Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Module 4 Professional Development Strategies
Now that you've explored a variety of strategies and models for professional development, what kind of professional development do you believe is most effective in helping teachers make real, sustained changes in their teaching? What experiences have you had with either effective or ineffective professional development - what made the difference? How can you develop and provide leadership in your professional development initiative? Share your thoughts about effective professional development strategies and identify the PD strategy you plan to use and share any literature or resources you are using to refine your focus.
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Effective Professional Development should be centered on the interests and willingness of teachers. Many teachers are involved with extra-curricular activities, which consume their evenings and some weekends. Other teachers only want to do what is required of them, and not willing to give up their time. The strategy I have to for an easy, effective way for teachers to receive their professional development would be to have trainings on instructional support days, when teachers are required to be in the school. Then teachers won’t have to give up their evenings or weekends. Another idea would be to provide graduate credit and/or a stipend to attend summer trainings.
ReplyDeleteThese opportunities actually exist in West Virginia. I work for the NASA IV&V Educator Resource Center. We provide these training workshops at the schools or at our facility at no cost. We also run several summer camps that provide either graduate credit or a stipend and sometimes offer room and board. For teachers that are looking for a way to learn how to implement technology into the classroom, we offer the following workshops to train teachers how to use and implement the equipment then loan the equipment to the teacher for a two week period: podcasting, GPS, space weather using iPads, NASA virtual worlds, PASCO water quality meters, and many more.
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ivv/education/erc_index.html
http://www.aera.net/uploadedfiles/journals_and_publications/research_points/rpsummer05.pdf
http://ncsall.net/fileadmin/resources/ann_rev/smith-gillespie-07.pdf
I didnt realize those opportunities existed. That is great to know!!
DeleteI agree with you. Teachers are very busy, and it is hard for them to give up precious time with family. Many already give their time to coach a sport or be involved with something extra-curricular. Some just can't give any extra time outside the school day because they are single parents who's children are involved in everything. And there are those few who will only do what is required. That's why holding professional development sessions during an IS day or a school-day right before/right after the school year works best. And actually those CE and IS days are built into a teacher's 200 day contract. Any days beyond those, I believe, the teacher should be paid a stipend, unless he/she is counting the session towards their 18 hours of required continuing education hours. For instance, if a teacher is attending a week-long workshop during the summer and not receiving graduate credit or CE hours, he/she should be paid for their time in the form of a supplement because this is work outside their 200 day contract. Not only is it the right thing to do, it also draws more teachers to these sessions. They feel their time and work is being adequately rewarded by giving them a stipend. It's a mark of seeing them and treating them as a professional, something we talked about a few modules ago.
DeleteI agree with your idea to have trainings on Faculty Senate days. Summers are a tough sell. I believe your ideas of stipends and graduate credit would be good incentive. Thanks for the resources. They would be very beneficial to individuals interested in those technologies.
ReplyDeleteThe "Professional Development" article describes professional development as ongoing learning opportunities for teachers and other education personnel. I believe the best PD approaches utilize simple, straight forward, and short trainings. In my own experiences, I find lengthy trainings by experts counterproductive. The trainings and experiences I found most beneficial were presentations by co-workers or other teachers that applied specifically to my job criteria. I have attended a large number of trainings this year as a first year teacher. Honestly, the majority of those have been a blur due to the amount of content covered and the repeated delivery of some of the same content. The hands on training that I do in class with my mentor has been much more valuable. The article describes this as "job embedded" training. I believe the actual hands-on experience is an effective PD strategy.
ReplyDeleteFor my PD, I plan to use the job-embedded approach. I have narrowed my Grant focus to netbooks for our department. I explored several websites and found the following provided some great ideas: http://ncara.edublogs.org/category/online-learning/ One school had purchased netbooks for student use. As part of PD, the faculty carried the netbooks as students. They then explored different websites and apps that the students would be using. The educators also utilized a website http://www.edmodo.com/ which allowed them to collaborate with each other and other professionals. I will borrow these ideas for my PD initiative.
The hands on approach is much more effective. It is an effective teaching practice so it makes since that it would carry over to professional development. When teachers get to share their own ideas then there isn't a sense of some "expert" looking down on the audience. There is instead, a sense of comradery that develops when teachers share ideas with each other because the presenters goals are the same as the audience and they've been in "trenches" to know if their idea actually works or not. If another teacher shares their ideas with me I can be sure the ideas will work for me because we have a similar situation in our classes.
DeleteDanielle, Since I will be beginning my teaching career next year,I'm glad that you are being provided with a lot of trainings as a first year teacher. It seems that some of these training were beneficial, while others were not. The most beneficial forms of professional development that I have found is by brainstorming and learning from colleagues who are or have been in my shoes and hands-on experience. Your PD strategy sounds interesting. I think it is good practice that the teachers experience what their students will encounter with these forms of technology.
