Creating Professional Development Plans

Colleagues, 

As we are ramping up our program planning for the new academic year, we are also looking at creating professional development plans for our staff. I'd like to devote this month to the discusson of creating a sustainable and meaningful professional development plan for your staff members. 

Questions I hope to cover this month include: 

  • How do you differentiate PD for the various staff members and their roles? 
  • What PD do you require? 
  • How do you measure the effectiveness of the PD for your program and connect the PD to student outcomes? 

To get us started, let's look at How to Create Teacher Driven Professional Development. What are your key take aways? 

Let's plan this year together! 

Sincerely, 
Kathy Tracey

Comments

     With our adult ed we've been trying to get together with some thing to share regularly -- things like "here's a simple thing to do with a thing called jamboard," but also "here's somethign I figured out for Burlington.."  
     Institutionally my college has gone top-down and even folks charged with getting PD have been told things like not to say "anti-racism,"   it being divisive.  

I think a key is to try to have a critical mass of a small group who keep things lively... and oh, last minute prompts so that a person can say "oh!  I'll click through now!"  ... and have it a regular thing. I'm in several discussion groups and a group crafting a multicultural version of some UDL guidelines -- often it's just 3 or 4 of us but we keep it moving forward.

 

There are 3 pillars of professional development - differentiation, follow up, and evaluation. As we continue to discuss the role of professinal development plans at the program level, how do we accomplish these tasks? 

Differentiation: How do we define PD expectations for programs based on their roles, job duties, and experience? Are we allowing staff to select their own PD options or do we offer a one-size fits all PD plan for our program?

Follow up: We sometimes refer to this as transference of learning.We've all done this -attend some great PD, learn wonderful new ideas, and then get bogged down into the day to day work when we get back to the office or the classroom, and the ideas remain in the handouts. So, how are we creating the environment for teachers and staff to experiment with what they've learned? 

Evaluation: We spend a great deal of resources on professional development -and I'll leave this topic for the next post, but I'd love to hear how you are evaluating the beneifts of the PD and adjusting accordingly. 

Chime in with your ideas and thoughts! 

Kathy Tracey

Colleagues,

As we continue to reflect on developing professoinal development plans, let's take a moment to discuss the role of the administrator in professional development. I invite you to review this article: Administrators’ and Instructional Coaches’ Involvement in PLCs

Key areas include: Goals, Roles, and Process. 

  • What are your take-aways? 
  • Building on what has already been shared in this thread, what action steps are you planning on implementing? 

Kathy

Colleagues,

As we talk about professional development plans, strategies to differentiate PD for the varied roles and experiences of our staff, the pillars of PD - let's take a final look at the role of the administrator when it comes to tranference of learning from the Professional Development event to the application of new ideas and strategies. 

Check out the States of Transference Process  and shere at least one take-away from the resource. 

I'm looking forward to learning what you found relevant in this thread and what you are able to implement at your program. 

Sincerely, 
Kathy Tracey
@Kathy_Tracey