame.com/blog/teacher-professional-development
Pescatore, Gwen. (2014, July 8) Learning Walks…More than a Tour of the School. Edutopia. Retrieved from: https://www.edutopia.org/discussion/learning-walksmore-tour-school
Featured image source: www.edutopia.org/blog/teacher-collaboration-strategies-ben-johnson
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Danielle
February 22, 2020 — 9:29 pm
I agree that input from teachers about how they want to spend their limited professional development time is crucial. Using a Google Form to collect information is a good idea for getting started, and one that I would like to try when I am planning for next year. I am intrigued by your suggestion of Learning Walks. I haven’t heard of these before and while I think they might be a little intimidating depending on the group size, I think observation is a great method for learning more about teaching strategies, and new initiatives and practices. I’d like to suggest this for next year at my school. Thank you for bringing it to our attention.
Darcy
February 23, 2020 — 8:24 am
An excellent post that shares strong strategies and resources for helping others develop their ICT skills. I agree with you that the nature of PD has changed. It is essential that teachers have input and options in order to ensure they can make the most of this valuable and limited time. Learning Walks can be quite powerful. Learning from each other is some of the best learning we can do.
Laura Breckenridge
February 24, 2020 — 7:38 pm
Yes, it’s interesting that we have been telling educators that learning should be student centred for years, meanwhile PD has not followed that model at all. There are some good ideas here on how to make PD more meaningful to teachers. I am thinking of how I can subtly share your infographics with the PD committee at my school. -L.Breckenridge