DeleteI teach part time at a community college so I do not have a mentor and I miss that from my student teaching. I have always been open for suggestions and like the hands on approach myself. Now that I have said that I think there is a place for service day workshops but they need to be planned to meet the teachers needs and support after the session must be present for the workshop to be more than a blur.
DeleteEffective professional development should include a variety of workshops for teachers to choose from and be made available during working school hours. Teachers would be more susceptible to learning environments with their peers that created an interactive atmosphere. Concentrating on refining your content area expertise and technology integration skills would be beneficial in the PD process. Improving teaching practices and student learning should be the focus throughout these workshops to create goal oriented responsibilities. Improving our teaching strategies should be a part of everyday duties and incentives should be given for ongoing PD practices.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you but getting the teachers to take an active part and want to do better is the hurdle. I think that experienced teachers sometimes believe that their delivery method is the best for their students and that mind set is hard to break sometimes. I am glad to see issues like these being discussed in teacher prep courses which will be carried on into practice.
DeleteI have been participating in professional development workshops since before I was teaching. I enjoy attending workshops that provide teachers with new technologies and classroom stategies to increase student learning and motivation. I feel that workshops are the most beneficial type of professional development as you are usually provided with background knowledge about the topic, instruction about what the topic is, and demonstrations or explanations on how to incorporate the topic into your classroom instruction. I have also participated in sessions held at my school directed towards the entire faculty - these are not very beneficial in my expereinces as we do not seem to have experts come in but rather listen to other teachers just talk about information. In my county we have an additional method of professional development in which the teachers have the opportunity to attend a session called Tech Tuesdays. These Tech Tuesdays are 1 hour sessions held after school on every Tuesday, the teacher recieves a stipend for their time. The TIS for the county provides us with new technologically advanced classroom methods that can increase student learning. Tech Tuesdays would be in my opinion the second best method of Professional Development. I have also participated in mentoring program which I find very beneficail as a new teacher.
ReplyDeleteI think that teachers need a crash course on the new approach being presented, I believe teachers also want to know why the should change or modify their current approach. They want to know how this will help student learning and increase student motivation. The need facts about the approach you are discussing. For my PD I am planning on understanding the importance of hands on workshops. These are workshops in which the teacher is actually particpating in the activity and interacting with the instructor. Lecture workshops are a think of the past.
Here are some of my resources:
DeleteTeacher Professional Leadership in Support of Teacher Professional Development
http://web.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.fairmontstate.edu/ehost/detail?sid=afcddcd2-3534-4054-8733-7a7741a54605%40sessionmgr14&vid=1&hid=12&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#db=eric&AN=EJ906405
Hands on learning with a hands off approach article
http://web.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.fairmontstate.edu/ehost/detail?sid=afdc3c7f-48ab-4867-a065-09ae4e76aae6%40sessionmgr11&vid=1&hid=12&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#db=eric&AN=EJ872670
Professional Development for Professionals: Beyond Sufficiency Learning
http://web.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.fairmontstate.edu/ehost/detail?sid=c1085d7d-5ee1-40fc-9a7b-b903e8e126e9%40sessionmgr4&vid=1&hid=12&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#db=eric&AN=EJ828982
Professional Development across the Teaching Career: Teachers' Uptake of Formal and Informal Learning Opportunities
http://web.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.fairmontstate.edu/ehost/detail?sid=54e723ee-9304-42aa-939c-60ae75457e6b%40sessionmgr13&vid=1&hid=12&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#db=eric&AN=EJ906395
This is a very relevant question. As a county technology integration specialist, I am part of my county's curriculum team. We met a few weeks ago to discuss what professional development we will be offering to the county teachers at our Summer Academy in June. We mentioned bringing in “experts” to do workshops, as well as giving teachers time to meet in content-area, county PLCs, and having the TISs do trainings. For the secondary teachers, they are bringing in an expert on student engagement in block scheduling. Although I think this could be a beneficial session, I can already hear the teachers I work with groaning. They like sessions that are more relevant to their content-area, or job-embedded professional development. According to our readings, job-embedded professional development is “is grounded in day-to-day teaching practice and is designed to enhance teachers’ content-specific instructional practices with the intent of improving student learning.” Teachers feel they get more information, strategies and ideas they can actually use in the classroom from these type of sesions. They also prefer sessions by the teacher-leaders, i.e. the county TISs. This is because they know that I will make the session relevant to their specific teaching circumstances; I know them well enough to tie specific ideas to their specific needs. Therefore, I believe that job-embedded and/or teacher-led professional development is most effective. The most ineffective professional development often is the expert-led one shot workshop. I have seen, especially with technology professional development, that these sessions are usually only 3 hours long and the expert throws every feature of the software out in those 3 hours in hopes that you too will be an expert in this short amount of time. What ends up happening instead is confusion and frustration. The more novice technology users are left in the dust and learn absolutely nothing except maybe how to do everything wrong. For that reason, I will always recommend a training by a teacher-leader who can be there to support teachers as they begin using the new technology or instructional strategy. There are naturally going to be questions as a teacher embarks on this journey. This is what I will use in the professional development plan for my technology initiative. I also think several professional development sessions with a teacher-leader, a TIS, will be in order. Sometimes it takes more than 3 hours to learn or work on a new task.
