Artifact: Professional Development Reading Power
In my view, standard 7 means for educators to continue actively seeking improvements to their qualities of teaching throughout their careers. Although there are many ways to do this, professional development workshops are some of the most direct forms to engage in career-long learning. Another key aspect of standard 7 is the idea of continuous learning throughout a career. This is the idea that learning to become an educator doesn’t stop when a teacher candidate graduates and is accepted into a college of teachers; in fact, it should never end.
Because there are so many different ways to learn as educators, I’m using professional development on the whole as an artifact. Having been to several, including Janice Novakowski’s Measuring Mania and Adrienne Gear’s Reading Power, they have taught me many teaching techniques and ideas for lessons. Other workshops focused on other aspects of teaching such as assessment and reporting. They were all of value and have contributed to my accumulated knowledge. First came Adrienne Gear at Trudeau Elementary, where she provided the audience with a detailed and concise overview of the program she developed called Reading Power. She not only talked about the program’s goals and advantages, but she also demonstrated specific techniques, lesson plans, and teaching resources. It was these detailed concrete examples which grasped my attention, as reflected in the notes that I was consistently jotting down while Adrienne presented. Of particular interest to me was the idea of the OWI (Observe, Wonder, Infer) and the flexibility of such a system to be adapted for all elementary grades. More importantly, learning experiences such as these expanded my view of education and motivated me to think about other lesson plans which could be adapted to a wide age range similar to Adrienne’s OWI. Next came Janice Novakowski at Mitchell Elementary during the RPTA Extravaganza, which was a large assortment of different professional development workshops. This particular workshop, Measuring Mania again provided me with more lesson ideas and resource materials than I could record or remember. Unlike Reading Power, Measuring Mania was focused more on separate lesson plans and individual teaching techniques which could be applied to any class without chronological constraints. In this way, Measuring Mania taught me even more ideas that I could immediately implement than Reading Power. However, the key point is that both of these workshops contributed to make me a more knowledgeable educator than before.
From experiencing many workshops throughout the year, I’ve come to value the diversity in knowledge that the different workshops have taught me. One of the main reasons that we as educators must continue learning is because the world is constantly evolving and educators must reflect that change, whether it is new scientific innovations, different social values, or a better understanding of the world around us. As Julie Kennelly writes in her article, “teachers entering the profession now, with a potential career extending over 30 to 40 years, will inevitably have to cope with ever changing information” (Kennelly, 2007). The need for educators to participate in professional development such as workshops is further corroborated by researchers such as Huberman, Thompson, and many others where professional development opportunities are concluded to have a positive effect on the quality of teaching in the classroom.
As I develop my teaching career, it is essential for me to gain as much knowledge as possible in the range of teaching styles so as to identify the teaching techniques which are most effective and beneficial for my students. More importantly, I will continue gaining further insight into improving any and all aspects of my teaching so that the advancements in the world is reflected in my teaching.