ReplyDeleteSustained professional development is the best way to effect change in teaching practices. When an “expert” comes in to talk to a huge group of teachers for one day and leaves without any discuss there isn't much chance to implement their suggestions. This “one-shot” wonder approach isn't effective and it is falling out of favor across the country. My county still enjoys this approach even though it has been shown ineffective. After reading the different methods mentioned I believe the instructional rounds approach discussed by Abeo is the best approach. This company suggests that teachers, not administration conduct rounds to observe other educators in order to collect data about teacher/student interactions and best practices. In this way a teacher could see what other teachers are doing and learn from the examples of others. I once had the opportunity to sit in on another teacher's classroom and watch them teach. It was an amazing experience that allowed me to learn a lot. The practices and interactions that I observed in this teacher's classroom were carried over to my own. I discovered so many new and exciting ideas that I could see were already proven effective because they were already in practice right down the hall. If a teacher could participate in this kind of professional development then they wouldn't have reinvent the wheel or wonder if the approach is valid for the unique environment present at their school and for their children. In this way a teacher could share ideas with their peers on a daily basis and the professional development could be sustained throughout the year.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your thoughts and experience. After watching other teachers, I have learned effective teaching practices (as well as practices that I will not be using in the classroom). I also like this approach because it is so informal and easy to accomplish. I think teachers would be open to this as well.
DeleteIn the world of professional development, I am going to follow the rule of do what I say and not what I do. To answer the question which form of professional development is most effective, I would have to say that is job-embedded that takes place in the classroom for each teacher. However, the funding for such an endeavor is hardly available in this time of budget crunching and the not job-embedded professional development that is done in teams is probably more practical. These sessions occur during faculty meetings or some time like that and address a crowd of individuals.
ReplyDeleteIn my experiences with professional development, this is the only kind that I have experienced. I have gained some real ideas and practices that I have sustained throughout my teaching career. This method does seem to be effective in providing different ideas and practices to teachers. I have been to both effective and ineffective professional development meetings. For me what made them effective or ineffective was if I could buy into the idea that the presenter was discussing. If I thought that the idea had merit than I was more likely to try it in my own classroom than an idea that I did not believe in. However, with any new technique, in order for the new practice to be perfected or even useful, the teacher has to practice the idea and stick with it over time to make it their own and work for them in their own classroom for their particular discipline.
Another aspect that made the professional development effective was if the presenter was entertaining or not. I hate to say it but if the speaker was charismatic and was excited about the ideas that he or she was presenting, then I was more likely to try the ideas later myself. If the presenter had data to back up how effective their new ideas were, also helps. If the strategies are research based and there is lots of evidence that demonstrates how effective the ideas are; then, it does give me a greater incentive to try the ideas.
In my professional development, I am going to provide the teachers different ideas of how to use the student response devices in their own classrooms. I am going to give general suggestions of ways in which the ‘clickers’ can be used in every classroom. Next, I am going to have discipline specific ways that the ‘clickers’ can be used to teach. This is another aspect that I believe makes professional development more effective. If there are ideas ready for teachers to use in their classrooms right now, then they are more likely to try the ideas then if they have to invent the entire idea themselves. Here are some of the websites that I am using to obtain ideas for my professional development:
http://www.cwsei.ubc.ca/resources/files/Clicker_guide_CWSEI_CU-SEI.pdf
http://its.uiowa.edu/support/srs/teaching.shtml
http://cnx.org/content/m26448/latest/
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ReplyDeleteAfter reviewing the articles, reading my fellow classmate’s blog postings, and reflecting on my own personal experience, I think that many of the forms of professional development discussed are effective. According to the article, “What Makes Professional Development Effective: Results from a National Sample of Teachers,” effective professional development contains three core features: a focus on academic subject matter, opportunities for hands-on work, and the integration into daily life of the school. For myself, as a future novice teacher, I think that mentoring and coaching will be the most beneficial for me to make sustained changes in my teaching. I learn best by “doing” and engaging in hands-on activities and a mentor/coach could be very helpful in the beginning of my teaching career. I know that there probably isn’t much time or funding in my future school system’s budget to provide the ideal mentor/coach relationship, but I will appreciate whatever assistance I am afforded. More realistically, the best type of professional development I will participate in during the beginning of my career will probably be job embedded professional development, which will hopefully include access to a coach/mentor, but will also provide enrichment opportunities to work with other teachers to discuss, evaluate, and improve our own practices. In my experience in professional development, hands-on activities and being mentored/instructed by those whom I work with have been most beneficial. I have observed that my co-workers do not respond well to trainings conducted by those who have not been in our shoes. So I think that it is beneficial to work with those who have done the job and know what works from experience. In my professional development initiative, I will be able to work with my colleagues to facilitate and implement the use of technology to provide education resources for the adults in our community-focused treatment program, particularly through computers. I will work with my colleagues by demonstrating ways that they can engage our clients in activities that can assist with job placement and education opportunities. I plan to use job embedded professional development strategies to implement this. I will provide instruction on how to utilize the technology for assisting our clients in obtaining employment and educational assistance as well as opportunities for community services. We will then reflect on the benefits and problems with implementing this technology and refine our techniques. These are some of the articles that I reviewed:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.marketwatch.com/story/verizon-foundation-awards-20000-grant-to-strengthen-technology-education-in-union-settlements-programs-2012-03-19
http://www.echopress.com/event/article/id/93006/
I plan to use the job embedded professional developement strategy. The technology integration I am focusing on is incorporating an online community called Edmodo into the classroom. I used this during my student teaching experience for my Action Research Project and it proved to be beneficial. Incorporating Edmodo into the classroom provides a wide range of possibilities. Keeping connected and student collaboration are just a few of the benefits.
ReplyDeleteThis is a resource I am using to get a few ideas.
http://www.minotdailynews.com/page/content.detail/id/552101/Technology-invasion.html?nav=5010
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ReplyDeleteSince Professional Development is an ongoing and ever-changing thing for teachers, trainings & workshops need to be available more than just once throughout the school year and summer months. If a workshop is offered that a teacher really wants to attend but he/she has a conflict at that given time, it should be offered more than once so teachers who do have conflicts can still attend and receive the credit (if given). These trainings and workshops could be done on a teacher's planning period, or during lunch, assuming that a lunch is provided for the teachers during this time frame. There needs to be a constant rotation of these PD options for teachers to receive the full benefit. I work in a Child Care Center, and when we have trainings or workshops to attend, it is given over a period of a few days, or weeks, that way everyone in the building has a chance to attend. There are well over 50 teachers at the center where I work, and it's not possible to pull in 50 substitute teachers on any given day so that all of these teachers can attend the sessions. It's easier to access a broader variety of people if the trainings/workshops are offered more than once.
ReplyDeleteProfessional Development is only effective if it is used throughout the year and by all those involved. In my experience the professional development that most often fails is those that are the one and dones. The PD's where you get the information and then nothing else. Even if the one and odne PD's were assigned follow-up sessions to discuss the results of that information being implemented it would be of a greater benefit to all those involved.
ReplyDeleteThe PD that was most succesful in my experience is the S3 committee. In this PD the S3 committee was trying to implement a new discipline structure in my school. They recieved a grant to purchase the license for Educators Handbook and we have been to several trainings (PDs) throughout the year to recieve basic training, updates on the numbers and to discuss what those numbers mean and how we could use those to changed our school for the better.
The professional development I find to be the most effective is hands on and interactive. If someone is simply standing in front of me showing a slideshow I lose interest in a very short period of time. I usually get a very minimal amount of useful information from this type of professional development. I find people usually learn more from hands-on presentations where they can do what they are learning about. For an example a lesson on how to use an I-Pad is more effective if all participants have an I-Pad in front of them to walk through the steps at the same time as the presenter. We use several different types of technology in my school including but not limited to promethean boards, and I-Pads. A professional development initiative that I would like to implement in my school is on the I-Pads, we have had very little training and I am one of the few teachers that use this very valuable tool. Several different presenters have demonstrated how to use the promethean boards during PD time, however I usually have to have “learning sessions” with some of the teachers to help them figure out what they just saw. It is much easier especially dealing with technology to have hands on presentations. Another idea that helps with PD is to have follow-up sessions to answer new questions that develop and to make sure that it is being implemented. Most teachers want to improve their lessons, but feel anxious about actually doing so, PD with follow up is a way to ease their nerves. I have also found in my experience that ideally PD is best on days when teachers have to be at school and students don’t however, teachers are willing to stay for an hour after school but anything past that starts getting into their personal time, stipends are always a good incentive.
ReplyDelete